CuRVWander

Our time in Waco done, we are moving north to the Dallas/Ft Worth suburb of Highland Village.  John's brother lives about a half hour south of Highland Village and we'll be visiting him and his family for a few days. Again, our initial plans for a campground, one we had used in the past, were thwarted by flooding.  Lewisville Lake was swollen by months of rain and the campground on the southern end near the dam was mostly underwater.  After an extensive search we came upon a little gem of a park operated by the city of Highland Village on the banks of the northern end of Lewisville Lake.  The park, Pilot Knoll , was on a little bit higher ground and not flooded by the bereft of rain.  However it was flooded by campers.  This park being one of few that was not battling flooding had all the campers funneled to it.  We were pretty lucky to get a space but it was for fewer days than what we preferred. We had no more got set up and ready to go see famil...

We have mixed emotions about getting back on the road.  On one hand we are looking forward to what Waco, TX has to offer tourists but on the other hand we are unsettled by our tire problems.  We have confirmed that our total load is within limits and that our load balance across each axle and even each individual tire is also within limits.  But after more hours than I care to think about researching and getting on forums it is clear that the Goodyear Marathons I am running are a tire with a reputation.  And it is not a good reputation. The number of reported failures of these tires was astounding.  It was not possible to read all the search hits about problems with this tire.  Of the couple hundred I did read the theme was common, tread separation and blowouts under conditions that these problems should not have happened.  One condition that did seem to be an issue in a large number of the failures was hot pavement.  Like me, many of the people...

Being in Livingston, TX puts us close to several of John's cousins.  Of course close is a relative term when your talking about Texas.  One was two hours away in Sugarland, another one an hour away in Conroe and the third an hour away in Montgomery.   By the way, did you know that you could always tell if you were talking to a Texan if they spoke in terms of travel time instead of distance?   When we were in high school we made a few trips from our hometown of Borger, TX (up in the panhandle, north of Amarillo) to Galveston Island, TX.  To this day I have no idea how many miles that drive was but I know it was a 14 hour trip with 70 mph speed limits.  During the oil crisis when speed limits were dropped to 55 mph we quit making long-distance weekend drives.  There just was not enough hours in the weekend to do more than make the drive, with no time to spend at the destination. Before our stay in Livingston was finished we had managed to meet with all...

The second day of jury duty was a lot like the first, hot and boring.  The A/C had not been fixed yet so it was plenty hot.  The heat coupled with the not-so-interesting law suit made for drowsiness.  One of our jurors, a twenty-something, actually dosed off, but within seconds of the first head-bob the bailiff was all over her letting her know that behavior was unacceptable. That perked everybody in the courtroom up. By the end of the day we, the jury, had found in favor of the plaintiff and awarded them the $150,000 they had been swindled out of.  We had now fulfilled our civil obligations.  Mark this one DONE! It was time to move on to the other objectives we (Cyndee and I) had come to Livingston for.  I made an appointment to get our truck and trailer weighed with SmartWeigh and headed to the tax commissioner's office to secure the title to my truck. It has been three years since we moved from Georgia to Texas.  All legal documents have been ...

Can it possibly get any hotter!  It was really hot coming across Alabama and Mississippi.  I about stroked out changing those blowouts in the middle of the day.  But since getting to Livingston it has only gotten hotter.  In these few days that we have been waiting for jury duty to start, the temperature has reached epic highs.  The actual temperature has peaked at 110 several times.  And with near biblical rains in this area for the past few months everything is soaking wet, raising the humidity levels to the point that the heat index has been topping out between 115 and 118 degrees.  The air is so thick you don't breath it, you wear it. Our 5th wheel RV has two of the largest air conditioners you can have on an RV at 15,000 BTU's a piece.  But they can't begin to keep up with this kind of heat.  The temperature in the rig rises steadily with the sun, staying roughly 20 degrees below outside ambient.  So when it hits 110 outside we're...

You know, sometimes you just don't want to do anything.  We had been on duty seven days a week as volunteers for Chattahoochee Bend State Park for 14 months and then nearly a week long, nerve wracking, excruciatingly hot trip from Georgia to Texas.  We wanted some down time and decided to take it.  Both of us got in our recliners, kicked back and catnapped almost all day. There were a couple of moments of lucidness where phone calls were made.  We inquired about how to volunteer for jury duty and learned to our surprise that they seat juries only on the second Monday of every month, and that was four days ago.  But for some strange reason they had a heavy court schedule this June and would be seating a jury on the third Monday also.  All we needed to do was to show up. The Rainbow's End Escapee Park has a lot of amenities and features.  There's a clubhouse, pool, onsite insurance agency, and mail service to name a few.  They also have a fa...

Okay, here we go.  It's a new day, we have two new tires, new brake lines and all new brake fluid.  We are hitched up and about to depart Campgrounds of the South  at just a little after 7:00 am.  Our destination is not even an hour away but there is a lot of anxiety about getting back on the highway given our break-down history of the last two days.  We'll get there way before check-in time but we'll be off the road before the asphalt exceeds 120 degrees.  We have learned that our make of tire may be sensitive to hot pavement, hence the comment about asphalt temperature. Happily the drive is going flawlessly as we approach our exit but as we talk about it neither of us feels much like doing the tourist thing in New Orleans.  We've already lost the two days we had planned on spending in NOLA and even though there is no schedule carved in stone for being in Livingston, TX, we would just as soon get there and get on with the things we need to do there....

