Snavley Freebirds

This was an e-mail that Martin sent to his friends and aquaintances and I thought it made for a good blog so..........

Just want to let everyone know that all is well. Motor Home living is treating us good and we all are still friends. :) We are in Show Low, Arizona right now. It is a little cold, around 20*F last night and 45*F during the day, so we are again remembering why we are on this trip. It is also a reminder of how much we love warm weather. We feel for everyone that is in the cold and as we hit warm weather we will try to send some your way. We got held up in Desert Hot Springs for a week longer then we expected as the newly rebuilt van transmission took a dump on us. So into the shop it went and a week later we had it back with new transmission #2. We like to think that this one will last longer then 3500 miles. (Note to everyone in the Wasilla area...Do not have any work done at "The Transmission Center".) We finished what we could do at this time on my sisters/brother-in-laws house (ground work, house addition pads, driveway and some concrete pads for the new entry gates) and left Desert Hot Springs, California on Saturday the 11th.

From there we went to Las Vegas to show the kids the sites and to ride the rides. We then went over the Hoover Dam and headed for the Grand Canyon. We spent Tuesday on the South Rim of the Canyon. What a site! We hiked about a mile into the Canyon and passed the pack mules with riders on the way out. That was a site! Not sure I would want to ride one of those things when one side of the 4' wide trail drops off about 2000 feet over a cliff into the Canyon! Crazy! Hiking was just fine.... as far as I was concerned. Kevin is wanting to go back before we end the trip and hike all the way down to the Canyon bottom and camp overnight. So that is now in the planning. We are hoping to do it sometime in September if possible.

We then moved onto the Meteor Crater. It was blowing about 40 to 60 mph, with gusts up to 90 mph when we were there (biggest gust registered was 92 mph). The power went out while we were in looking at the Crater so we left and headed down the road. The Motor Home was being blown all over the road and it was a nerve racking trip to Show Low in the wind but we made it. More then once I thought we were done for but we did make it in one piece. We had a part on the motor home that broke and we could not find the part in Show Low so I fixed it the best I could and will try to find the part down the road somewhere.

On Saturday we are headed to Tombstone and then on to New Mexico (White Sands) and Texas. For anyone that does not know, Heidi now has our family web page up and running for all of you to view. She will be updating it weekly (or when we have internet service) with new pictures, so you can check back every so often for updates. The Web address is www.5freebirds.com. She loves to mess with it and will soon be adding the "Freebirds" song to it. She has built the site on her own as she got tired of waiting for me to help. I'm accused of being a little lazy lately......not sure what I'm going to do when I have to go back to work. :) Kevin has also helped Heidi some with the web site, as he is our computer tech at this time. Computers are his life right now and we have figured out that three days without internet, makes Kevin a very unhappy camper. Because of this the site is updated with new pictures often, as we are never long without internet service. Time to go for now......take care until next time, Martin