up, up and away!

Shortly after finishing my last blog entry I headed for bed since I had been up all night letting a couple tanker trucks in the gate. They would come in, load up whatever they were hauling and leave about an hour after arriving. They would return anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour later and kept this up for most of the night. I had only been to bed a couple of hours when Rudee came in and woke me up telling me our supervisor had called and our gate was being shut down and had to be off the gate no later than 4 pm. She had already started getting the inside ready for travel and I begin tearing down all the outside stuff. The temperature was in the 90's and this didn't help much but by 2 pm we were ready to roll. Our first stop was only 18 miles up the road at the Chevy dealership in Dilley Texas. We needed to get the motor home inspected for our Texas registration and they had a large enough parking lot to make it an easy in and out procedure. This was our last task to change our residency and we are now "officially" Texans! :-)

Leaving Dilley we headed to the small town of D'Hanis, Texas. For those of you who belong to the Escapee's RV Club this is the location of their co-op park, Lone Star Corral. There is also a small but fairly new Passport America Park located nearby as well and this is where we were heading. Calling the park they said they restricted the 50% PPA rate to three days but when I told them we were hoping to stay five days they were very nice and said they would go ahead and honor the discount for our full stay. We have been Passport America members for several years and paid the additional $$'s and purchased lifetime memberships. The 50% discount at the participating parks has saved us a bunch of money on our travels. Our membership has paid for itself several times over and we never have to pay dues again! We have found that when traveling it is usually cheaper for us to stay at a PPA park for a night instead of boondocking at the local Wal Mart. We can often find the parks near our routes for as little as $10-$15 per night with full hook ups and rarely do I make it out of a Wal Mart for less then $20! :-)

We pulled into Quiet Texas RV Park just after 4 pm and the thermometer on the rig said it was 96 degrees outside! Needless to say it didn't take me long to get the rig parked and set up! The park has just one loop with pull through sites in the middle of the loop. There is no laundry, bath house, pool or even an office but the sites are long, level, full hook up sites with some smaller shade trees scattered about. We even have grass which is a welcome sight after all the dust we have been living in! This is a no frills type of park for sure but the price is right at $15 per night and we are close to several of our friends. The hill country is just a short 30 minute motorcycle ride away and if we need to do any shopping we can head for Hondo east of us or Uvalde which is to the west.
Once we were set up I took a quick shower and we headed to a nearby restaurant for our first dinner out together in almost two months! D'Hanis is home to Bill and Rosa's Steakhouse and we wanted to give it a try.  D'Hanis is also known for their brick manufacturing so all the buildings in town are built with bricks made locally.

The restaurant had good reviews and we were not disappointed. We shared a New York Strip Steak with all the trimmings and enjoyed listening to the "one man band" who entertained us with music throughout our meal.  Yep, this place is a winner and exactly what we were needing after a long stretch of gate guarding! :-)

Our plans for the next few days will be to connect with a few friends who are nearby, do some bike riding and just "get back to normal". I'll keep you posted.

winding down

We survived another "frac" here in the oil patch. Once the wells are drilled a large crew arrives and does a process called Hydraulic Fracturing or "fracking" for short. The process includes many different "stages" where different chemicals mixed with water and sand are pumped at high pressure into the well. This fractures the shale around the end of the well casing pipe causing the oil to release from the shale and flow into the well. That's the readers digest version, I'm sure it is much more complicated then how I describe it. When the fracking is going on the pad is a flurry of activity 24 hours a day. We are kept hopping checking in the different crews and the almost endless line of semi trucks delivering the sand.

They finished the frac and moved out late last week and then we had a "coil tubing" crew move in for a few days. They clean the wells out of any debri left over from drilling and fracking. The next step was a "work over" rig whose job was to start the oil flowing and this was monitored by the "flow back" crew. The rig pulled out a few days ago and the flow back crew is moving out today and then we will be all alone here. The company man has put us on notice that our days are numbered on this gate. I guess the sun is setting on this season of gate guarding.

We will probably do a little "decompressing" somewhere close seeing as it has been almost 2 months since we have had a day off. We are both looking forward to getting away, going out to eat and maybe take a motorcycle ride. I'll keep you posted.

two down!

