2005 - PAGE -2-
So with the bike ready for a long trip and the satellite on autopilot we headed off for Las Vegas and the International Truck Show.
6/11/05 - Albuquerque, NM on the infamous Route 66.
Our first real stop for the trip was Albuquerque. We spent a couple days here resting up and catching up on R&R and business. We rode a little, took in a museum or two and just generally had a good time.
I'll let you guess our next stop from the picture.
If you guessed the Grand Canyon go to the head of the class. We stayed at the Grand Canyon KOA for 3 days and rode up to the canyon. Sheila can't do a lot of walking up at that altitude, but we rode along the edge of the canyon and stopped at a number of the view points to take in the graneur of the canyons.
From there it was on to Vegas and the truck show -
The parking in Vegas isn't exactly ideal - it's just a paved lot at the Circus Circus casino, but it's only a few blocks from the Convention Center where the show is held so it's real convienent.
I'm not sure exactly when I took this shot, but I think it was as we were getting ready to go so the satellite is already down. I have a big warning tag - ANTENNA UP that hangs in the windsheild so I don't forget to bring it down. I did that once, forturnately I saw it's shadow before we hit it on something and did bring it down. One of the many joys of age - we get forgetful :-0
From Vegas we headed north for the return trip across the 70. I'm kind of enamored with interesting signs so here's a couple from the 70 in Colorado - you'll have to excuse the bugs,
next trip I'm going to clean that windsheild a little more often. I do it every night now, but guess I need to do it a couple times a day when I want to take pictures :-)
From there is was on to Missouri and for a stop at OOIDA to tape a few shows with Mark Reddig for Landline Now.
There's a real nice KOA up one exit from the OOIDA headquarters and we stayed there this year.
We spent 3 days in Oak Grove and had lunch with Mark Reddig and also pried Sandy out of her office for lunch. Anyone who knows her will appreciate the accomplishment that was, for those who don't she's the editor of Landline and hard to pry away from her job.
From there we headed down to Lebanon, Mo to meet with Craig at Truck.net. 
Craig had asked us to stop by and do a couple pod casts for truck.net one of the hot sites on the net for truckers. It was real fun working with Craig on these as he's real informal with them.
Almost was a little jealous when that bus pulled in a couple spaces down, but then he flexed his musles and rolled out his slides and started smiling again. :))
This was the last stop for this trip so we packed it up and headed for home. We had been out most of the month of June and had really enjoyed this first long trip in Almost.
July and August are a little too hot to really go anywhere in Florida so we settled back in at the house and waited for Dallas which was our next show for the year.
8/21/05 enroute to Dallas, Tx.
The Dallas show is our final show for the year. It's usually a good show and this year we had to find a new place to camp out as we were informed that parking in the truck parking area was not going to be allowed this year.
We found a mobile home park that had a couple spaces in the front for RV's and so we parked there this year -
This shot was actually taken at the end of the show. Getting the stuff to and from the show was a bit of a challenge, but Mellow Yellow proved up to the task. We just dropped the top and piled the stuff on.
Our booth - we were out in the middle this year. We weren't sure if it was going to be a good spot for us or not, but it turned out to be a real good site and as always several of our customers came by to say hello.
September and October flew by as we were real busy at work. But as Thanksgiving drew near we made plans for what had started to become a habit, our yearly trek over to the west coast for Thanksgiving. After the year we had just enjoyed we both felt that we really had a lot to be thankful for.
The satellite fixed the problem with getting connected and it was nice not to have to run to town a couple times a day to do emails.
With the year drawing to a close we headed down to the Keys again for Christmas. It had been a really full year and the keys seems like the perfect place to close out a hectic but extremely enjoyable year.
We found a park right in Key West this year and that was our big Christmas present (the rates are really high down there in December), but it was a really nice park and being so close to everything made it easy to get into town often.
We did lunch out most of the time we were there and had a really great time.
So we ended the year smiling -
And I think this next shot pretty well sums up the year -
