Getting settled

Our first few days at our winter location have been busy.  As I noted in my last blog, we had the brakes fixed in our Jeep the day after our arrival and John spent six hours at the repair shop.  He had his IPAD with him and the shop had free WIFI so John entertained himself for the day by doing his Bible study, watching TV shows on the IPAD and playing games.  He ate lunch at a small restaurant across the street from the auto shop and said they had the best chicken fry he had ever eaten.  One of the main ways he judges chicken fry is whether you can find the meat!  So many places pound it out so thin it can be hard to find!

While John was gone for the day, I put up Christmas in the motorhome and gave the girls baths.  Now the motorhome has a more festive feeling and the girls smell fresh and clean.  I’m trying to find a dog groomer for at least one professional groom while we are here and that has been a challenge.  The reviews for most of them in the area aren’t great.  I think I may have found one in Corpus Christi whose reviews are all very good.  A bad haircut grows out so I’m more concerned about how they treat the dogs and if the place is clean.  I’ve heard horror stories about groomers.

On Saturday morning we checked out the breakfast that the park serves for $3/person.  The food was excellent.  They served bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy and pancakes as well as coffee and juice.  When we had our food a couple we had briefly met in the park waved us over to their table which was so nice.  They were a nice couple out of Illinois.  Both had been short haul truck drivers.

We’ve met several folks but trying to remember their names has been a challenge.  We know that will come as we spend more time with them.  There have been lots of dog walks and it seems like everybody has a dog or dogs.  Some have some very large cats.  One lady takes here cat out for a walk in a wagon and her fur baby must weight 30+ pounds.  Everybody seems to like to the dogs and engages with them wherever we go, which is nice.  On Saturday, we took time to finish up a few outside decorations and lights, drove around the area a bit, figured out where the church we hope to attend was located, refilled a script, bought groceries and relaxed a bit.

Now it’s time for us to get into a routine that hopefully includes exercise!

We Arrived at our Winter Destination

On the morning of November 30^th, we said good-bye to Cedar Blue and headed south for the winter.  It was a sunny and very cool morning and great driving weather.  We stopped in Ardmore for gas (about 40 miles from Cedar Blue) and John smelled hot brakes on the Jeep.  In checking the braking system, we had in it, it seemed that he had set the system a bit too far forward and it had been pressing on the brake the entire way!  Yikes.  It hadn’t registered on the readout in the motorhome so we knew it was all about where he had the system located since it wasn’t engaging the brake.  Oh well, not much we could do at that point but get the system setup right and keep going. 

The drive on I-35 and I-35W was stress-free until we got to Ft. Worth and the highway construction was beyond crazy.  I had hoped to take a bypass around the city but all the construction chaos started well before that exit.  By the time we reached the exit for that bypass it wasn’t even worth the time as we were almost through all of it.  Traffic moved slowly through all of it so it wasn’t that stressful driving our rig.  We just had to make sure we stayed on the right road, which we did. 

Once we were south of the construction we wanted to stop for lunch and change drivers.  John found a Loves Truck Stop on his phone so we got off the highway and headed that way.   We cannot back the motorhome since we are towing a vehicle so we always must find a pull-through parking space.  Now you would think that wouldn’t be a problem in a truck stop but not this place.  Every parking space for trucks was back in!  Amazing.  So back onto the highway to find someplace else.  A short distance down the road we saw signs for several eating places and decided to try again so off we went in search of parking and found a shopping center with lots of open space. 

We spent our first night at the South Forty RV Park just south of Giddings, TX on Hwy 77.  This was a nice small park in a wooded area.  As we were driving along the exterior of the park to our space we saw a herd of Texas Longhorns on the other side of the fence.  They had the longest horns I’ve ever seen.  There was one very large longhorn standing so still and with such long horns that I thought it was fake but then I saw it move slightly! How do they hold their heads up?  Those horns must be very heavy.  While there for the night we met a nice couple next to us that were full-timers from South Dakota heading to Houston for a visit and then onto Arizona for the winter.  They had a friendly, large spaniel-looking dog.  As dog owners, we have found that dogs are what bring so many people we meet together.

On December 1^st we arrived at our destination in Rockport, TX.  We are staying at the Wilderness Oaks RV Park and we were greeted with lots of smiles and helping hands.  This is a large park with some permanent residents and lots of winter Texans.  It didn’t take long at check-in to be informed that ‘snowbirds’ are in Florida and we are ‘winter Texans’.  After showering me with lots of information about the park we headed into the park to get our rig parked.  I always park the rig and John directs me which seems to work well but when I got to the space we were assigned and looked at the narrowness of the street I was very thankful for the two guys that came to help us park.  These guys are awesome because they know exactly how to move the rigs around to get them into place.  I think they had me backed in in about 5 minutes. 