We have completed two full weeks at our current gate and have settled into a routine. Our hats are off to the folks who do this job months or even years at a time. The money is good but the days are mundane and repetitious. We do enjoy working with the crews on the rigs. They are all very polite and we do our best to learn their names and memorize their license plates. Rudee is a lot better at it than I am and our dash is littered with "cheat sheets" of names to help me out. :-)

We have made a lot of progress on our move to Texas. Our license plates, registrations and titles are all being processed and should arrive at our address in the next few days. We have updated our address on just about every account we can think of and have changed our insurance policies over to Texas. We still have to change our drivers licenses so I'm not running out and buying a cowboy hat just yet. :-)

We did have some rain here on Tuesday which made things a muddy, sloppy mess. Our pad is pretty well packed down and wasn't too bad but the road getting in was a mess. We are 3/4 of a mile from the main road on Pena Rd. which, for the first 1/2 mile is a mix of blacktop and hard packed gravel. The remaining 1/4 mile is mostly red clay and sand which turns into a quagmire when it gets wet. Once you pass our gate the quagmire continues and there are at least two more gates further down so we at least have it a little better then they do. :-)

We are not sure what the future holds for this job, they have finished drilling one well and are moving a few feet on the pad to drill another one. We figure that will take another 2-3 weeks by the time they are done and moved out. The next major step would be to Frac (hydraulic fracturing) the wells but I have no idea when this would be scheduled and information is a little hard to come by on this job. We are hoping to stay a total of 7 weeks before heading North of course I'll keep you posted. I will leave you with a sunrise shot of another day on the gate.

the great escape

Monday morning started out busy but Monday night was a total zoo. I was busy all night long with trucks and equipment running in and out of the gate. It seemed like the bell was going off every couple of minutes. When I check someone in I always look up the road as far as I can to see if another vehicle is coming. This night it seemed like I would no more get the door to the motor home shut and start to sit down when "ding, ding" I would be out the door again. Yep no nap time for me tonight! :-(

Things became a little more "normal" later in the day Tuesday but one of the bosses warned us we would have another busy night so I got ready for another gate guard work out for our last night here. Luckily the rush through our gate never materialized and traffic died off to just a couple of vehicles all evening. I was even able to get about 3 1/2 hours of quality sack time on the couch. :-)

Once the sun came up this morning we finished our packing up and prepared to move off the pad to make room for our replacements to park. Our service guy, Robert, was leading them to our (now their) gate and helping them get hooked up. He called us around 7:45 and said they had just left the yard but the other guards motor home started overheating after only 5 miles. They pulled over and found a broken hose. Robert ran back into town and was able to get supplies and make a temporary repair and they were back on the road in a little over an hour.
We had hoped to be on the road by 9am but ended up leaving an hour later than we thought. Our departure was not without it's own excitement though. Once we knew Robert had fixed the new guards motor home and was back on the road towards us, I started our motor home and raised the leveling jacks up. They came up just fine and got busy rolling up our electric cords. When I walked by the motor home I could hear the low air pressure alarm still beeping. That's seemed odd because I felt like the engine had been running long enough to build up the necessary pressure and the alarm should have turned off. I hopped into the drivers seat and sure enough both my air pressure gauges showed "0". Oh oh.
In a diesel coach if you don't have air pressure in the system then you cannot release the parking brake, which is a good thing because even if you got the parking brake off you would not have any brakes to stop the motor home once you started rolling. :-o
I told Rudee we had a problem and I started looking for a reason. I knew the air tank and air dryer was under the motor home between the front wheels and there are two cables that you can pull to drain the air and moisture out of the system. I had done this several weeks ago after we had parked at the gate. I followed the cables back to the valves they were hooked to and started "fiddling" with them. I had one of our two way radios and Rudee had the other one, She was watching the gauges to see if they moved at all. I "fiddled" the right one a little and then after I "fiddled" with the left one she radioed me that the gauges were climbing! Hooray! I did a quick leak down test on the brakes just to make sure they were operating correctly and we were back in business!

Since we got a later then anticipated start, and I was not wanting to drive a long distance with only a few hours sleep, our trip today was only a little over 100 miles. We stopped at Braunig Lake RV Resort which is a Passport America Park on the south side of San Antonio.  The park is nice but we are packed in like sardines. They have some nice amenities with a pool, hot tub, fishing lake, and a large clean laundry and of course you are just a few miles to downtown San Antonio.
We wont be staying to do any touring though. We have another 250 miles to travel tomorrow to get to the M&G factory. They have an area in their parking lot for us to park and spend the night while we wait for our appointment Friday morning.  We are not going to be in a big rush getting on the road tomorrow and are looking forward to a relaxing travel day. I'll keep you posted.

short timin'

As expected the crew arrived to perform the next process on the wells that are past our gate. We have been busy signing in and out all the workers and are trying to get the feel for the "ebb and flow" of this crew. The work they are doing will not take too long and they are predicting they will be done with the first well tomorrow and move to the other well and start working on it. That is only 2-3 days per well and then they will pick up the circus tents and head for their next site.
We are starting to fold our tents up as well. Rudee and I uncovered the Harley, cleaned some of the caliche' dust off of it and loaded it onto the lift mounted on the back of the motor home. Rudee had a little excitement when she took the cover off the bike and found a scorpion hiding underneath. She let out a few squeals and did a funny kind of dance that must have driven the scorpion away because I never did see it. :-)

Wednesday is departure day and we are looking forward to getting things back to normal again. Our replacements will be escorted to our site by one of the service guys for our company who will help them get set up and top off the water and diesel tank. Our plan is to have everything unhooked and the motor home moved before they arrive. There is a large area just outside the gate where we can park until they arrive and once we fill them in on the gate procedures we will head on down the road.

