We are working!

Yes, after 2 1/2 years of traveling and enjoying this beautiful country, we are working again. But first a couple of pictures of our new "home" for the next few months. The car is not in the picture, since Doug is at physical therapy for his shoulder, but it fits behind the rig just fine.

See the water puddle in the front. It had rained here since last Thursday with some heavy thunderstorms and even though the rain stopped yesterday afternoon, the ground is so saturated that the water just has nowhere to go. Our spot is on the opposite site of the amusement park, which means that you really can't hear the kids screaming on the rides at our site. If you enlarge the picture you should be able to see the Ferris wheel in the background.

Before we started working last weekend and the weather turned bad, we decided to work a little bit on the truck to replace the sub woofer. It turned out to be more of a project than I had thought, so right now everything is taken apart and we should be installing the new sub woofer some time this week.

See the new driver seat!! When we were in Kansas City, Doug had to go to the spare parts department of MCH (it is a guy thing) and found this beautiful Elite chair for about $300 less than he had seen it on the Internet. Since we were there already, we decided to have them install the chair, which was a good thing, since the base plate had to be changed to fit the seat.

Now let me tell you how our first weekend of work went. Doug is not supposed to work until May 21st, but told his supervisor that he was willing and able to work should they need him sooner. He got a call the next day and worked last Saturday from 8 am to 3 pm setting up stages for competing school music groups from the area. It was a good workout for his shoulder. I got the swing shift on Saturday, which means giving lunch and afternoon breaks to four different store as well working in their inventory room. It started raining in the afternoon, but it was not bad enough to close the park. I was supposed to work the afternoon shift on Sunday, but due to it being only 50 degrees outside and rain in the forecast, the park closed at noon and I did not have to work.

I have to say that my back was hurting at the end of day on Saturday, but I did have fun. There was this little girl that bought some pretty rocks, which are sold in a bag for a certain amount. After putting all of them in the bag, the bag was not full yet and I told her that she could get some more rocks. She looked in the bag and told me very politely that she had all the rocks she wanted. These moments are just priceless and I am looking forward to moments like that when working. I have my schedule already for next weekend and hopefully the weather will cooperate better.

We made it!!

We arrived at Adventureland on Wednesday afternoon, but unfortunately our trip since my last post did not go as smooth as we had hoped for.

We left Thackerville, OK on Monday morning and everything seemed fine. I saw a pick-up truck slowing down a little bit and looking at the rig when he passed us, but I thought he was just admiring it. Well, I was wrong. We stopped about 50 miles up the road for me to get gas to find out that the truck had decided to spit up. The whole front of the rig, the back of the truck cab as well as anything sticking out a little on the side was covered with an oily fluid.



We first thought it was engine oil, checked the oil level and it was okay. We could see a few drops of fluid under the truck, but nothing was leaking badly. We wiped of a spot on the front of the rig to see if we would keep leaking and continued on. Our next stop was a Flying J in Oklahoma City where we got weight and again, we only saw a couple of drops of fluid under the truck and the spot that we had cleaned off was not covered again. We bought a gallon of engine oil and continued on. For the rest of the day we kept stopping about every 50 miles and got to Oasis RV Park around 4 pm. The rig looked just awful.

We decided the next morning to go on to Kansas City and have the truck looked at there. Kansas City has a very big truck shop presents and we knew Volvo was there. Before going to the campground we decided to go to a truck wash and get the truck and rig professionally cleaned. If I would have had to clean the rig it would have taken forever. Doug decided to also get an underbelly wash for the truck and once he got to campground you could see that it looked like a hose to the transmission was leaking. Doug took the truck right away to the Volvo dealer. We have dealt with this shop once before and were not very impressed. Well, they said that they could not get us in until the next morning and Doug came back to the campground. After discussing our situation for about an hour we decided to drive the car down to MCH and talk to them about our problem. They said that they could get us in within the hour and just bring the truck by. Luckily we were only 3 miles away from the campground and had the truck at their shop in no time. MCH found two leaking transmission hoses, replaced the transmission oil and we were able to pick the truck up the next morning and go on to Adventureland.

We arrived in the early afternoon and started check in. When I saw that they had put us into a site that has 30/50 amp I was getting a little bit nervous and we decided to drive to the site with the car first. I am glad we did, since there was no way we would have fit the rig and car never mind the truck there. So back to the check in office we went and the girl was nice enough to call Joe, who was the guy I had talked to about two months ago. So Joe drives up and you can see that as he passes the rig takes a good look and then took another good look. It seems to happen a lot to us since we have the big truck. At first he said he was not sure if he had a spot big enough for us, but then Doug and Joe where able to find a nice pull through spot that fits all of us. I was very relieved, since I did not know where we would have gone if they did not have room for us.

So now we are pretty much settled in, laundry is done, and we met with the human resource department yesterday. I have a meeting with the retail department tomorrow morning at 8:30 am and we will fill out all our paperwork next Wednesday. The only thing really left to do is wash the roof, since the truck wash did not do that. But, since it is only 56 degrees right now and pretty windy, it will have to wait until the weekend when it hopefully is less windy.

On the road again!!

We had originally planned to leave Retama Village on Saturday to start our journey to Iowa. Well, we woke up on Friday morning, realized that we had done everything that needed to be done before we leave and decided to go ahead and hit the road. Linda was kind enough to take some pictures, since we were busy getting packed up and saying goodbye to our friends.


It was going to be a new experience for Doug, since he has not towed the rig with our big Volvo, so we decided not to make a reservation anywhere, since we did not know how far we would actually get. I have to say Doug did a fantastic job. We drove 320 miles, getting through San Antonio right before rush hour and stayed at a campground in Sattler, which is a little bit west of New Braunfels. We have stayed there a few time and it is really nice and quite. Unhooking that night was no problem, we went out for German food in New Braunfels and left Sattler the next morning around 9:30 am. Driving on I35 can be a bit challenging and after what happened we have decided not to travel through a big town again on the weekend. We were driving nicely along towards Austin when a dump truck came onto the highway. Doug gave him plenty of room to pull in, however, I guess the guy did not think so and dead stopped. Doug was able to get over into the middle lane while cars were moving quickly to avoid him. I unfortunately had to come to a full stop. Luckily the car behind me was paying attention and did not hit me and we got moving again.

We made it through Austin, Waco and Fort Worth just fine and then we met another idiot. We were merging from I35W onto I35N when a little Prius decided that he could not do the merge and decided to stop on the on ramp. The car behind him veered to the right and also stopped. There was nowhere for Doug to go, so he hit the breaks hard and luckily came to a stop before hitting anybody. Luckily I had kept some distance behind him and was able to veer to the right as the car behind me veered to the left avoiding me. If we would have been in the F550, Doug probably would have not been able to stop with the weight of the rig behind him. I am so proud of him handling this bad situation and was so glad when we finally arrived in Thackerville after driving 300 miles around 4 pm. Amazingly enough the content in the rig survived all this pretty well. No drawers or cupboards opened up and nothing came flying towards me. It seems that our new air hitch really does a nice job keeping things in the trailer in place.

We decided that it was time to take a break and are staying here until tomorrow morning before we continue. From here we will divide the remaining 700 miles into three 230 mile day trips and should be at the campground at Adventureland on Wednesday. Hopefully, nothing else this drastic is going to happen from here on out.