Continuing on our journey to Florida, we left Louisiana and spent 2 very cold days at the Hollywood Casino RV park in Bay St. Louis. I (Maren) tried my luck on the day's date, 12-12-12, at the slots and walked away $200 richer, so we enjoyed the huge buffet for dinner the night before we left -- "on me" :-)
The rest of the money went to partially fill up Max with diesel fuel (I say "partially" because filling his tank completely would cost almost $400). It is interesting to drive in to a new town... we can't help but inspect each gas station as we drive around. While we'd love to take advantage of the better fuel prices than we'd find on the interstate, the vast majority of "in town" stations are a definite "no-go" of fitting Max+car in tow on their diesel pumps. In Bay St. Louis, we didn't even see one we'd be comfortable driving Max alone in.
Ergo, it was with careful planning ("The Next Exit" is a great book for RVers) that we picked a truck fuel stop along I10 that we could fill up on our way to Pensacola. Turned out to be a non-event. Lots of pumps, lots of room... even got a burger from the Wendy's that shared its building. Now if we can just get our "Pilot / Flying J" card working so we'll get a puny discount at the pump.
Arrived in Pensacola Thursday evening and was happy to be back in the "Land of Sonny's Real Pit BBQ", which we promptly ate dinner at with Jeffrey's brother and his wife, John and Susan. While in Pensacola, they gave us a great tour of Pensacola's downtown area, we explored Ft Pickens state park, we stocked up on seafood for the freezer at Joe Patti's Seafood and, for a grand weekend finale, we went to the Naval Aviation Museum at the Naval Air Station to see the museum and enjoy a big commemoration of the 40th anniversary since the final Apollo mission. As part of the agenda, we got to hear a presentation from the flight directors and 2 surviving astronauts of Apollo XIII (Jim Lovell & Fred Haise). We also got to hear a bit about the Gemini and Mercury programs by a number of astronauts from that era. Very cool! How nice that our timing in town coincided with this terrific event.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
First 450 miles under our belts!
Well, we have survived our first two travel days! Left Georgetown Dec 5th and enjoyed a 200ish mile drive to Livingston TX, home of the Rainbow's End "Escapees" RV park (which also serves as our mail forwarding service). We think we need to adjust our RV GPS a tad. It had us on some lovely but curvy back Texas roads. Thankfully they were in decent shape except for the railroad crossing that "looked" smooth but jarred our teeth as we crossed it. No crashes in the house behind us, so we survived that one with no casualties.
Rainbow's End was an interesting mix of traveling as well as retired RVers who had homesites with specialized parking for their rigs. There is even a facility for RVers who need temporary medical care and assistance as they heal. We went on a tour and got to see their state-of-the-art mail processing center. It processes more mail for full-time RVers than the entire town of Livingston's other residents. They wouldn't let us take a picture inside or we would have snapped one of us posing with our own personal mail slot.
One of our big accomplishments while there was to use the "SmartWeigh". It gave us an accurate weight of each corner of Max so we could see if we were overloaded. You do this process with a full fuel and water tank (and other tanks empty). Turns out we were at the max weight overall, but a little lopsided in the rear -- probably due to the washer and dryer being on one side. We don't normally travel with a full water tank, so we'll definitely be "under" the max when we travel. Hopefully nobody noticed when we went back to our site and drained out 50 extra gallons so we don't have to haul it across bumpy Louisiana roads :-)
We left on Dec 8th for Henderson, LA the next day and had a nice ride until we got within 20 miles of our destination -- that is when the roads went to concrete segments with seams every 10-15 feet. All I can say is OMG! About halfway through the steady bumping, a heavy speaker cover fell off the wall and banged to the floor. Luckily it didn't do much damage on the way down and still worked fine when we screwed it back in place securely the next day.
The Cajun Palms RV Resort we are at for 3 days is really something -- hundreds of RV pads and very targeted to families. In the warmer months this place must be a madhouse! For our stay, only a fraction of the spots are in use and many of those cleared out Sunday morning as the few families that were here went home. Right next door is a Crawfish Town U.S.A. restaurant, so we got to enjoy some gulf seafood (at least I did -- Jeffrey found a non-seafood entree). We also went into nearby Lafayette and wandered through the Science Museum. They had a planetarium as part of it and we enjoyed 2 different shows. Pretty much had to drag Jeffrey out of there!
As I write this, our last full day in Henderson is a deluge of rain and wind -- perfect for catching up on some chores, email, etc. Heavy rain inside an RV is like sitting in an Igloo cooler under a waterfall... you have to turn up the volume on the TV when it gets really loud on the roof!
Rainbow's End was an interesting mix of traveling as well as retired RVers who had homesites with specialized parking for their rigs. There is even a facility for RVers who need temporary medical care and assistance as they heal. We went on a tour and got to see their state-of-the-art mail processing center. It processes more mail for full-time RVers than the entire town of Livingston's other residents. They wouldn't let us take a picture inside or we would have snapped one of us posing with our own personal mail slot.
One of our big accomplishments while there was to use the "SmartWeigh". It gave us an accurate weight of each corner of Max so we could see if we were overloaded. You do this process with a full fuel and water tank (and other tanks empty). Turns out we were at the max weight overall, but a little lopsided in the rear -- probably due to the washer and dryer being on one side. We don't normally travel with a full water tank, so we'll definitely be "under" the max when we travel. Hopefully nobody noticed when we went back to our site and drained out 50 extra gallons so we don't have to haul it across bumpy Louisiana roads :-)
We left on Dec 8th for Henderson, LA the next day and had a nice ride until we got within 20 miles of our destination -- that is when the roads went to concrete segments with seams every 10-15 feet. All I can say is OMG! About halfway through the steady bumping, a heavy speaker cover fell off the wall and banged to the floor. Luckily it didn't do much damage on the way down and still worked fine when we screwed it back in place securely the next day.
The Cajun Palms RV Resort we are at for 3 days is really something -- hundreds of RV pads and very targeted to families. In the warmer months this place must be a madhouse! For our stay, only a fraction of the spots are in use and many of those cleared out Sunday morning as the few families that were here went home. Right next door is a Crawfish Town U.S.A. restaurant, so we got to enjoy some gulf seafood (at least I did -- Jeffrey found a non-seafood entree). We also went into nearby Lafayette and wandered through the Science Museum. They had a planetarium as part of it and we enjoyed 2 different shows. Pretty much had to drag Jeffrey out of there!
As I write this, our last full day in Henderson is a deluge of rain and wind -- perfect for catching up on some chores, email, etc. Heavy rain inside an RV is like sitting in an Igloo cooler under a waterfall... you have to turn up the volume on the TV when it gets really loud on the roof!
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