Our friends and fellow Hoosiers Kit and Jerry sent us an email that they had been offered another gate near Dilley, Texas. They had driven over to check it out and it sounds like a really nice gate. They accepted the position and were moving their rig over today to get settled in. Welcome back to the oil patch guys! :-)

Rudee asked me the other day what I wanted to do first after leaving the gate. I think the thing I miss most is just being able to go somewhere together. We didn't get to celebrate her Birthday so maybe I'll take her out for a nice dinner ........ hmmmmmm, sounds like a plan is forming. I'll keep you posted.

just hangin' around

Ok, I'll be the first to admit that sometimes I just don't understand the way things are done here in Texas. Maybe it's the "Yankee" in me the causes me to just go "what the Heck?".
Here is a case in point. Many of the ranches here are hunting preserves where the owners stock everything from exotic animals to the "normal" deer, wild hogs, turkeys etc. These ranches are easy to spot by their 12' high fences surrounding the property. The ranchers make a pretty good living hosting out of towners who pay big money to kill a trophy deer or some exotic African animal.
I used to deer hunt some back in Indiana. We would hunt in State Forests or other government land as well as local private property (with permission of course). Our day consisted of getting up well before sunrise, dress in multiple layers of warm clothes, cover ourselves in deer urine or some other "scent" to mask our own and head into the woods. We would find a nice spot and sit in the freezing cold waiting on a deer to appear so we could fill the freezer. I probably wasn't very good at it because I never bagged a deer. The best opportunity I ever had was at a nice buck that walked out of the woods with in 50 yards of me. I had been sitting for hours and just when I laid my gun down to pour myself a cup of coffee from my thermos he appeared. Needless to say he survived the encounter and I decided to give up deer hunting! I swear I could hear him laughing as he disappeared into the corn field. :-)
Now, hunting here on the ranches are a little different. They have large tool sheds built with really tall legs set up in a clearing. Next to the tool sheds are automatic feeders that spread "deer corn" that can be purchased in 50 lb bags at about every store in every town in Texas. The hunters get up into the tool sheds and when the deer come by to eat the corn they "hunt" them. They pay the rancher based on which deer/animal they shoot. Quite a challenging sport, don't ya think? :-)
Anyway it's big business around here and the ranchers have a lot of money tied up in their "hunting stock". One thing they don't want are coyotes or bobcats attacking and killing the fawns so they trap and kill the predators. Then, this is where it gets a little weird, they hang the dead coyotes on the fence posts surrounding the ranch.

This is on the main road leading into Cotulla and there are about a dozen of the critters hanging in the space of 2 miles! I, being the "Yankee" that I am :-), googled the practice and supposedly this keeps live coyotes from coming onto the property. Not sure if it works or not, seems to me it would just drive them onto your neighbors property and then there would be the smell ...... ewww.

Things are still slow on the gate and this just makes our hitch itch even more pronounced .... 2 more weeks. I'll keep you posted!

is that a "flicker"?

Our gate is starting to return to normal after over 2 weeks of "busier than a one arm paper hanger". The process just completed on the two wells requires the use of large pumps with huge diesel motors all mounted on semi trailers. There were over 20 of these units on our site and the company moved all but three of them by Tuesday evening. Business through the gate had even slowed down enough that I decided to sleep in the "big boy bed" instead of trying to cat nap while curled up on the couch. I closed the gate and we turned in around 11:00 pm after a very quiet evening. I no more drifted off to sleep and "ding ding" the driveway bells woke me up. CRAP! I went outside and found a van load of workers wanting to come in and remove the last 3 semi trucks. I checked them in and went back inside to wait for them to exit. They were back at the pad for almost an hour and when they came back out there were only 2 semis and the van. I asked about the third one and they said they couldn't get it started and out the gate they went.
By this time it was almost 1:00 am when I headed back to the bedroom trying not to disturb Rudee. Shortly after 5:00 am the bells sounded again. I went back outside and found two of the same guys at the gate that were there at midnight. They said they were there to pick up the last semi and were sure they would be able to get it started this time. They went back to the pad and I was surprised when they came back in 10 minutes without the semi. They said they couldn't start it because there were no keys in it. I asked if maybe one of the other crew members from earlier this morning had forgot and left with the keys? They told me no that wasn't possible because the reason they couldn't start it at 1 am was because there were no keys then either! I wasn't sure what to say after that, not sure why they thought the keys would be there at 5am when they were not there at 1am!
Later that morning I turned the gate over to Rudee so I could take a little nap to catch up on the sleep I missed. When I woke up she told that right after I went to bed a crew showed up again to pick up the semi. She asked if they had the keys and they assured her they did and would be right back out with it. They returned to the gate in a few minutes without the semi. When she asked them "where is the truck?" they told her they couldn't get it started because there were no keys in it. Really??!!! I mean this went from being kind of funny to becoming a big pain in the butt with us in the middle! :-)

