We're Now Texas Residents

We drove from San Antonio, to Livingston, Texas to the Escapees Rainbows End park where we now have our new address.  This is the Escapees headquarters and we got to tour their facility and mail room.  Many people who live full-time in their RV’s use the Escapees for their mail and other club benefits.  The mail room was quite an operation and they are so large they have their own zip code!

Community Center

Headquarters

A very small section of their mail room!

Our campsite for the week

While waiting for our tour of their headquarters to start, we ran in to a couple that was at the San Antonio Grand Design Rally too!

The reason for going to Livingston was to get Texas driver’s licenses and register our RV.  The new Ford truck will already be registered in Texas since we bought it in Ft. Worth.  It’s easier to get this accomplished in this area because they are more familiar with people who live the full-time RV life style.  We had some county government hoops to jump through to complete the process and it was like a marathon visiting the correct agencies in the right order and getting all the correct papers needed but we accomplished it in 3 days.  One big hurdle for us was we didn’t bring our SSN cards with us so we needed to drive about an hour to Conroe to the SSN office to get a form proving our SSN belongs to us and then drive back the hour to their Department of Public Safety (DMV) and wait four hours in line to get our driver’s licenses. 

Texas State Flag

Finally, all the paperwork was completed and we could go have some fun! 

We’re trying to become Elks club members so we can use their RV benefits so we visited a local club in Huntsville for their Steak Dinner night.  Oh my, that was the best rib eye steak we’ve ever had!  The process of becoming an Elks member takes a couple of months and we don’t stand still that long so we’ll see how this works out. 

Another day we went to Lake Livingston.  They had a junior ranger program so we worked on earning another badge.  The lake was huge and it was a very wind day but provided a nice place to walk. 

Another part of establishing our residence in Livingston was visiting a local dentist for teeth cleanings.  We had appointments at an office that was more like an assembly line and nothing like the experience we have with our dentist in Irvine.  We got our teeth cleaned but we'll be looking for another dentist for future cleanings.  

After our stay in our new “home town” of Livingston, we drove to Ft. Worth with a stop over night at a Love’s truck stop south of Dallas to break up the trip.  With the purchase of the new truck, we’re watching our pennies even more so we wanted to try out a truck stop as a free place to stay.  Ok, we won’t be doing that again.  There were over 100 semi’s parked there and running their engines all night long.  With so much noise and activity we didn’t get much sleep that night!  Lesson learned!

Look how small we look next to that 18 wheeler!

After not getting much sleep at the Love's truck stop, we drove back to Sam and Sarah’s farm in Azle to spend the next 2 nights.  We loved staying on their farm and it’s close to the dealer where we purchased the Ford.  We got set up and off we went to pick up our new truck!

  

King Kong!

Next, we needed to get the hitch adjusted for the difference in height between the old Chevy and the new Ford.  That took longer than expected but we were able to find a place to do the work. 

I planned for an extra day in the area in case we couldn’t get everything done that we needed to the truck so we had a free day.  A cold front was coming and so we helped Sarah harvest the remaining peppers and vegetables from her garden before the frost killed the plants. 

Sarah's Canning Cabinet!

From Azle, we drove south west and spent the night in Pecos, Texas on our way back to California for the holidays.  We took turns driving the new Ford towing the trailer and the Chevy.  Pecos is an oil town and not much else.  We planned to spend two nights there but the campground was full of oil workers and their rigs so we decided to move along after just one night.

Next time I'll tell you how we ran out of diesel in the new truck!