Happy Holidays

We want to wish all of you and your families the Happiest Holiday ever. Stay safe if you are traveling, even if it's just across the street!

We'll catch up with after the holidays.

Dee & Larry

The Big Scene

Tonight we had an outing with about 40 other Workampers for dinner at Mesa's famous Organ Pizza Stop. This restaurant boasts the largest and finest Theater Organ in the world today! Its nearly 6,000 pipes, numerous percussion instruments and countless traps are masterfully presented along with electrical light accompaniment (featuring laser lights, kaleidoscope, disco ball and numerous colored spots). In the postcard photo (we forgot our camera!) you can see a xylophone mounted from the ceiling, bell chimes from the ceiling, drums mounted on the west wall, cymbals, bells, gongs, and on and on. Trumpets are at the rear of balcony out of the photo. Behind the curtain above the Wurlitzer 4 puppet cats tap dance to lively tunes. You can see the organ pipes behind the 8 louvered openings along the back wall.

The closeup photo shows the high gloss ebony and real gold leaf of the Wurlitzer "French" console. It is the largest and most elaborate design ever created by the company, containing 276 keys and 976 controls. Needless to say the organists have their hands and feet full when playing the most memorable songs - over 10,000 upon request.

As a side note, the pizza was okay.


Saturday evening First Street residents had their annual Christmas potluck and karaoke. About 114 people attending the event. Always nice to meet our neighbors up and down the street.
There are 2 more Christmas parties, one on the 22nd and one Christmas night.


This will be our first full week scheduled for work. We have been assigned to the Setup/breakdown crew along with 4 other couples and we each work 12 hours a week Thursday through Sunday. We set up the room for Thursday bingo, Friday morning Kountry Store, Friday night dance, and Saturday special events and then Sunday church services. The Large meeting room has a capacity of 1,000 and the small meeting room has a capacity of 300. It's a lot of banquet table and chairs to set up and take down but it goes really fast with 10-12 people working on it.

Roses are in Bloom

The photo shows the entrance to Mesa Regal Resort where we are staying until April 1st. Roses are absolutely gorgeous. We will be Workamping here @ 12 hours a week each. Starting Thursday we will be working with 5 other couples doing the set ups for all of the events held in the park, i.e. dances on Friday evenings, bingo, church services on Sunday, etc. The men set up tables and ladies handle the chairs. Pretty easy as far as we are concerned.

Our trip out went really well even though we had a rough start getting to I-10 from Alpine. We drove through snow flurries for about 30 miles on Hwy 90 and then stayed overnight in Van Horn at junction of I-10 because road was closed into El Paso due to snow & ice and a whole bunch of wrecks. By Wednesday around noon the interstate was open and the roads were clear. No further weather-related problems were incurred.

CoCo loves it here too as he has lots of buddies to play with, most of whom are way bigger than he is but that doesn't stop him from running after them and playing with them.

Today we put up Christmas lights (on our grapefruit tree no less!) and inside the MH on the dashboard. Our whole street is decorated to the max because a committee is judging to see who has done the best job. Most everyone has a wooden chimney display with a dog peeking out of it to indicate that we are in a pet friendly area. Decorations around the Clubhouse, Gazebo at the pool and the ballrooms are decorated to the max and are just gorgeous. It's taken volunteers almost 2 weeks to get the trees up and all the light put up. Lots and lots of work for everyone. I'll get a picture of some of the decorations and post them for you to see.

Lots of activities planned this month - 1st Street Xmas Potluck is Saturday evening and over 100 people will be attending. On Dec. 25th there will be a Christmas potluck and Chinese gift exchange. And of course there are always bridge, pinochle, cribbage and coffees to attend. Don't know when we'll have time to work!