Rudee made a trip into Cotulla to meet some of the other lady gate guards at JJ's Restaurant for a late lunch. She also did the weekly grocery shopping and brought me back a Wendy's chicken sandwich and a Frosty. :-)
While she was in town one of the company trucks pulled up once again to pick up the semi truck. I asked them of they had the keys? They told me no, they decided that the keys were indeed lost and instead had a mechanic with a new ignition switch with keys. They were there to replace the ignition and get the truck running again. Well, I guess that is one way to get it done, I would have thought there would be a spare key somewhere but doesn't sound like it. They were back at the pad for about 30 minutes and out they came but no semi. What the heck??!! They told me that the ignition has been replaced, the keys are in the ignition and the engine starts. The problem is neither one of them has a CDL so they cannot drive the truck down the highway so they had to leave it here! You have got to be kidding me! I swear there is no way I could make this stuff up! I just knew they would be showing up in the middle of the night again to pick up this semi. Oh well, such is the life of an oil field gate guard. :-)

The good thing is there is a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. We have just over 2 weeks before we will turn the gate over to another guard and begin to head North. We have a couple of stops to make on the way that should make for some decent "blog fodder". :-)
Our plan is to be back in Indiana by Sunday April 7th because we have an appointment to have our taxes done on the 8th. We will take care of some medical appointments and of course get some quality family time before leaving for South Dakota later in the month. We are both looking forward to the new job at Mount Rushmore and were a little nervous these newest budget cuts would effect us. We have been in contact with our employer and been assured that all is well and their season has been fully funded.

Wednesday night just before dark a crew arrived and removed the final semi! Whoo hoo! Maybe I will be able to get some quality sack time! I'll keep you posted.

shake, rattle ... time to roll?

We are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel for this process at our gate. The crew told us they should be finishing up sometime Sunday and then there will be a mass exodus. I'm sure it will take them another day or even two to remove all the equipment so we are not out of the woods yet.

Speaking of out of the woods, we had a visitor just a few hundred yards up the road from our motor home.

Yep, that's a Rattlesnake that is at least 4' long! One of the truck drivers told us about it and said it was the second one he had seen that had been ran over in the roadway in as many days. I guess the warmer weather has got them moving again. Rudee is pretty sure that she will be moving too if they get any closer! :-)
I would go so far as to say that if she saw one that was still alive she wouldn't come back out of the motor home until we crossed the Indiana state line! :-)

Since I work the night shift it was my job to change all the clocks since we "spring forward". The good news is I will get off an hour earlier. Well not really since that means Rudee would get an hour less sleep and I just don't have the heart to go in and wake her up early.  I'm not sure if I like the daylight saving time or not. Until recently Indiana did not change their clocks and it was always a hot topic every year the law makers tried to change it. They finally got it changed a few years ago so now, twice a year, there are big debates if it is good or bad. I'm kind of on the fence on the issue. I mean, does it really matter to full time RVers what the clock says when the sun rises or sets? Oh well, I set the clocks ahead anyway and in a couple of weeks our "internal clocks" will adjust as well. I'll keep you posted.

more excitement

Wednesday Rudee took over the gate earlier than normal so I could get some sleep before heading into town. She woke me up shortly after noon and I was able to meet the guys in Cotulla for a nice lunch. Afterwards I filled up our portable propane bottle that had ran dry a few days ago. We have been using it since we arrived at the gate the 30 lbs (approx. 7 gallons) lasted us for 6 weeks. The Ace Hardware is the only place to refill propane in Cotulla so I was surprised when the charge was only $20. Seems like most of the stores around here have "boom town" prices. Back in Indiana I have seen prices in the high $20 range so felt like I was getting a pretty good deal here.
I stopped at the store and did the shopping as well as picked up our mail at the post office. Before leaving town I hit the drive through at Mc Donald's and brought us a fast food treat home for dinner.

Back at the gate Rudee was having some excitement of her own when this guy came hauling butt across the ranch.

Seems like another pick up truck carrying illegals had ditched just off the highway and they had fled on foot onto the ranch next to ours. This is the 2nd week in a row this has happened. They had a helicopter circling and Rudee said it was so close that the rotor blades would cast a shadow over the motor home windshield when it flew over! :-o
By the time I got back they were all leaving and we heard they had picked up four illegals but were not sure how many, if any, were still on the run. Needless to say I was on high alert the rest of the night.

