The flight to Tucson was uneventful. We’re staying in a Home 2 Suite hotel in the downtown district. The property is excellent. Our room is fabulous. Our bedroom and living area are separated with a door, which makes it much easier for one of us to sleep in a little. Here’s a view from our 6th floor lobby.

We were counting on a locally owned super grocery store for most of our needs. It’s a short walk from the hotel and stocks a large variety of pre-prepared foods. Unfortunately, it’s closed for renovation. That’s no real problem. Public transportation is quite good and totally free.

It was time to get dinner. We arrived on the first day of a major cold snap. Evening temperatures were around 40 degrees. We found a bar/restaurant that has an excellent reputation. The food was very good for bar food. We even had a restaurant favorite — chocolate covered bacon. It was a nice dinner but there was one thing that surprised us. The place had air conditioning, but it doesn’t have heat. Customers were eating with their coats on. Nobody else seemed to find this at all remarkable. I remember when I was a kid, some places started air conditioning the entire store. They would put signs on their windows advertising it was cool inside, with a picture of a penguin standing in the snow. We didn’t see any store advertising they were warm. ;-)

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We are leaving for vacation Wednesday. Our first few weeks are in Tucson. You might heard of the movie “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”. If you didn’t see it, you haven’t missed much. But the title and premise were good. We’re doing that this year — plus we’re adding a boat (cruise to Mexico), and Uber, walking, and a bunch of other transportation modes.

As most of you know, it’s snowing today. We might get 5″. 40 years ago, it would have been an inconvenience. But we haven’t had any substantial snow for 3 years. Nobody knows what to do, other than perhaps check that their car’s flashers work. The snow ends tonight. We are very lucky to be leaving Wednesday. Everything should be back to normal by then. (Fingers crossed!). If we are delayed a day, it’s no big deal.

A few days ago, my router started flaking out. I had to unplug and re-plug it to get it working again. This is a really bad thing because our security cameras need WiFi to do their thing. I ordered a new router. (MikroTek hAP ax2, if you are into that kind of thing). It’s a sweet piece of equipment, but setup is more complicated than I thought it would be. I spent two long days getting a simple setup we can live with. I’ll work on it more after we return.

For more fun, I fired up the security cameras. One doesn’t work. Amazon says they can get a replacement by 11:00 AM tomorrow. We’ll see.

We were probably the first people reading this to celebrate 2025. We had a “New Year at Noon” dinner. Ed & Lynne, and Rick and Suzy joined us. Danita prepared a wonderful meal. Here are a few pics.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.