Staying Safe in Texas

So perhaps traveling to tornado alley in spring is a bad idea. Along with the warm weather you get high winds, rain and impressive thunderstorms. Luckily the softball-sized hail went south of us last night, but we had some severe weather. Chuck rode through it fine but it made for a sleepless night. We were due to leave Livingston today and head west of Austin to town of Dripping Springs (I can’t wait to see that), but the weather along the route looks threatening all day today so we’ve opted for another night here at Lake Livingston and we’ll head west tomorrow. This morning as I drove to the park office to secure the extra night, ducks were swimming in new roadside puddles. Yes, it really rained last night.

Meanwhile, we spent a good part of yesterday trying to resolve a problem with the connection between Chuck and Toad. There’s a coiled electrical cord that plugs into the back of Chuck and the front of Toad and powers the brake and signal lights on Toad so that when we brake the rig or signal a turn, the car signals also light up. In theory it will prevent someone from crashing into our back end. This connection has been fussy as long as we’ve had the rig, requiring jiggling and twisting and jerking to get it right. Oh yeah, and we’ve had to manipulate the cord too. So yesterday we took the cord to an RV repair place here in Livingston who tested it and declared it bad. They didn’t have a perfect replacement, but had a similar one they sold us for $160. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work a whole lot better, lighting up just one side of the car. Being stubborn, geeky people, we took apart our old cord and examined it, even using Robin’s fancy multimeter to check the connections.

Fixing(?) the cord

Of course we had little idea what we were doing but eventually figured out how it all should work and confirmed that our cord worked, as least in testing. There’s still a question of a possible short or loose connection when it’s stretched out between the vehicles or a bad socket on the rig or car. Anyway, another day in Livingston gives us time to get a better fix on the problem and hopefully find a solution. RVing always gives one the opportunity to learn new things and spend money on new stuff.

You may be asking yourself why we came to in Livingston in the first place. Livingston is the home of the Escapees RV club of which we are members. They were the organizers of last fall’s bootcamp where we learned what we did and did not know about RVing. Since we were heading for Texas, we decided we had to check out the home office. Along with club headquarters, Escapees has an RV park here, a development of deeded lots where RV folks have built small homes with connected RV storage, and a Care Center where the medical needs of Escapees and be taken care of. It’s an impressive operation.

Livingston is also home of Lake Livingston State Park where we are camped. It's a beautiful, lush wooded park with great boating and fishing.

When it's not raining, our campsite at Lake Livingston

Downtown Livingston is centered around a courthouse square and we lunched yesterday at Whistlestop Café across from the courthouse. The café is connected a gift/antique shop that Robin kept insisting was Downtown Pleasures.