Thursday the ranch owner and his wife came through and were checking their fences for damage, They stopped and talked awhile and told us that Wednesdays seem to be the day for illegals to be in the area. Not sure why but they said when they hear the Border Patrol helicopter circling they know it must be Wednesday. :-)

The gate is still really busy and we are both ready for the slow down. We are not sure when that will happen but are keeping our fingers crossed it will be soon. We are doing way too many trips in and out the door! I'll keep you posted.

better get movin'!

Not a whole lot to report from our little slice of heaven here in the giggle weeds. We have about another week to go with the current crew. Things should slow back down after they leave.

We are still splitting our shifts and most nights I have been able to squeeze in an hour or two nap during the night. These guys sure do start early. The majority of them start rolling through the gate around 4am. There is usually a pretty steady stream of them in their pick up trucks (all white, of course) until after 5am and then it's mostly semi trucks coming and going the rest of the time.
The caterer has been making regular appearances too! We had a whole pile of chicken fingers and fried Okra a couple of days ago. We ate some, froze some and had enough left over to pass out to friends and fellow gate guards Kit and Jerry who are just a few miles away from us on a gate.
Today we had bacon cheeseburgers with baked beans. UMMMMM Good!

The other day this guy landed on a post at the entrance to our gate.

Looks like he was looking for an easy meal. I guess I may need to get up and start moving a little more so he doesn't mistake me for road kill! :-)

Tomorrow I will make the trip into Cotulla to pick up our mail and groceries. Several of the guys are meeting at JJ's Restaurant for a late lunch and that is always a good time too. I'll keep you posted.

finding a groove

We have really been busy the last several days with the new crew. Each new process undertaken at an oil well comes with it's own "schedule" of sorts and we have been trying to get into sync with this one. The crew arrives early, like way before dawn early! That is when I have a flurry of activity at the gate that lasts for about an hour. Once that rush is over the gate changes from employee traffic to semi traffic. They use a lot of materials at this stage and the trucks run in and out several times a day keeping us (and them) hopping.

Yesterday Rudee made our weekly trip into town for supplies. Cotulla is about a 40 minute drive and is the closest town with the stores we need. We go on Wednesdays to correspond with a gathering of other gate guards at a local restaurant. I was out of bed early and took control of the clipboard around noon and Rudee headed out. My afternoon was going smoothly until about 4:30 when a Border Patrol SUV came skidding to a stop in front of the motorhome. The officer told me they had chased a pick up truck onto our road, the pick up crashed and about a dozen suspected illegal aliens scattered into the scrub brush. They had a helicopter on the way and she told me to stay inside and lock the doors.
The helicopter arrived in about 5 minutes and begin circling an area about a 1/2 mile from our gate. I called Rudee to let her know what was happening and to be really careful on her way home. The helicopter searched back and forth for about an hour and then left. By the time Rudee got to the end of our road there was only a wrecker and one officer left. He told her they had 14 people in custody and "thought" they had them all. She said he wasn't too convincing though so we kept our eyes open and the door locked the rest of the night. :-)

We have had some questions of how we like the motor home compared to the 5th wheel so I will try and answer that.
There are pros and cons to both units. I like the motor home when we are traveling just for it's convenience. When we stop for a quick break we don't even have to get out if we don't want too, although I almost always do just so I can make sure all is Ok with the tires, toad, bike etc.
The motor home is easier to park and set up once we park for the night too.
One downside is you give up some living space for the dash and steering wheel that you don't have in a 5th wheel and we went from 4 slides in the 5er to just 2 slides in the Winnebago so we lost some square footage which also translates to losing inside storage. We gained a lot more outside storage so we just shifted some more things to the basement.
We both really like the hydraulic leveling jacks on the motor home. They really hold the rig steady even in the 50 mph winds we had the other day. :-o
All in all we are happy with the change. Towing the Dakota vs Rudee following me saved us around $300 in fuel so far and we really like being in the same vehicle again instead of having to "sight see" via radios. We plan on doing a few decorating changes and are exploring getting the couch reupholstered and redoing the valances over the windows. We'll see how that all goes. :-)

