Travel Blog

We finished up our three week stint at Amazon last Saturday.  We spent most of the last two days wrapping gifts in the shipping department.  Now I have to apologize to the poor folks who got the presents I wrapped.  Little Jimmy in Katy, TX, Santa thinks that wrinkles in the wrapping paper add character.  Liz in Jasper, WY, if Hanna Montana shows up dented, it wasn't me.  And on a side note, Mr. W in Akron, OH, dude maybe you should cut back on the Japanese anime if you expect that book on dating for the chronically single to help out.

Truth is we got pretty good at wrapping.  Like everything else at Amazon they have it down to a science.  We had tidy well stocked work stations where we would grab the boxes from a conveyer, wrap the contents, and dump them onto another conveyer for the final packing.  This was the only time where we could see who was getting the packages.  While we were picking we had no idea who was getting what.

One suggestion if you have the folks at Amazon wrap your presents, make sure you check off everything that needs to be wrapped.  Some people would have one thing wrapped and you could see they probably wanted everything in the package done, but they had not checked off each item.

Sue loved gift wrapping.  She had never gotten into it before because her sister is the kind of gifted person who Martha Steward calls for tips.  Gina would make her own paper from the pulp of local fauna and design patterns rivaling the Renaissance Masters before wrapping the strangest shaped gifts with crisp smooth lines.  So Sue said she knew her limitations and would just wrap her gifts in the Sunday paper since she figured no one would be paying attention.  But the setup at Amazon let her inner-wrapper blossom and now she wants to do it again next year.

Personally I did not mind the wrapping, but I liked picking better.

One last Amazon observation.  We have probably all heard how bad a season it has been for retailers.  From our point of view picking and wrapping it seems the main winners this season were Nintendo, whose Wii games, systems, and accessories were flying off the shelves, and Disney who got Hanna Montana and the Disney Princesses to outsell Barbie.  So if you are a recipient of any of that stuff, you are in good company.

On our last day off, we were driving around looking for an oddity on our map.  Our map has a listing for the Little House on the Prairie near Coffeyville.  Now Sue was a big fan of the TV show (please no flames about poor taste) and was sure they lived in Minnesota. So we drove over to check it out and it turns out, as readers of the books know, the Ingalls lived in Kansas for a year and their third kid was born there.  This little cabin is very likely the same house that they built, and has been preserved by a local historical society.


To find out more about this you can go to www.littlehouseontheprairie.com.

After finishing up at Amazon, we headed off to get our living room slide fixed.  We thought it was the same problem as we had last year, the pin that connects the crank and shaft broke, but it turns out it was a faulty gear box..  This is good because there was no way we could have caused or prevented it from failing, but it was bad because we had to shell out the dough to replace it.

After that we had a frigid trip to Albuquerque with some days reaching a high of nine degrees.  But now we are back in the sunny high desert ready to go back to work..  One of the temp agencies we worked for last winter already has jobs lined up for us, so that made the decision to come back here for us. Stay tuned to find out what they have us doing this year.  Meanwhile we will leave you with a campground cow.