Friends Helping Friends

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged.  We arrived back at home base in Sulphur, OK on April 2^nd and spent 2 ½ weeks there.  Our home base is a large lot that we own in a private RV park.  The place seemed to have survived what winter they had quite well.  We dug up some old shrubs and planted new ones, decorated a bit with some fun items we purchased in Rockport, TX, mowed and took care of other odd jobs.  At some point, we do need to paint the outside of our add-on room, our shed and the large wood posts that hold up our metal canopy over our RV and room.  I had hoped to get started on that project while we were home but it’s not looking like that is going to happen until fall.  

On Thursday, April 20^th we dropped off the RV at Camping World in Oklahoma City to get our refrigerator looked at and repaired, have the oil changed, and get the roof checked and caulked where needed.  By the following Monday, they had done the oil and roof and determined that we needed a new valve for the fridge that allows the propane to turn on when disconnected from power.  I was pretty sure something was wrong as all it did was heat up while traveling so the propane couldn’t have been working.  The hose that runs water to the icemaker was broken so that needs replacing and the unit seems to struggle to stay cool when the RV itself starts to get warm on hot days.  The door gaskets have been replaced twice with no change and the doors just don’t seem to be closing very tightly.  So, new doors are needed as well.  Starting on Tuesday, April 25^th they started pricing items so they could do battle with the extended warranty folks to get the work paid for.  Pricing took over a week!  Crazy, isn’t it?  The warranty battle started about May 2^nd and parts were finally ordered May 4^th or so.  Today is Sunday, May 7^th and we have no idea when the parts will arrive.  It should only take a day for the work to actually get done but that’s in my ideal world!!  At this point we are hoping to be back in our home in time to head out on our 10-week summer trek starting June 19^th.

Some folks wonder if being full-timers is really worth it when the home has to go to the shop, and if we didn’t have good friends to take us in, we would definitely have to come up with another option as a month in a hotel is too costly.  It just boggles my mind that the work should take so long to get done but then again, the RV service places are busy.  Just check out their lots sometime and see how many units are going in and out.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they would offer the full-timers or those who are traveling and not at home when they need service, a travel trailer to stay in at their lot or a campground nearby?  We’ve thought about adding onto our room at our place in Sulphur so we could have a bathroom and place to sleep.  Since we cook with a grill, microwave and induction unit, we could survive in our little place like that OR we could pick up a little travel trailer to stay in when needed or to use with guests and just store it in one of those storage places.

In the meantime, we have a good friend who takes us in and in turn we try to help her out when she needs it.  We’ve stayed at her place when she has traveled to take care of her pets as well as helped her out following a surgery and this time around we are helping her pack up her house to move.  She has purchased a home in another town and is needing to get her current home on the market to sell.  John has been a big help in fixing some electrical issues and he removed a ceiling fan that wasn’t working and replaced it with a ceiling light.  Painters are coming next week so we’re cleaning out the areas that need painting and we’ve been packing up things as we go.  Her brother took a large trailer with a full load and dropped it at her new home and there’s probably enough packed to fill up another trailer at this point.  

So, the timing of our repairs and her needing to move is working out quite nicely but I still wish the repairs weren’t taking so long.  All in God’s timing though and He knows how this all needs to work out much better than we do.  I’m selfishly hoping that we get to stay at her new home sometime as it backs up to a pond and walking track in the neighborhood.  There is a gate in her back fence that opens right to the walking track.  She also has a living area, bedrooms and bath on the second floor which is very nice for guests.  

John has been working on his stained glass and wind chimes and sold his first one a couple of weeks ago.  He has two more in the works and may have a buyer for one of them as well.  The two he’s working on are a lighthouse and hummingbird and are very pretty.  I must say, though, that with the time it takes him to make these and our costs in supplies, at some point I think the price is going to have to go up.  He seems to be enjoying making them and is always finding ways to do a better job and better ways to get the job done.  The one thing he doesn’t want to get into, however, is taking orders as that takes the fun out of it. His is plan is to work on them at his own pace and to make the designs he wants to make.  We also plan to have some of his sunset and sunrise photos put on metal and see if folks might be interested in purchasing some of them as well.  

