Nearly every summer while I was growing up, my family would hop in the car and take a road trip back to see both sides of my family, who were mostly in Illinois. We made traveling traditions during those trips, nearly always stopping in Rapid City to spend a day at the outdoor waterslide park (which is why I really want to take my kids there again - when it's warm enough to be open ;). We did one-time things like the Reptile Gardens (which is why we HAD to take our family there on our way back to our hometown that first year). We would always borrow certain sets of books from my gramma to read in the car on the drive back home (which is why I own SEVERAL sets of both The Borrowers and the All Of A Kind Family series- for sentimental sake). I love traditions. I love passing experiences down. I love reconnecting with family that I haven't seen since taking that last car trip back at the age of 14...
And, believe it or not, there in little Cottonwood, AZ, I got to reconnect with some of my family! When I was growing up, my dad's brother owned a dairy farm back east. Whenever we would go back for one of our summer visits to family, we would spend at least one day at Uncle Rick's house; sometimes I would get to stay longer. I enjoyed the new experience of the farm, but the biggest reason that I went was because his daughter and I were 6 months apart in age, and as close as cousins living 1100 miles apart could be (gotta love low maintenance cousins!)...
Anyway, I know that you wanted all that information to get to the point that - my Aunt Linda and Uncle Rick now live in Prescott (that is in Arizona, and very near where we were staying in Cottonwood!). And when they heard that we were in Cottonwood, THEY decided to come see us! (I hadn't called them yet - we travel with 10 of our kids; it's not generally considered polite to invite yourself anywhere with 10 kids! LOL!)
One morning we received a call from the entrance gate - my aunt and uncle had driven up unannounced to surprise us! And we were so very glad that they did!
It was such a lovely visit catching up with them! Next time we are going to announce our presence even before we get there to make sure that we get to spend more time with them! :) Getting to visit them was like icing on our stay at Cottonwood! 
Besides our getting to meet up with some of my family in AZ (Vaughn has LOTS of family in AZ!), we got to meet some new fulltiming friends too!One of our main reasons for coming this far north, and braving the freezing nights (really - we had to unhook our water every night or it would freeze up), was because there were some other fulltime families here.
The first 2 years that we were on the road, we met ONE, count 'em...ONE other fulltime family. We knew that there were others out there, but we never seemed to cross paths. This year, we have had the opportunity to meet 3 other families during our couple of days in Quartzsite, and then, at the TT park in Cottonwood, we got to meet 4 more fulltime families!!!
And we had a ball.
We met the Lundys (who the guys went hiking with), Kimberly and her family who own/run the Fulltime Families website, and 2 other wonderful families also (I think that you can eventually meet us all via tour and call-in radio show on Kimberly's new "The Real Housewives of FtF"! LOL!)!!! And we had such a fantastic time!!!We were parked a ways away from the others (but still walking distance), and we were able to get together several times.
One night Kimberly organized a pizza party/game night. One of the games included one team member wrapping a roll of toilet paper around another - Bethy is wrapping one of Kimberly's sons. It's not as easy as it sounds; each family had to bring a roll of toilet paper (considering the size of our family, we took 4 - we had no idea what they were for! ;), and since RVers usually use single ply, there was lots of breakage, which meant lots of laughter!*on a side note, they should have used OUR t.p. - Charmin all the way. buying t.p. is a 'pink' job at our house, dumping tanks (and figuring out blockages caused by 2-ply purchased by 'pinks'), is a 'blue' job!!! ;)
Beth and Thomas finished their 'Kleenex pulling' at practically the same time.
there were lots of games...
like sucking Sprees up with a straw and transfering them from a bowl at one end of the table to the bowl at the other end of the table. supposed to be table, not floor...
stacking dice on the end of a popcicle stick...
even Molly had fun watching the silliness...(tho snitching sprees might have a little to do with the grin) 
Kimberly should get a medal for all the work she put into organizing this crazy-fun night!
everyone stuck around past the games, and hung out talking and gabbing.
We had such a fun time at Cottonwood!!! We loved connecting with family and new friends!
We did eventually have to hit the road again, and while it was a bummer to leave our new friends, we were excited to park with our 'Arizona family'! Last Wednesday we pulled into Vaughn's cousin's driveway, where we will be for a few weeks while we (hopefully) get to help them with some projects. Beth wants to stick around until the second weekend of Feb so we can spend a day at the Arizona Reneissance Festival on it's opening weekend; we will see if we have enough stuff going to keep young bodies busy for that long... *on a different note, we have always received a certain number of 'advice' or 'how do you do it' emails. I LOVE to get them; I love to meet new people, I love to share our story, and I love to (hopefully) help families realize that YES, you can make it work if it's something you really want to do. However, it has gotten to the point that I am having a hard time keeping up with individual, detailed replies (I do have 12 kids! LOL!)! I told V last night that I'm going to hire a secretary :) ... so, starting tomorrow (those of you that know me know that this means next week, right???), I'm thinking that I will publish a couple of the notes that I've received in the last week, and answer the inquiries on the blog (removing any sender-identifying info). Hopefully putting those details of our lives out there will help others out with their questions or curiosities also!
I would still love to hear from those of you that are wondering how we do certain things, or keep sane with 12 in <400 sq ft,or just want to say HI!, or slam us for raising our kids 'without roots', or whatever... meeting new friends (and mixing in an occassional critic for reinforcement - I'm a bit of a rebel I guess) has been one of the highlights of our traveling, and it's part of the reason that I have kept blogging past that initial "super-cool, everything's-exciting, we-can't-believe-we-are-really-doing-this" first leg of the journey ;)
(well, that and, if I didn't keep blogging, Gramma wouldn't ever get to 'see' what we are up to! :)
We hope to continue to meet more new friends as God places them in our path!
Looks like such fun!!! We hope to meet more on the road families as well. Blessing!!!
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