Merry CHRISTmas!

It doesn't take long for us to decorate for Christmas in the motor home. We have a small tub of decorations, including this nativity set that sits on the dash.

We love celebrating Christmas with family. So even though the forecast in South Texas indicated perfect temperatures for a Christmas day swim in the pool, we headed north instead. It's a 13-hour drive from Mission, Texas to our first destination in Oklahoma to see relatives. But before we left, we put our Christmas cards in the mail. We wanted to wish everyone reading the blog a Merry CHRISTmas. We also wanted to remember why we are celebrating, and proclaim once again that "Christ is Born!"

The Christmas letter we mailed with the above card summed up our year in the following way:

Merry Christmas! Our Christmas card proclaims that “Christ is Born!” and we hope you are celebrating that miracle this season. We were excited to get to spend Thanksgiving with family, and had time to take this quick snapshot. When we compare it to pictures from Christmases past, we see that our little boys have somehow turned into men with day-old beards. How did that happen?

Our oldest son, Luke, is seated with his sweet wife Jordan standing behind him. They are still living in Kansas City, where Luke is in the second year of his pediatric residency at Children's Mercy Hospital. He worked an all-nighter at the hospital before they loaded into the car for the six-hour drive to meet us in the Oklahoma panhandle. So if he looks tired, that could be because he hadn't slept for a couple days when the picture was taken. Jordan is a PA, working in a family-care practice in Kansas City. We were blessed to spend a week with them and Jordan’s family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina this summer. In their spare time, they are kept busy with their puppy, a 60-pound golden doodle that got his first taste of ranch life on this Thanksgiving trip.

Our son Blake is standing in the center of the picture, and he just drove four hours from Oklahoma City to meet us in the panhandle. This year he has traveled to meet us many places. We saw him in Arkansas for his birthday in March; in the mountains of north Georgia in May; at the ocean in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in June; Virginia and West Virginia for beautiful fall leaves in October; and hiking in Arkansas in November. He purchased another plane ticket to see us in South Texas right before Christmas. We have gotten to spend more time with him this year than when we were working in Oklahoma! He is finishing his third year as an engineer for Chesapeake Energy, with a schedule and vacation time that allows for the travel he loves.

He must have inherited that from his parents, because Mark and Denisa obviously love to travel as well. We are finishing up our second year of living full-time in our motor home, traveling all over the United States. As we continue to “Wander His Wonders,” we are daily inspired by the powerful God that created and designed all these wonders. When we sold the house and gave everything else away, we were often asked how long we were planning to continue this full-time travel adventure. Our answer was, “Two to thirty years.” We’ve made the minimum, so we are heartily heading towards the maximum now. 

The 2016 travel loop took us east, where we spent several weeks in each of 16 different states. The short summary of this year’s travels would include heading east along the coast during the winter months; then heading north across the eastern seaboard in the summer; so we could spend the autumn following the fall foliage trail southwest back to Oklahoma. 

We made a road trip in the middle of that journey to return to Oklahoma to celebrate Mark’s Father’s 90^th birthday in August. As we celebrated 35 years of marriage this year, we also got to witness (and even photograph) two different random marriage proposals during our travels. Our plans for 2017 include heading up the west coast to the Pacific Northwest, wandering His wonders in a new section of the country. But for now we celebrate Christmas and God's ultimate wonder that “Christ is Born!”