We are going to be dog sitting for some friends for a week starting tomorrow and yes, our friend that we are staying with has told us to just have that dog join our two at her house!  Ours are only 7 and 8 lbs and the one coming is about 5 lbs.  She’s a huge animal lover and has three of her own; two large dogs and a large cat.  

Well that catches folks up on what we’re up to these days.  You should hear a lot more once we head out across the northwestern United States and some of Canada for the summer.

The Bane of Internet for Full-Timers

As most full-time RVers know, trying to figure out the best and least expensive way of having phone and internet service is a challenge.  Although you can use WIFI in many of the parks, you cannot rely on it and it’s not wise to use these or other public WIFIs for doing your personal banking, paying bills and so on. 

For the past several years the two places we spent most of our time had very bad cell and internet service.  Some of our problem also dealt with the fact that we were under a metal cover at both locations.  To resolve this, we put up cell phone boosters at both locations for Verizon and AT&T and that greatly enhanced our ability to have both internet and cell service.  However, in the past year something changed drastically and the phone boosters, which were specific to our service provider, weren’t doing the job.  We finally broke down and purchased a prepaid flip phone with US Cellular just to have phone service and I forwarded my phone to the flip phone.  The internet, on the other hand was just getting worse and worse.

This past week I became so disenchanted with no internet that I spent hours researching other ideas.  Now that we are exclusively based in one location in the woods outside of Sulphur, OK I found that we could add internet through our Dish service, get ATlink, or switch service completely to US Cellular and ditch Verizon.  Whatever we did, it had to be internet service that we could carry with us.  All but one of these ideas were just adding to our already expensive service, so we decided to give the least expensive way a try.  After three hours at a US Cellular office, we switched our service from Verizon to US Cellular unlimited.  The perks they provided were incredible.  We are going to receive a big enough credit to pay off John’s Verizon phone, we both got new phones, we ported our numbers over, and we were given two goodie bags worth $100 each.  Because we did this, we also shut off our prepaid flip phone.  In the end with the monthly cost, plus the monthly payment for the two phones, plus a monthly protection fee we will be paying $15 a month less than we were with Verizon and the flip phone.  The goodie bags had nice Bluetooth headsets, portable charges, portable Bluetooth speakers and some other things in them.  Wow. 

We had already purchased a Weboost cell phone booster a while back that is supposed to work for all the major companies, including US Cellular, that we could use when traveling and when we launched that we went from 3G and 1-2 bars to 4G and several bars on our phones!  Life has gotten considerably better.

With all new equipment and phones and a new company, we are still saving money, have much better service and have unlimited service!!!  The unlimited service also allows us 10 GB hotspot service per phone per month.  We could never have gotten this deal for this price from Verizon.  Hopefully we will have service most places we travel.  I do know that when traveling west it may be spotty but so was our service with Verizon.  When I had AT&T I never had service when traveling west.  I don’t think there are any services that are all that great throughout the west.

Welcome to our little challenges when living full-time in an RV.

Our Last Day "at Camp"

Today is our last day in Rockport and although I’m looking forward to some time back at our home base and doing pet therapy at OU Medical Center, it’s a bit sad to be leaving.  I would compare it to when we were kids and summer camp had come to an end and you had to say goodbye to all the new friends you made.  Many of them have already pulled out, but there are a few stragglers still here.  I’ve figured out that even though many of us were scheduled to pull out April 1^st, it’s all about watching the weather and picking your ‘real’ travel dates.  Some are still returning to cold weather and maybe even snow.  We are watching for storms and tornados as Oklahoma is our destination.  After watching the weather forecasts for days, it appears that we have a 2-day window with no storms along our drive to zip home so we pull out tomorrow – 2 days early.  Yes, we have a storm cellar on our RV lot.

Yesterday we started to pack up things.  After sitting for four months you tend to spread out a bit.  We took the weather station down and, of course, we had probably the highest winds we’ve had the entire time here and no way for me to see how bad it was.  I'm afraid of high winds.  My guess is we had 20+ mph winds hitting us.  We were rocking and John slept through it all!  I probably fell asleep about 2 am.

