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.