When you live and travel in an RV fulltime and you migrate to the same park for the winter you make a lot of friends. The snowbird parks all become micro villages, depending on their location and their size.

Catalina Spa and RV Park is part of the RPI family of parks but there are several folks who call this their winter home. With the nature of the RPI system, some folks (who are RPI members with a different “home” park) come for two weeks then go elsewhere for a week or two and then return for two weeks again, repeating this same pattern all winter. Then there are those folks who are also Catalina Spa members and they can purchase their third week in, sixth week in, etc. (providing there is availability) to stay for several months at a time. Lastly there are those folks who as well as being members, come and volunteer here for the entire winter, essentially working for their site. We fall in the latter category.

Regardless of how or why folks are here, it doesn’t take long to become a large, friendly “community”. Last year we stayed in the lower, older section (topographically lower) where the electrical service is only available as 30 AMP. This year we chose to move to the upper, newer section to take advantage of the 50 AMP service which is more suitable for our all-electric coach. Today we acquired “new” “old” neighbours, Sue and Dail, friends we made last year who have stayed in the lower section near our old site for a number of years. Sue, who manages the sales in the office, liked being close to where she worked but we were able to persuade them to move in beside us instead.

So now our row is complete; there are three of us in a row who work and play here all winter and it is nice to be together. Sue and I work together and Rick and Dail “play”, work and “putter” away together. There is a few other friends close by and slowly our neighbourhood seems to be coming together.