John thought he might caulk the roof, which needs to be done at least annually, but when he got up there to check it out it was covered in greenish-yellow pollen.  Since it wasn't Thursday, we couldn’t wash it off (a city rule) so we had to let that job go for now.  These live oaks shed these hard, small leaves all winter and then comes these fuzzy looking things and tons of pollen.  It’s all over everything.  The good news is my allergies slowed way down when that switch was made.  I would have thought the pollen would have done me in.

This morning the rain finally started in but I think it will clear up late morning and we could end up with high heat and humidity the rest of the day.  At least things should dry out.  We will finish packing up the things that go in the Jeep and on the cargo hauler this afternoon so getting out of here in the morning should only take about a half an hour.  John and I have this down to a fine art because we’ve done it so often that it doesn’t take us much time. We will head to the gas station first and fuel up the RV then to a shopping mall lot across the street to hook up the Jeep and check that everything works and the steering wheel really doesn’t lock up when it’s turned off as we’ve been told.  Since we bought this Jeep here, we’ve not had a chance to test it out behind the RV so we are praying all goes smoothly.

I found a new route to head home.  Rather than head up through the Ft. Worth area and then up I-35 to Sulphur, we are going to head north and east to Palestine, TX for the first night, which is north and east of Houston.  We will completely miss Houston – Yea!!!  Then stay on state highways east of Dallas up to Lake Texoma and to Cedar Blue and completely avoid Dallas – Yea!!  I hate traveling through big cities.  If this works well, we will stick with this route.

We’ve had a great winter here at Wilderness Oaks RV Resort and Rockport, TX and look forward to returning in about 8 months.  After 10 weeks in Sulphur, we will be heading out on our next big adventure - 6,000+ miles through the NW quadrant of the country and Banff.  Yep, there will be lots more photos coming on Facebook.  Please keep us in your prayers for safe travels.

Magnificent Texas Coastal Bend Sunsets and Sunrises

In Rockport we are located on a peninsula with Aransas Bay on the east and Copano Bay on the west and both are a very short distance from the RV park.  We always thought that the sunrises and sunsets in Oklahoma were beautiful but what we’ve seen here in Rockport is indescribable.  To really appreciate them, we do need to actually go to the water’s edge.  It’s not uncommon to arrive at the water only to find lots of clouds giving the impression that there won’t be much of a show.  What we’ve learned is to just sit it out and even if it’s when the sun is at the horizon and almost gone, it may peak out from the cloud cover and produce an amazing show.  When shooting over the water and with some clouds, the reflections and explosions of light into the sky are breathtaking.  Sometimes you miss the sun altogether because of the clouds but then they move away and there’s still an impressive show of color and rays.  Patience and perseverance is the key.  We’ve spent a great deal of time exploring around these bays looking for places to shoot with other interesting forms of nature for the pictures.  Our favorite place for sunsets has a small sandbar a few yards from the shore that fishermen wade out to in the evenings with their chairs and poles.  Fishing piers with some interesting detail around them or marshes with birds are always nice.  So here’s some of the pics that John has captured.

Sunset

                Sunrise

New Jeep, Towing Vehicles, Salt and the RV and Killing Fleas

The week started with losing an hour of sleep when daylight savings time started.  Not sure I’ll ever get used to that.  Usually I wake up about 7 am and then just lay in bed and watch TV for an hour before getting up and getting my day going.  Well we are a few days into the new time thing and I’m slowing working my way back to waking up at 7 instead of 8 am.  But, hey, we’re retired, so does it really matter?

We’ve been saving up with the hopes of upgrading our jeep from a 2-door to a 4-door with more storage in the back end.   Well we finally reached a financial point that I could start looking around.  For a few months now I’ve been searching the internet for just the right jeep – you know, low mileage, low price, but bigger than ours….  I’ve been watching for them back in the Oklahoma City and Sulphur area but just for fun started looking at the Corpus Christi area as well.  Then BAM, there it was one day sitting on a BMW lot in Corpus!  Everything we were looking for as well as a great price and low mileage plus two years newer than ours.  I spent time in prayer over this and God just kept the door open.  In the end, we got more than I expected for a trade and the price on the jeep we bought was well under book. 

On Monday we cleaned up our old jeep and cleaned everything out of it and on Tuesday went to Corpus to make the deal.  We had to take the old jeep to a hitch place to have the tow bar removed and next Monday we will go back with the new jeep to get it reinstalled.  Then John will add some things like a quick disconnect on the battery and some things we need to hook up our brake system for towing.  Glad he’s so handy.  See my info on towing a vehicle at the end of this blog.

