"if you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room"

Saturday, October 29, 2011

taking a day "off"

We decided to stay an additional night here at Gulf Coast RV Resort. The sites here are all pull through full hook ups with a nice patio. They are part of Passport America so we get a 50% discount on their rates making our site $17.50 including tax. Pretty good deal!
I checked out attractions in Beaumont on the computer and found a couple of museums downtown that sounded interesting so Friday morning we played tourist. :-)
Our first stop was the Texas Firefighters Museum housed in a restored Beaumont fire station. My Dad was a fireman for many years and my Brother is a career firefighter as well. I even started down that path for 5 years before becoming a cop. Both my brother and I grew up in and around the firehouse so walking into one is a trip down memory lane for me :-).
There is no cost to visit and they have 2 floors of displays. The engine bays have several pieces of apparatus including an early aerial truck and some of the old horse drawn pumpers.
On the walls were patches from Departments all over the U.S. We found several from Indiana including Lebanon and my old department, Plainfield.
Next was the Texas Energy Museum just around the corner. We had to pay $2.00 each to tour this one which traced the first oil discovery in Texas to present day drilling methods. The displays were nicely done but contained a little too much chemistry for me. I got lost a little with all the talks of molecules and strings of something or other.
We made a stop for a late lunch at Mike and Terri Hamilton's Catfish Kitchen. The special was barbecued crabs, a little pricey for us so we settled for fried Crawfish tails and crawfish ettouffe'. We tried their soup of the day based on our waitress' recommendation. I have no idea what she was calling it, she was talking southern and I was listening in northern :-)
The soup was a type of seafood stew and was really good.
Back at the 5th wheel we settled in for the remainder of the day and watched some TV. The weather was not particularly great today with the temperature barely breaking 60 degrees and the wind blew hard most of the day. I was sure glad we decided to stay put rather than try and travel in bad weather.
Saturday morning we got up early and got everything ready to hit the road once again. Today would be the last leg of our our odyssey to get to the oil fields where we will be working this winter.
We pulled out shortly before 7am and headed west on I-10 once again. The traffic was fairly light and we had an easy drive, even through downtown Houston with all of it's ramps and overpasses.
Our next big hurdle was San Antonio where we turned South on I-35. We stopped for a picnic lunch just south of San Antonio at a rest park. We turned off the interstate and onto SR 85 in Dilley Texas. Our destination was Carrizo Springs where our company, Gate Guard Services, has a storage yard. We met our supervisor, Roger, at a gas station and he led us to the yard about a mile out of town and showed us where to park.
We will be here for a few days until we get a gate assigned to us. There is one other guard couple here whose well was shut down due to a faulty piece of equipment. They will go back to the same gate as soon as parts arrive to get things back up and running again.
We have made contact with Kit and Jerry Bertleson, http://www.kitandjerry.com/index.htm fellow Hoosiers who are guarding a gate a few miles away. We made plans to visit them tomorrow and they invited us to ride along with them next Tuesday when they head back to their home park for a quick visit. Sounds like fun and will give us a chance to get to know them, of course this could all change if a gate opens up and we go to work. I'll keep you posted.

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