Vivian's RV Vignettes

So far I’ve made it to Thousand Trails Three Flags near Wildwood, Florida. The park is “perfectly adequate” but not especially exciting as a destination… I realize how spoiled I am to have two beautiful parks like Lake Conroe and Colorado River at home. Unfortunately the swimming pool is down for repairs, and it’s a bit warm for other outdoor activities. But I’m moving on this Sunday to Space Coast and Cape Canaveral, which I’m VERY excited about. It’s the first real “tourist” destination of my trip.

I left Lake Conroe on Monday, but I ended up stopping on the road two days at Fairview-Riverside State Park in Louisiana because a client had a big federal grant deadline and I needed to sit still long enough to finish up the proposal. Juggling my consulting work with travel is definitely going to be the big challenge of this trip. I’m just going to have to be flexible and change plans when needed. The state park was pretty and peaceful, but since I was working I didn’t get to do a lot of sight-seeing. I did take time to drive across the nearby 24-mile bridge over Lake Ponchartrain. It’s a seriously impressive lake!

Audiobooks help me stay alert on long drives. I’ve decided I will try to pick books that match the part of the country where I am in some way. I started with Beth Moore’s autobiography “My Knotted-Up Life,” partly because I’ve been wanting to read it and partly because I knew she was a Southerner with a story appropriate for driving across the Deep South. (Actually she’s from Arkansas, but whatever, close enough.) Her story is more tragic than I knew, but powerful… I highly recommend it. Also, I didn’t know she went to Spring Woods High School. After I finished that, I switched to Eric Berger’s book on the early days of SpaceX, “Liftoff,” since the Kennedy Space Center is my first big stop.

On arrival in Florida, I noticed a couple of signs that the long drive had taken a toll: one of my rear tires looked low, and my closet had experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” when I hit a bump (to quote SpaceX on their rocket explosion that happened around the same time).

The closet was an easy fix:

The tire wasn’t quite so simple. Apparently my mechanic in Conroe (who I’m NOT very pleased with, for various reasons) put some valve stem extenders on my rear tires that damaged one of the valve stems and made it leak slowly.

Thankfully the park office gave me the name of a good local tire mechanic who would come here for a service call, and he got me all fixed up, at a cost of course. I’m hoping for no more repair bills for a while, but I’m not holding my breath. With an old rig (or even a new one!) it’s always something. At least I’m not paying a mortgage.

I’m taking the rest of my time at this “restful” campground to try to catch up on work for my clients, trip planning, and putting things in order in my RV that I didn’t finish before I left. At least I got my maps hung!