 On Wednesday we made a trip back out to the Aransas Wildlife Refuge to check out some more areas we hadn’t walked into.  We were looking for a place we had heard had several gators and when we thought we found it, I stayed in the car with the dogs while John trekked around it.  Sure enough, he found 5 of those bad boys and at least one was resting with his head facing the walking path about 5’ away.  John agreed, no dogs on that trail whether they are carried or not.  Gators can move very fast and we are not interested in them having our girls for dinner.

The fleas in south Texas are horrible!  Our girls have never had fleas but they got them here even with Frontline Plus.  The vet in Rockport said the topical treatments don’t seem to work.  I guess the fleas have become immune.  They don’t have a cold enough winter to kill them off either.  So, she gave us Nexgard, which is a chewable.  After reading about it we were hesitant to give it to them for fear of seizures or even death but finally we felt at peace about it and gave it to them this week.  Thank goodness they didn’t have any adverse reactions to it so they should be flea free now.  Yea!!  We’ll definitely have a chit chat with our regular vet about this.  I had just purchased 6 months of Frontline Plus and don’t want that to go to waste.  Hopefully, I can use that up when we get back north and then we may need to move to Nexgard.  It isn’t cheap though.

Thursday was cleaning day.  Even though we aren’t right at the water, the salt water still gets on the cars and RVs so we had Scrub Monkeys come out and give the RV a good washing.  We topped that off with putting on a roof treatment to keep the roof in good shape.  Now John just needs to get up there and check all the caulking.  I headed to the laundromat with all the bedding, rugs, dog beds, and blankets to deflea all those things.  It’s going to be nice to be rid of all that problem.

Even though we don’t own a home, there is still maintenance that needs to be done to the RV and if it’s a motorhome, there is maintenance with the engine, chassis, tires and keeping the wheels balanced.  Once a year we take it into a truck place for routine preventive maintenance and a truck tire place to check the tires and the wheel balancing.  We also have to maintain the generator and change the oil in it as well as check the coach batteries, which often need distilled water.  Right now we are dealing with a refrigerator that has problems and the first company we hired just walked away from us as they didn’t want to mess with it.  So now we are waiting for a second company to come and take a look.  We prefer to use mobile RV repair folks so we don’t have to move out of it for days at a time.  So more to come with that.   John is learning a lot of things himself thanks to online videos.  In fact, an RV group offers an RV technician school that we are looking at.  You can either attend it in person or purchase the videos and materials and do it at your own pace.  May be worth it.

Towing a Vehicle – We used to bring a car and a motorcycle with us on the road and had a huge trailer that the bike would sit crosswise in and the front wheels of the car went up on the back of it.  It was a front wheel drive vehicle so towing it that way was not a problem.  The problems came with the two straps that went over the wheels.  We went through several of them as they would wear out from the wheels moving around when we turned.  Maybe we just weren’t getting them on right, but as we got older loading all that up and having to push that trailer around became more than we wanted to deal with so we sold all of it and bought a Jeep Wrangler. 

The Jeep can be towed with all four wheels on the ground.  BE AWARE – not all vehicles can be towed this way and it is imperative that you check the manual or go online to find the vehicle you want to tow in the Motorhome Dinghy Towing Guide.  For those that can be towed this way, there are still lots of instructions – some are limited to how fast you can go, some must be started after so many hours, how do you get them setup with the transmission and battery so they can be towed and so on.  We have a 4-wheel drive automatic Jeep Wrangler and it’s a breeze.  The battery must be disconnected so we put in a quick disconnect.  With the key turned to on you put the regular transmission in neutral, then the 4-wheel into neutral and then the regular transmission into park.  Start the vehicle up and put it in drive or reverse and see if it moves – hopefully it doesn’t.  Then hook up and you’re good to go.  There are no speed limits or driving time limits on it.

Also know, that in most states if you are towing a vehicle over 3,000 lbs. you will be required to have a brake system of some sort in the vehicle.  Some states require it regardless of weight.  There are several different types to choose from so you will need to do your homework. 

That’s all for now.  Have a great day!