We have had our Christmas in Vermont, and it was very nice. You have to use your imagination because I left my camera holstered most of the time: Christmas dinner Friday night, with ham, spinach casserole, sweet & white potatoes, pumpkin & key lime pies, wine and eggnog. Can you see Emma bouncing around excitedly?

Saturday morning: egg breakfast, gifts with the family, peeking in stockings, afternoon movies (Wizard of Oz, Shrek2), noshing on the leftover ham, cheese quiche, sweet pickles, artichokes … the adults trying on their new fleeces, Emma playing with her new magnetic toys, and the dog wrestling with her chew toys. All very good & peaceful, with a few inches of fresh snow on the ground outside. Yes, we had a white Christmas.

And now we are staying with our friends Guy & Katie for the next two nights, as our Vermont break winds down and we prepare to head back to California on Tuesday. But there are a few more things to do, first.

Tomorrow I will head over to Plattsburgh NY to visit Colin Hyde.   He has numerous interesting projects underway, including my own 1968 Caravel, and I plan to go take photos of a few of them for this blog.

We also have to do some serious thinking about what to do with the the gifts we’ve received this Christmas. As full-timers, we have only two places to put things: (1) in our trailer, which is already stuffed; (2) in our storage unit here in Vermont, for retrieval next summer.

I have received a very nice new fleece, for example, and so I will leave the older one that I wore to Vermont, in our storage unit, and take the new one with me on Tour. I’ll also leave a few other warm things behind, in the hope that we won’t need them for the next few months!

The same process has to happen with Emma’s stuff, but a bit harder to deal with. We don’t want to disappoint Emma by forcing her to leave new presents in storage, but she already has THREE bins of toys stored on the bunk above her bed. So when we return, she’ll also have to select a few of the older things she doesn’t play with much, and pack them for shipment to friends with younger children, or donation. It’s a good lesson about sharing, I hope.

This is how it works in a travel trailer: you keep only some of what your normally collect. It forces you to think about what you really need. Most people discover that is much less than they already have.