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!

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