I'm doing my best to get used to being up all night and sleeping during the day. I used to do it all the time back in my Sheriff Dept. days but that was a few years ago. I'm not saying I'm getting old but ...... I'll keep you posted. :-)

switching things up a little

Our gate has transformed from a quiet spot in the middle of nowhere into a hotspot! We have really been burning through the lead in our pencil the last few days and don't see signs of a slow down for at least another couple of weeks.
I did try and use the slower times to get some things fixed up on the motor home. The last thing on my list was to try and figure out why our step cover didn't work. The door to our home is in the very front passenger side and has 3 steps right in front of the passenger seat. The step cover is made to "extend" the floor and cover the step well while we are traveling and operates by flipping a switch on the passenger  arm rest mounted on the wall.
I did some research and found others have had problems as well and gave some tips on getting it to move again. The step cover actually works off the air from the coach that pushes (and pulls) an arm attached to the cover. There is also a switch on the dash to "dump" the air out of the system so it can be operated manually. My first attempt at a repair was to clean all the electrical contacts on the air/power relay mounted on the firewall. This seemed to be the most likely problem judging by the responses I read on the internet. Once everything was cleaned up and I made sure all the connections were good and tight I fired up the engine to build up the necessary air pressure. That is when I noticed the switch on the dash felt "funny". I took it apart and found that the air line coming to the switch had become disconnected so I put it back together and replaced it on the dash. I tried to get the cover to "go" using the switch but no luck. I then took the the switch housing apart so I could get a closer look at that wiring. I'm not sure what I did but as I was messing with it Rudee said "it's moving". The bad thing was I could only get it to extend and not retract. :-(
I reversed the wires and low and behold it retracted! I had a bad switch, or so I hoped. A call to Winnebago turned out to be hopeless. They had discontinued the switches and redesigned the step cover several years ago. My next stop was my old stand by ... Ebay! I searched through several pages of switches and found one that I thought was close to what I needed. Who knew there were that many different switches out there, Wow!
The switch I ordered was under $3.00 including shipping so I wasn't taking too big a gamble and it was being sold by someone in Iowa and not someplace overseas, another plus.
The switch arrived here last week after going to our "home" address in Indiana and then being forwarded to the post office here where I picked it up on my last run into town for supplies.
As soon as I got back to the motor home I installed the switch and it fit perfectly in the hole the previous one was in. I started the engine and waited for the air to build up. I crossed my fingers and then flipped the switch. The cover extended! Now the big test. I flipped the switch the other way and it retracted! Oh Ya! That's the way it is supposed to work. :-) Another job crossed off my "honey do" list.

The weather has been really nice, mid 70's during the day and into the 40's at night. They are predicting some gusty winds starting tonight and into tomorrow so we are battening down the hatches. I'll keep you posted.

change in the air

Our little slice of heaven here in Texas has started getting busier. There has been a noticeable change in the traffic patterns and the amount of vehicles we have visiting us. We started our split shift schedule earlier this week. I work the night shift and Rudee takes the daylight hours. That first night shift is always a struggle with me having to stay up for 18-24 hours straight. I did get a short cat nap in the recliner but I was sure ready to hit the sack once Rudee vacated the bed. :-)

Last week we had a visitor. Fellow blogger, work camper and gate guard Susan stopped by and paid us back for visiting her in January. She is currently waiting on a gate assignment and, like us, is on her second season as a gate guard.
We do enjoy visitors so if you happen to be in the area drop us an email. We would love to have you stop by.

We had a another visitor of a different sort also.

This guy, or is it a girl, showed up in the scrub brush across the road from the motorhome the other day. I managed to get a photo but those things are quick! Meep Meep!

We are at the half way point of our gate guarding for this year. Another 5 weeks and we'll head back to Indiana for a visit with family and then on to South Dakota for our summer work camping gig. Spring is in the air! I'll keep you posted.

Happy Valentines Day

Shortly after posting my last update our service guy, Robert, pulled up. Our tanks are now full of water and fuel so we are good to go again, for awhile anyway. :-)
I always keep the on board water tank full when we are gate guarding. This gives us a nice reserve just in case they have trouble getting us serviced. Better safe than sorry.

Tuesday I decided to get up off my lazy rear end and do something ..... anything! I took a nice long (about 1.5 mile) walk. I need to do that everyday because it is just too easy to sit around here and get fat and lazy! Since it has been slow it seems all I do is go from the recliner to the patio chair and then back to the recliner again. That, coupled with three home cooked meals a day, is a recipe for disaster! :-)

Wednesday Rudee drove into Cotulla for the weekly Gate Guard get together. This week was the ladies turn. She left around noon, giving her time to stop at the post office and do a little shopping at Dollar General before meeting the girls at the restaurant.
While she was gone I finished up the laundry and defrosted the freezer. I also removed the ice maker from the freezer to give us some more room for food.
Our refrigerator is not the wide 4 door model so we are limited a little on space. The ice maker takes up quite a bit of the usable space in our freezer that we felt we could put to better use.
We already have a portable ice maker that we have used since starting our full timing and really love it. We can use bottled water as opposed to the "outside" water the RV parks, or in our case the company, provides which can be "questionable" as to origin, quality and taste.
We had never used the ice maker in the freezer since the water had been turned off for winterizing so taking it out was pretty easy. I removed the 4 screws that attach it to the wall of the freezer, unplug the wiring and pulled the unit out. I replaced the screws back into the holes and we will save the ice maker in case we ever want to install it again.
Rudee was pretty happy with the extra room and even brought home a half gallon of ice cream to fill up the empty hole. :-)

I surprised Rudee this morning with her Valentines gift. This was waiting for her when she woke up.

