4/13/12 Early tomorrow morning we will be driving to the Houston airport to catch our flight to New Orleans, where we will board the Voyager of the Seas. It will be the beginning of a 16 day transatlantic cruise to Barcelona, and we will be traveling with 9 of our good cruise friends: Roger & Martin, Jack, Sergio & Reuben, David & Diane, and Patrick and Daryl. There will also be some Boomer friends on board: John and Julie Black and their granddaughter, Tayler. In Barcelona, on April 30, we are meeting other Boomer friends, Bill and Gisela Pollock, for lunch. They are arriving on a different cruise ship the day before. Then we will get back on our ship and travel to several ports in Egypt, Jordan, going through the Suez Canal, and ending in Dubai. We will stay there 3 days with David and Diane, exploring the city before flying back to Houston on May 18. Then we will get our rig ready to travel again and keep heading east.
While waiting for this event, we have had a couple of experiences worth mentioning. Last Thursday we drove up to Nacogdoches to tour the Foretravel RV factory. They have been in business since 1967 and make some of the most highly regarded RVs in the industry. We had called ahead of time and they told us they had tours every Mon-Thurs at 10AM. Unfortunately, they don't communicate well at that company because after the guy loaded us up in the van and drove us over to the manufacturing plant, he discovered it was closed because it was the Thursday before Good Friday. Since we had driven 75 miles to get there, we were rather annoyed. So we looked through some of their new and used rigs before leaving to explore the town. Foretravel RVs have evolved into very large and luxurious units and they cost anywhere from $600K to $1.2 million. Here are some pictures of one of them:


Downtown Nacogdoches has a lot of history and has preserved a number of the old buildings all around the main town square. Sam Houston lived in Nacogdoches for four years prior to the Texas Revolution in 1836. Here is a picture of one of the sides of it:

Nacogdoches isn't a very big town, so we didn't spend much time there after all.
Last Monday we drove to Houston to see our cruise friends Duane & Dorothy McCarthy, and their friend Mary Townsend. After a pleasant hour of catching up on everyone's news over a glass of wine,

we went to lunch at a nearby Tex Mex place called Las Ventanas:

The food was very good, and so was the company! They will not be joining us on our upcoming cruise because they are taking one through the Panama Canal instead.
We have also been attending some of the movies here at the SKP park, which they have twice a week because a guy named Joe who stays here buys all the latest releases and shows them. Last night we watched the Swedish version of the second book in the Millennium series, "The Girl Who Played With Fire". It was engrossing. Joe has a very appropriate sticker on the back of his truck:

We will try to do some blog posts while we are gone for the next 35 days but it all depends on whether we find some free WiFi spots at the ports.