Monday, January 12, 2015

On The Road Again…

Yep, we are back on the road. My mom’s health situation seems to have stabilized (at least we weren’t going to a doctor on a weekly basis) so Linda and I are currently in Texas working several parks here. Mom is super stubborn and won’t use her oxygen machine while she sleeps, and doesn’t pay much mind to the doctors so there’s not much any of us can do at this point. She wants to live a quiet life by herself so I will honor that and decided to go with Linda to do the jobs that she had planned to do. I’m doing the office work and Linda B is working with the advertisers. We left Pennsylvania Monday, January 5th in order to get out ahead of some “wintry mix” that was coming the next day. We stopped in Lemoyne to pick up our friend Dot who is tagging along till early March, then started the long drive to Texas.

Usually the weather, in the southern states, is reasonably tolerable and we can boondock some nights in rest areas along the way. It has been bone chilling cold and seems more like we are back in Pennsylvania rather than in Alabama or the Carolinas. The polar vortex (do you remember how much I hate those two words) blanketed a large area of the country and we couldn’t seem to outrun it. It snowed our first night in a campground and we awoke to the white stuff. Consequently the roads were covered with salt, the rig became a mess and the windshield was yucked up with salt and streaks. When we stopped at a Flying J, I was happy to see the long handled windshield washers in the bucket.(the day before I had tried to use the short handled ones to clean the windshield, while hopping like a kangaroo to reach the viewing area. The guy filling up next to me was over 6’ tall and took pity on me and came to my rescue and washed the windshield for me) My happiness was short lived as everything in the bucket was frozen solid….it was that cold out. Bitter cold!

Flying J popsicle

We arrived in Port Aransas on Saturday and are set up in a nice site on the corner of the park. The owner is away on vacation and her front desk clerk quit the day she was to leave on vacation. She picked a woman patron in the park to run the desk while she’s away and we’re not sure if we’re on the site she wanted us on or not but we’re set up and will be here till Sunday. We’re working on four parks in total and will be here till the beginning of February. The weather was horrible when we arrived. Rain and 20-30 m.p.h. winds, then in the overnight hours we had thunderstorms/lightening and 30 degree temps. Today it is still windy though the temps are a little warmer. Other RVers who have been here for a while told us that it’s been really cold and miserable this year. The parks all seem to be busy (with the weather the way it’s been up north…who would want to stay home to experience that?).

Once we finish working on these parks, we will go to the home office for TACO training, then on to the company meeting and then to the northern part of Texas to work on the Texas travel guide. It’s not warm but it’s warmer than back home. Life is good.