I'll be honest though, it was pretty tough figuring out a nice present being "locked" to this gate 20 miles from anywhere!
The candy and card I bought on my last trip to town and had it hidden in the Dakota. I hand picked the flowers right here next to our motorhome this morning and arranged them myself. :-) I guess my talents are expanding. :-)

We are seeing a little more activity and looks like they are preparing for the next phase of work at our site. Looks like we may start getting a lot busier in the next week or two. I'll keep you posted.

"that just aint right"

We had a fairly quiet week end and enjoyed the cooler temperatures. We have left the windows open each night which makes for nice sleeping. :-)

Our gate is right at the end of the little dirt county road ..... almost. The road makes a 90 degree turn right at our gate and there is another pad and gate about 1/4 mile past us. There is no gate guard there but there has been a lot of activity the last couple of weeks. The workers arrive early and then leave as it gets dark so there is quite a few vehicles in and out. They do not come onto our property so we do not have to sign them in or out thankfully because, even with the turn in the road, they don't slow down much. Saturday evening I was out grilling a steak for dinner shortly after dark. I had all the flood lights turned on and they do a pretty good job of lighting the area. The workers were leaving the other site so there was a fairly steady stream of vehicles passing by the front of the motor home but then one of the vehicles seemed to just stop in front. I could hear his diesel engine idling but didn't give it much thought. After a minute or so when he didn't pull away I walked around the front of the motor home to see what the problem may be and if he needed any help. The passenger was out of the truck with the back door open and it was quite obvious what he was doing just by the way he was standing! He had his back to us but "Dude"! "Find another place to take a whiz". Now I have been somewhat of an outdoorsman so understand when "ya gotta go, ya gotta go", but there is a 1.5 mile road ahead of you with nothing on it and you choose to stop in the road in front of the only occupied structure with flood lights shining bright? I guess maybe he needed to "see" what he was doing? That just aint right. :-)

Sunday we needed to get a letter into the mail so Rudee sent me into Big Wells for that errand. Now if Big Wells is "big" I would hate to see Little Wells. :-)
There are a few houses, a post office, a gas station/mini mart combo and a small restaurant/bar. I was going to bring some lunch back as a treat for Rudee and I so planned to get a carryout meal at the restaurant. Unfortunately it was closed on Sundays. :-(
I stopped into the mini mart to check it out and there were some guys in there ordering food so I decided to check out their menu. The guys in front of me got their order and headed back to their vehicles since there are no tables or chairs of any kind. The menu board was up and turns out the only thing they offer on Sundays is Manudo. We had been forewarned of this Mexican delicacy last year and decided it wasn't for us. They make it out of intestines and either pigs or cow feet. For some reason I didn't think this would be a "treat" for Rudee so I passed. Guts and feet in a soup? That just aint right!
We are getting pretty low on water and diesel fuel for the generator. Our service guy has not been out for awhile, in fact it has almost been two weeks since we saw him last. I will give him a call this afternoon if he doesn't show up before then. I'll keep you posted.

dust bowl or mud bog?

Two things gate guards despise are windy days and rainy days. Don't get me wrong though, we appreciate a nice cooling breeze on a hot day as well as the soothing sound of rain lightly falling on the roof of the rv while we are sleeping. :-)
But there is another side to it. The wind blows the dust into big clouds that cover EVERYTHING. The rain then turns all that dust into MUD. Yuck!
In the last week we have had both. The wind kicked up last week end and the dust was blown to the point we had "dust drifts", similar to snow drifts back home, in the road. Later that same day the wind shifted and blew all the same dust back across the road where it came from! :-)
Tuesday the rain started and turned all that dust into mud. What a mess! The road leading back to our site was now a quagmire. All the large craters were now full of water so there was no way to tell how deep they were. I experienced all this first hand when I drove to town Wednesday afternoon.
I made the trip to meet with some of the other gate guards at a restaurant in Cotulla. We take advantage of these trips and do our grocery shopping and other errands after lunch with the gang.
There were about a dozen of other guards there and I enjoyed swapping stories with them. After lunch I made stops at the post office, grocery and gas station. I also picked us up a couple of sandwiches and a Frosty at Wendy's for later. :-)
Next week will be Rudee's turn to meet with the ladies. Hopefully she wont have to use the 4 wheel drive on the Dakota to leave our little piece of heaven out here in the giggle weeds. :-)
Things have been drying out here and our starting to return to "normal" if there is such a thing in the world of Gate Guarding. I'll keep you posted/

up off our lazy butts!

