winds of change

Friday morning we were up and on the road by 9am. The weather promised to be a much better day with only cloudy skies and just a light breeze.

We headed west on I-10 through Mobile and were soon in Mississippi. I stopped for fuel at a Flying J and we also filled with propane. Rudee suggested we go ahead and fill up the Dakota too since the RV lanes at Flying J also have both diesel and unleaded pumps. I felt a little odd to be pumping gas into a truck that was being towed but what the hey!

I have an i-phone that is set to alert me when I get new emails. The alert sounded so Rudee checked the phone and found an email from Joan and Steve fellow fulltimers whose blog I follow: FOSJ

They were also westbound driving back to Vegas to pick up their rig after spending the Holidays with family in Florida. They just wanted to see where we were going to land for the night and if they were close by we could actually meet face to face instead of just through our blogs.

Rudee gave them our itinerary and a plan came together pretty quickly. 

We pulled up for the night shortly before 5pm in Beaumont Texas. Hidden Lake RV Resort is a Passport America campground that had good reviews. The office staff were very friendly and we had a nice long pull through site with full hook ups for $17.50. 

Our plan was to spend the night and meet Joan and Steve at a nearby Cracker Barrel for breakfast before hitting the road again. 

Saturday morning we woke up to heavy rain and, looking at the radar, we were not going to be dry anytime soon. We quickly decided to stay another night and let the weather clear up.

We arrived at Cracker Barrel and were getting a table when Steve and Joan walked in. I recognized them right away from their blog pictures :-).

We had a great visit with these fine folks. They both ride motorcycles and are fulltimers so we had a lot in common. We swapped stories and experiences for most of the morning. I'm sure the restaurant was wondering if we were ever going to leave but eventually we said our goodbyes. 

Thanks for meeting up with us guys, we'll need to get together again real soon!

Sunday morning the weather had improved so we hit the road again. 

You might ask, where are these two headed? Well here is our plans for the immediate future. As you know we have been through training and one 10 day assignment as Roving Storage Unit Managers. When not on assignment we are paid a very minimal wage if we don't work for an entire month. This "stand by" pay only lasts for two months and then we are placed in "part time" status with no pay unless we are actually working. I guess business has been running smooth and the need for roving managers has decreased some since we have not worked since the first week of October and our "stand by" pay ended on Jan 1. 

We have decided to head back to the oil fields and do some gate guarding to generate some substantial income to build our finance's back up. We have communicated our availability with our old supervisor and he is working on getting us a gate. Right now there are a couple of workers ahead of us to be deployed but he expects additional gates to come open very soon and wants us close by and ready to go, so we are headed that way. 

Right now we are parked just off I-10 at http://www.riverbendrvpark.com/ another Passport America park. We thought about staying a few days here but the park is nothing special so we paid for Sunday night and plan to move southwest of San Antonio later today. 

Once we got set up I looked up another blogger, http://whatsupwithsusanandcompany.blogspot.com/ who we have talked with on the phone occasionally.

I knew she was workcamping somewhere in Texas and it turns out she was only about 10 miles up the road!

We gave her a call to make sure she was home and wanted visitors and headed out to meet her and her guard dog Angel. :-)

We had a nice visit at Susan's and she followed us back to Lulling, Texas to Blake's Cafe for dinner where we continued our visit. 

One of the really nice things about blogging is meeting other bloggers! We already know a lot about them and it feels like we are getting together with old friends instead of meeting "strangers". :-)

On the home front, Lexy was released from the hospital Friday afternoon and is home recovering. She is in very good spirits and looking forward to school starting again. 

We will be pulling up stakes soon and heading a little closer to the drilling rigs. I'll keep you posted.