January 17-23, 2022
Our lives changed a lot since we became full-time RVers in 2021. We sold our "sticks and bricks" houses and moved into our Newmar Dutch Star. Monica works for a utilities company with three main offices in Denver (where she worked before the pandemic), Minneapolis, and Amarillo, Texas. We decided to officially move to Texas, and Monica moved her desk to Amarillo.
Our first time there was in January of 2022 after enjoying a bit more warm weather in Arizona and New Mexico. We were "snowbirds" to avoid the snow and cold weather we left when we headed south from Colorado, but when we got to Amarillo it was winter! It snowed, and it was pretty chilly.
Margot stayed nice and warm in the motor home, venturing out to some fun times playing pickleball. Amarillo is proving to be a great place for that! Monica stayed warm at the downtown office in Amarillo.
It was weird to go back to the office after working from home for so long. Our leadership sent us home in March of 2020, and that would eventually become more permanent until our return to the office in 2022. Officially, everyone was going back in March of 2022, so Monica was going back a bit early. We had to work 20% of our time in an office, and the plan is to keep swinging by offices in all three locations to work weeks at a time to meet that goal. The calendar on the wall was for 2019 so it was all a little bit weird.
We really like Amarillo! It's a city, but not too big. Traffic is busy but not too bad. We ate at Macaroni Joe's a few times, and Margot fell in love with pork shank dinners. We found a lot of good food. We even got a steak at the Big Texan, of course!
Over our weekend there, we went to check out Palo Duro Canyon, the second-largest canyon in the United States. People think it's flat in the Texas Panhandle, but it isn't. Even the "flat" areas are hilly. Palo Duro was gorgeous, with a nice drive through it. There were some awesome campgrounds, too, and we even had cell service in the canyon. We are hoping we can stay there over one of our weekends in Amarillo.
We had another stay in Amarillo planned in a couple months, but first we were going to check out Dallas/Fort Worth. We only spent a couple weeks in Amarillo this time, and we liked it. Our plan of most weeks in Amarillo should work out well. Off to more adventures!