Thursday was a slow down day for us. We slept in and then stayed around the 5th wheel for most of the day. We had both been wanting to see a couple of the new movies out and took advantage of the matinee prices at the local movie theater. We chose to see "One for the Money" with Cathrine Heigle playing a bounty hunter. The movie was enjoyable but why do they spoil most of the movie showing all the good one liners and funny scenes as "teasers" during the advertising.

Friday morning we woke up to cloudy skies and sprinkles, guess we wont be venturing out much today either :-(. I decided that today would be a good day to fill the tanks on the Freightliner. I figured since the weather was gloomy I might as well be gloomy too and spending several hundred dollars on diesel fuel was a good way to wipe a smile off ones face :-(.

I had not fueled up since Florida back in October and we had driven right at 1500 miles since. This was going to hurt! We had loaded up our Wal Mart fuel card so we could get the 3 cents off per gallon a couple of days ago. I fired up the truck and we hopped in and drove to the other side of Del Rio to the Murphy gas station at Wal Mart. On the way Rudee said she smells something burning, like wires. I think women are more in tune to smells than men because Rudee can smell a fart in a hurricane! It took me awhile but I soon found the source of the smell. The freightliner has a small computer monitor that is used by the trucking companies to monitor the mileage, rpms, miles per trip etc. You can set it for different states so you can keep track of mileage in the state you are in for tax purposes, anyway the computer has shown the words "no communication" for the last couple of years on the screen. Today it was blank and when I touched the box it was really warm so I unplugged it and this seemed to cure the hot smell. Guess maybe it shorted out inside the computer thingy.

Fueling up took a little while since we needed almost 200 gallons and of course once one saddle tank is full I had to turn the truck around to fill the tank on the other side. All that coupled with the fact they only had one pump that offered diesel caused me to get some dirty looks from the pick up truck drivers! Our total bill was just a few pennies over $700 and we got right at 8 miles per gallon. Ouch, told you it was going to hurt but knowing we wont have to fill it up again until next fall after our work camping back in Indiana helps ease the pain a little :-)

Once we got over the sticker shock of the fuel we decided to stop for lunch at Buffalo Wings and Rings. I got my chicken wing fix while Rudee had some chips and salsa. We came out of the restaurant and the clouds had parted and the sun was shining. One thing we wanted to do before leaving here was to see the ancient Indian rock art at Seminole Canyon State Historic Park about 35 miles up the road from Del Rio. The only way to see the art was by ranger guided tours down into the canyon which are done twice a day and it looked like this afternoon would be our best option since the weather is supposed to turn cold and rainy late in the week end. We took the truck home and grabbed our hiking sticks and headed back out in the Dakota.

We arrived at the visitors center 45 minutes before the 3pm afternoon tour and had the chance to check out the displays on early life in the canyon. The entrance to the park is $3 each and then another $5 each for the tour. We were the only ones signed up when we got there but by the 3pm start time 6 other couples had signed up and we were all ready to go, well almost, we had to wait for one guy who had ran out to his car to make himself a sandwich, geez! Guess there is always one in every crowd! :-)

Once our gourmet joined us we headed down the stairs with our guide Tanya. She would stop occasionally and explain some of the various plants and how the ancient Indians would use them in their everyday lives. The going was slow as the steps became steeper and steeper until we finally got into the bottom of the canyon. Here is a photo looking back up the steps.

We walked through the canyon floor back towards the visitors center high above us.

We arrived at the Fate Bell Shelter named after a former ranch owner of this property and the location of the Indian art.

No one knows for sure what all the art means or depicts Some say it has religious meanings and other drawings appear to display the everyday life of the Indians. The drawings are determined to be 4,000 years old, amazing they can survive that long!

The Indians used the shelter for their home and Tanya explained the area looked much different back then with abundant wildlife and green plants and trees before the climate changed to the more desert type we know today.

The tour lasted for about 1 1/2 hours and we had to return the same way we came. Back up all those stairs! The last several months the most stairs we had climbed was the 4 steps into the 5th wheel! I thought I was in better shape since I was in and out the door many times a day tending to the gate, well I was wrong! By the time we got back to the top I was winded and my legs were burning :-)! On the way out of the canyon we spotted some purple flowers blooming on a shrub that smelled just like grape koolaid! Gave us both spring fever! We both enjoyed the tour even though we were tired. Back at the 5th wheel Rudee had some left over baked chicken heating up in the crock pot for dinner. I added some homemade barbecue sauce while Rudee made us each a salad to top off the meal.

The weather is supposed to turn for the worse late Saturday and the high temperature for Sunday is only 45 degrees! Brrrrr! Sounds like a good day to stay inside and make a big pot of vegetable soup! I'll keep you posted.