It has been awhile since my last post, again.  Things have been hopping and getting online has been a challenge.  But to pick up where I last left off, the people that we engaged to repair the damaged brake lines did a bucks up job. They showed up the next day as scheduled and got the damaged brake lines removed and off to a local shop that can custom make new lines on the spot.  That was the key to success for this job.  It would have been easy enough to remove the damaged lines myself and order replacements from the manufacturer.  But that would have been days, if not weeks waiting for the parts to get to me.  These repair guys shortened the job to a few hours.  The hardest part was purging about 25 feet of brake line and six calipers. It was mid-afternoon by the time everything was buttoned up and ready to go but it was horrible hot, plus we were a little gun-shy about having a problem on the road.  That brought us to the decision to stay p...

The first part of our day was going great.  We locked in a reservation for a place to stay and play for the winter and we only have a two hour drive to get to our next stopover, Mandeville, Louisiana.  Mandeville will be our home base for the next two or three days for day-tripping into New Orleans.  We want to spend some time exploring the Garden District   and the historic cemeteries St. Louis Cemetery No 1 and Lafayette Cemetery No 1 . As a bonus, our drive is along some beautiful Gulf Coast scenery.  One of the sights is Mobile Bay.  Interstate 10 crosses the bay towards its north end where it is narrower.  Still, even at the narrow end the bridge is seven miles long.  In addition to being long it is also narrow and crowded.  We had just cleared the ground and were fully over water, and that's where our day took an unwanted turn. We heard a big FOOMP! sound followed by the tire pressure monitor alarming and flashing lights for the lef...

Our babysitting weekend is done, we are re-engaging our plans for moving west to Texas.  First stop, Rainbow Plantation, Summerdale, AL.  Rainbow Plantation is an ESCAPEES park in a small town just north of Gulf Shores, AL.  We have never been to this park but wanted to give it a try and look at it as a potential place to winter over starting next January. The drive from Chatt Bend is a bit longer than we like to do at one time, coming in right at seven hours.  Our preference is to be done with driving for the day in four or five hours.  But having stayed an extra week beyond our planned departure day we opted to skip the short drive.  Still, we got in while the office was open, got checked in, set up and drove almost all the way to Gulf Shores for dinner, all before it got dark. Our dining establishment for the evening (we were looking for seafood) was recommended to us by the camp host.  She said Fish River Grill #2 would fix us about anything w...

One thing about being a fulltimer is that you have to be flexible.  It is a rare day that you make a hard schedule (regarding where you will stay, when you will get there or when you will leave) because things change.  And so it is with our departure from Chattahoochee Bend State Park.  Our last day of being volunteer camp hosts is still May 31st but our departure day of June 1st is now history.  At nearly the last minute our daughter and son-in-law asked us to keep the grand baby so they could have one last weekend away before we leave.  But the weekend in question was a week after we were supposed to be gone.  There was no chance that we would say no to having the baby all to ourselves one more time, even if it means changing our plans by a week. So now we will pull off our camp host site on the first day of June and move a grand total of about 500 yards to campsite #111, a pretty back-in site with great views of the woods and a clear shot at the satell...

We have been campground hosts at Chattahoochee Bend State Park (Georgia) going on a year now.  For a volunteer position this is a long time, most volunteer host jobs are three months with a long gig maybe stretching to six months.  A year is especially long when your hosting duties include daily bath house cleaning.  Which in this case means about 2,000 square feet of toilets, showers, sinks and floors that have to be scrubbed, mopped and disinfected every day. Then there is the seven months of growing season when the campground has to be mowed every week.  There is about 11 acres of surface that has to be mowed in campground #1.  This is not to say that all of that acreage is vegetated.  There is a lot of bare, red Georgia clay between clumps of grass.  Chatt Bend is a relatively new park and it has a long way to go before all the bulldozered campsite building is fully revegetated. In an attempt to cover some of the bare clay, we put down over...

DECEMBER 2015 (continued) As it has been for months, the rain continued.  The week preceding Christmas was pretty soggy and the Chattahoochee River was straining to handle the flow.  Miles of the river saw levels top out at 15 feet above flood stage.  All of Chattahoochee Bend State Park saw every inch of that high water. At the boat ramp.  River was rising rapidly, in only minutes after this photo everything was submerged. River rising up to meet the swing which usually sits twelve to fifteen feet above the river. The river crested and receded quickly but left a mess.  Once the waters over-topped the boat ramp they freely flowed into the public use area, flooding the playground and picnic pavilions.  At least six feet below the water is the River Trail and its bridges over multiple creek crossings that are now fused into one single river. Even with the nearly continuous rain we managed to squeeze in a Christmas tradition of a trip to...