I last left off with the challenge of getting backed in at our home park, Rainbow's End in Livingston, TX. In our first night we learned that not only did we have RV eating tree limbs at our campsite but we were also backed up to within feet of a very busy and very, very noisy highway. I don't bemoan our noise plight lightly. We have camped adjacent to interstate highways (I-10, I-40 and I-70 to name a few) several times and while they were all noticeable they were also ignorable. Not the case with this highway, it was not ignorable. All. Night. Long.
The next morning I was in the campground office to get the address for having things shipped to me and mentioned in passing that the road was really loud last night. Dorothy, the campground host, replied with; "So that's why you look like warmed over death" and added that was not just last night, every night would be noisy. I said thanks for the info and drug myself back to the camper. It's going to be a long month.
I had not been back to the camper 10 minutes when the phone rang. It was Dorothy and she wanted to know if I would be interested in moving. She didn't think I would, she said, since I had only parked the day before but she thought she would ask. I told her that if it was away from the road I would be breaking camp before she could hang up the phone. I later learned that someone canceled a long term stay due to a medical problem, which made it possible for us to move in an otherwise sold out campground.
The end result was a campsite that wasn't much further from the road but it was enough that the road noise was ignorable. We loved it and settled in for a month's worth of activities. We also had no tree limbs to deal with so the satellite dish went up and we started getting our favorite TV shows. However cell phone reception was still a no-go. It was all one could do to get a text message out, never mind a voice call or getting on-line to do all my bill paying.
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| No longer backed up to a heavily trafficked highway we are at our home spot for the next five weeks. |
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| In this new spot the trees are far enough back from the camper that our dish had a clear shot of the TV satellites. |
I had been drooling over the thought of having Starlink for more than a year now. But due to the immaturity of the technology and the hit to the wallet I could not justify getting it when I had a working system. I do use the term 'working' loosely though. Our cell tower connection from the Volunteer Village was never better than two bars and while that is a decent connection it does nothing for bandwidth. The tower we were on was so busy we could rarely get above 1.0mbs during peak hours. And peak hours became longer and longer as time went by. It got to where we were having to do banking/billpaying late at night and if we wanted to watch a movie we would have to start a download at bedtime and watch it the next night. Now we don't even have that. We are looking at going back to the old days and hitting libraries and coffee shops for internet connections.
Enter Starlink's latest advancements. Their constellation of satellites has greatly increased and they have accounts specifically tailored to RVers. With our current situation and knowing that we have an entire summer coming with no internet service without traveling miles for a signal that is only available during 'business hours', I'm going to pull the trigger.
In the mean time we have an awning repair company that was supposed to meet us in our Livingston location but when I called to confirm the appointment I was met with the question; "Tell me again what we were going to do for you?" When I explained that they agreed to repair the stitching on the hems of my awning I was told; "Oh we don't do that." Well, dang. They took the appointment more than a month ago and I stopped looking for someone that could do awning work. Honestly though, this was the only outfit I could find that said they did this kind of work (but then they didn't). So Cyndee and I put our heads together and came up with some heavy gauge, outdoor rated thread (Amazon of course) and a big needle and got to work.
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| Cyndee on our extension ladder, her head at about 12' and stitching a hem on our awning canvas. |
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| It was slow going but our heavy gauged and doubled-over thread did the trick. No puckers or wrinkles in 16' of hem. |
It took all the ladder we had to reach the awning hems and we spelled each other until the job was finished. After a couple of hours on the ladder and a crick in our necks we got it done.
We also set about completing tasks that brought us to our home park. On the first day of early voting we made our way to the one and only polling location and cast our votes. This was our first time in ten years of full-timing to not use absentee ballots. The following week we reported to the court house, the same place we voted, for jury duty. Polk County is sizeable geographically but small in population, so jury trials are formed only every other Monday.
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| Polk County has a classic old west courthouse on the town square. The working court house is actually a building in back of this one. |
We arrived at the appointed time and were seated in the jury pool room, which was also the court room, and the winnowing process began for a single trial that was on the docket. The usual excuses from serving were worked through and then they got down to eliminating people based on the situation of the trial itself. Being that it was just the one trial they were not going to seat relatives or marrieds on the same jury. We were excused. But, we got credit for coming in and that should keep us from getting any more summonses for at least a year.