When John got the Jeep unhooked before parking the RV it was a nice surprise to realize that we did still have brakes.  After getting the RV setup we took the girls and headed to a local auto repair shop we found online with high ratings to see if they could look at the brakes the next day.  John said they were extremely helpful and gave us an appointment with no problem.  In talking to the young lady helping him, John found out that she used to live in Ardmore, OK – just 35 miles from our place in Cedar Blue.  Small world.

Today I’m planning to work on some Christmas decorations while John is having the brakes checked out in the Jeep.  It looks like there could be at least 3” of rain headed this way over the next four days so we will need to be looking at indoor activities.  This will be a time to check out the workout center.  We were expecting an outdoor pool with a dome over it but since we were here two years ago they have changed the outdoor pool to a saltwater pool and it’s now heated and no dome.  Apparently, the dome was a liability of some sort.  I hope to try out the pool later in the week when the rain is gone.  More to come about swimming in an outdoor, saltwater pool in the winter!

So, it’s time to sign-off and go bathe the girls before starting on Christmas.

Heading South for the Winter

We have spent three wonderful weeks at Cedar Blue (home base) head to Rockport, TX for the winter tomorrow.  We were reminiscing that the Sunday following Thanksgiving last year we had snow and found ourselves driving our motorhome back to Newcastle in that nasty weather.  It was icy, cold and snowing.  We came across cars in the ditch, had to stop multiple times to deice the windshield and vowed never to drive the motorhome in that type of weather again.  This year we haven’t experienced any bad weather in late November, so very thankful we will have good traveling weather to TX.  

The weather this November has been incredible – sunny, warm days, and cool nights; although there is wintry weather headed to Oklahoma next weekend.  The fall colors finally arrived and the park was full of trees with leaves painted in bright gold, crimson red and flaming orange.  We have enjoyed a lot of outdoor time with our fur babies often walking an average of two miles a day or more.  We enjoyed walks both during the daylight hours as well as after dark when you can hear a pin drop since we are out in the woods and there are very few people in the park now.  The nice weather provided us the ability to get a lot of small projects done around the property.  When we return in April we hope to get some painting done but that will be weather permitting since spring is storm season in Oklahoma and yes, we have our own storm shelter.  We also plan to plant some bushes around the patio.  We will have about 10 weeks at home base before heading out on our next adventure in mid-June 2017.

Some have asked us why we choose to stay put at Cedar Blue during the spring storm season and the answer became very clear to us while traveling during storms two years ago.  In the spring, it seems that there are severe storms throughout the entire east half of the country.  When you are on the road you don’t know the names of counties and cities so when high winds and tornadoes are active you have no idea where they are in relation to your own location.  Also, you have no idea where to go to seek shelter.  A tornado missed us by 2 miles on that trip two years ago – very unnerving.  We would much rather stay put at Cedar Blue where we know exactly what’s going on and we have our own shelter to get into. 

We spent Thanksgiving at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Norman, OK for a couple of nights.  It’s a very nice hotel with an indoor pool, hot tub, a huge free breakfast buffet as well as a free manager’s reception nightly.  They are also very dog friendly – even providing their furry guests with goodie bags.  Ours included some nice treats, bottled water and a great ball.  Dinner was at Legends Restaurant with a dear friend.  It was very nice intimate dining with good food and conversation.  They even gave us desserts to go on top on the desserts we had already eaten.  While in the city we did a bit of shopping, got April’s shots and other vet things taken care of, wondered around the Myriad Gardens in downtown Oklahoma City and visited some friends.  Oh, yes – we did enjoy the hotel’s pool, hot tub and bathtub!  We are hoping to get a portable hot tub for two for our place at Cedar Blue as our Christmas present to ourselves!

We spent Monday and Tuesday making sure we had everything organized to be gone for an extended period.  The cargo hauler is secured on the back of the jeep and loaded up a few extras to take with us.  We also wanted the cargo hauler in case we decide to travel overnight someplace without the RV as there isn’t room in the jeep for suitcases and dog crates.  I’m hoping after taxes are prepared, we have the cash to trade our current 2-door jeep for a slightly newer 4-door jeep.  We are leaving one of our vehicles at Cedar Blue so we need to top off the gas tank to stop condensation, put a trickle charger on it, moth balls under it and a cover over it.

So off we go for our first year as ‘snowbirds’.  We will be staying at Wilderness Oaks RV Park in Rockport.  Once we get ourselves situated there I will put up a post.  Although ‘home’ is now our RV I still consider home to be someplace in Oklahoma so it’s going to be a bit of a transition for me into this next stage of our lives, as I’ve never been away from home for four months.