Hometown Bound

It is the last few days of June 2016 and with almost a week under our belts in Highland Village's Pilot Knoll Park it is time to move north.  There is not a whole lot of things we are interested in doing between Dallas and Borger when daytime highs are breaking 110 degrees.  If the weather were cooler we would stop in at Caprock Canyons State Park or Palo Duro Canyon State Park, beautiful places when the temperature is somewhere below a pizza oven.  July in the panhandle of Texas is a time to seek out things to do that minimize your time outdoors.  We are going to be spending time with family and friends as well as a 4th of July gathering.

Sticking with our strategy to minimize our risk for trailer tire failure we are getting out early and picking a layover town that gets us off the road by mid-day.  Doing this puts us in the tiny, dusty town of Vernon, TX.  Like many Texas towns it has a nice campground for a night's layover.  I think it is great that as we travel the back-roads of Texas that you rarely have to worry about not finding a campground wherever you are at the end of the day.  Some may be private campgrounds like ours tonight or they may be a city park or county park or fairground, but there is almost always something.

A nice flat, grassy park in Vernon, TX.  Vernon doesn't have much but this park is
conveniently located close to what it does have.

Vernon does have a Walmart, an RV'ers delight, and it is literally next door to the campground.

It was unusual for the wind to not be blowing in this part of the country but we took advantage of it and fully extended the awning to get a little bit of shade on the side of the rig and give the air conditioners as much help as possible.  It took awhile but we got cooled down and set up house keeping until we head for our hometown in the morning.  The satellite beam that DirecTV got us hooked up to in Waco was still working in Vernon so we had entertainment for the evening.  When we get to our next stop we'll have to call DirecTV again and get authorized for the Amarillo beam.

By the way, that is a pretty significant change since starting our fulltime adventure in 2012.  When we got the satellite system installed the only thing DirecTV offered was a fixed address service.  At that time you had a choice of using one of two addresses.  One was in New York and the other was in California.  The beam for these addresses were receivable coast-to-coast.  This was immensely convenient, no matter where you landed you just put up the dish a voila, 800 channels of high-def TV.  But the downside was that the local stations were always New York City (if you were on the New York service address or Los Angeles if on the California service address).  Another thing that got wonky was changing time zones.  As we went west for our National Park jobs in Arizona and Texas the programming for "prime time" shows were coming down from the satellite by East Coast time.  The 11:00 pm news was coming on at 8:00 pm when we were in Arizona (Arizona does not do daylight savings time). Plus, we were getting really tired of seeing commercials for nothing but Broadway plays.

But all that changed at some point.  DirecTV never made an announcement, I just happened to be reading a forum for satellite TV for RV'ers and saw a blurb where somebody said they were now able to call in and change their service address at will.  It seems that the competition, Dish TV, had a department focused on RV'ers and their unique needs and DirecTV decided that maybe they should accommodate this segment of the market too.  I immediately called the number given and was greeted by a friendly, RV-savvy person and in just a couple of minutes I was getting the beam for my location (we were in the Atlanta market at the time).  Since then we have been able to move, sometimes daily, and just pick up the phone to get a satellite feed specific to our location and time zone.  It's been great.

A new day has come and it is time to saddle up and get going.  Today's drive will only be three hours, an easy cruise without wind.  We pull into Borger without fanfare and head to our customary campground that is part of the city park.  This park is on an honor system, "pay a donation" campground.  There are ten spots and each has 30 amp electric and water with a three-day limit.  But things have deteriorated since our last stay.  It looks like some campers have homesteaded the place and several slots had either electric or water problems.  We finally ended up in a site that had good electric (although thirty amps will run only one A/C) but we had to run 75 feet of water hose and put a "Y" on our neighbor's connection to get any water.  That kind of distance through a water hose makes for low water pressure and with no sewer hookup that means we'll have to practice extreme water conservation by doing navy showers, minimizing using any dishes that would need to be washed (use disposable paper and plastic) and use bathrooms at gas stations to extend the time before having to hit the dump station.

For the moment we have family and friends to see.