Anticipation has been building about the arrival of our Starlink system, that is in parallel with aggravation at the cell phone service almost everywhere we have been in the Livingston area. But the day has come, we got a message from the campground office that there was a package for us. I wasted no time in making a hasty trip to the office.
And there it is. A beefy black box, simply labeled. But oh the things it had inside.
And there that is! Two pieces of hardware and a cable, that's all there is to it. Just put the dish where it can see the northern sky, plug in the power and it does the rest. Well, almost. I did have to get the Starlink router talking to my WifiRanger router. And then, just like that, we had what was to us blinding fast internet. Of course that is a matter of perspective too. After years of getting by with no more than 3mbs of data speed we were now getting what Starlink defined as "congested area" reduced speed of 30mbs. I'll take it! I can now stream a movie while downloading two others and surf the web all at the same time. Wow, what a difference a day makes!
Next summer when we move to a part of the country that is classified as not congested I don't know what I am going to do with another 70 or 80 mbs of speed. Maybe I'll find out what it is like to overload on funny cat videos. But seriously, we'll be making all our voice calls, FaceTime calls and anything else we do electronically through the Starlink. We're counting on this being our connection to civilization and family without having to go to great lengths to get to a connection.
With the must-do chores pretty much complete we can get down to some of the fun stuff we wanted to do. First thing is to get with all the cousins in the area. There are a couple, and their families, in Conroe and another and her family in Sugar Land as well as an aunt in Sugar Land. Over the course of a couple of weeks we managed to get with them all and get caught up on family stuff and just some real nice visiting. In this case all this family is from one line. We are all decedents of a McFarlin. In my case it was my mother and in their case, one of my mother's siblings. And the aunt is my mother's sister and our matriarch.
Being a tourist was also on our want-to-do list too. And we did. It wasn't hard, there are so many things to do within a 2-hour drive in any direction that it is overwhelming. It had been seventeen years since our last visit to Galveston so we got southbound on I-45 and got on down there.
It had only been a couple of weeks since hurricane Ian had blown through and churned up the Gulf but our brief visit to the shore was met by gorgeous weather and calm waters. We were both wishing we had packed camp chairs. We would have really liked to have just sat on the beach and watch the sun set. We still saw a great sunset but it was through a windshield going down Sea Wall Blvd.
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| All three above photos taken at Galveston Island State Park |
One of Cyndee's favorite places on Sea Wall Blvd is the Hotel Galvez. It's not often an old building stands up to the harsh environment of being on the shore of a salty body of water but this one does. These folks are committed to keeping this grand old building in good shape.
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| Hotel Galvez, Galveston Island, TX |
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| The Galvez has honored its past (opened 1911) by keeping its original style and keeping it like-new fresh. |
Even the most casual observer of history has heard of the Alamo and are aware of the siege and massacre that took the life of almost every occupant of that mission. They may even know some of the famous names lost in that massacre; James Bowie and Davy Crocket to name a couple. But it is a much smaller set of people that know about the events that transpired in following days. Unless you were a seventh grader in a Texas school, then you knew. Everybody got Texas history in the seventh grade.
The battle of San Jacinto entered the history books roughly 31 days after the Alamo. Sam Houston and a band of Texicans surprised Santa Ana's army encamped at San Jacinto and despite being heavily outnumbered, defeated them in just 18 minutes, all the while yelling "Remember the Alamo".
This defeat was momentous and worth commemorating. After decades of fund raising and political maneuvering a fitting monument was approved to be built on the site of the battle. In March of 1936, as part of the Texas Centennial Celebration, ground was broken for the monument. In three years a 567.31 foot column stood stark against the coastal wetlands sky.
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| That's a 34-foot tall, 220-ton star atop the world's tallest masonry column. |
Each of the column's eight sides have an engraved panel that depicts what is referred to as the 'birth of Texas'. Altogether the panels represent the timeline from the fall of the Alamo to the rise of industry in a free Texas.
On the four sides of the base of the column the story told by the engraved images are put in words.
And within that base is a 15,625 sq ft museum plus a 160-seat theatre. It took a long time for everyone to get on board and build this monument but when they did it turned out to be something else. All of this creativity and work did not go unnoticed. It was designated a National Historic Monument in 1960 and designated an Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1992.
So far this month-long layover in our home park in Texas has been great. Being here in the fall, instead of the summer, is the way to go. We may have to deal with remnants of a hurricane passing by but its been way better than the heat and humidity of July.
The next move is approaching but we have a little more time and are going to make the best of it.
