We’ve relocated to Lake Mead National Recreation Area, near Las Vegas, Nevada. This is the man-made lake formed by the building of the Hoover Dam. It’s a big blue-green splash surrounded by the small jagged hills of Mojave Desert.

It’s hot. Really hot. Today we hit 110 degrees by 2:00 pm, and it stayed above 100 most of the day. The air conditioner in the Airstream can’t keep up. It runs continuously to keep the interior in the upper 80s. We’ve decided that after 105 it’s not so much fun, but it is certainly novel.

I’ve been anticipating tonight for weeks. We had some special friends coming over for a barbecue. In the picture above (left to right) are Phil and Anita, Brian and Leigh, and Emma. Anita was formerly the personal assistant to a certain movie star whose trailer we are re-doing inside the pages of Airstream Life magazine. We became friends over the phone during the past year, and this is the first time we’ve been able to meet face-to-face.

The same is true of Leigh and Brian. They recently came off the road after 650 days full-timing in their 1963 Airstream Flying Cloud. Their blog was a daily “must read” for me over the past year, and we’ve been communicating via email during that time. Now that they’ve settled in Las Vegas, we had to meet up.

So we got our friends together for a single great night, and cooked dinner on the grill over charcoal in the 100-degree heat. It was fabulous. Grilled shrimp, steak, chicken, mushrooms, onions, plus salad by Leigh and tons of neat appetizers & desserts courtesy of Anita. And great times with the friends we’ve never met before.

This reminds me that it’s not just the travel opportunities that make this full-timing life so appealing. It’s also about the friends we make along the way. These folks, who we met strictly as a result of our involvement with Airstream, are some of the nicest people we can hope to meet, and we’ll stay in touch even after we’ve moved east from Las Vegas.