Daily Archives: April 5, 2012
A New Chapter . . .
and a Big Milestone.
This is the blog post for Thursday, the 5th, that got eaten by the power outage last night. Landon is home and doing fine
Jan and I were up about 8:30 this morning, wondering what was going on with Landon’s hospitalization. Then a few minutes later we got an real, actual phone call. Don’t know why it worked this morning, but not last night.
Our daughter Brandi was on the way home from the hospital to freshen up and grab a little sleep. She said Landon was doing OK, but was still in ICU (which is normal at his age). They’ve got him on some steroids so he’s really restless and doesn’t like the IV he’s hooked up to.
Feeling relived, we left the RV park in Junction a little before 10. Our first stop was the McDonald’s that is part of the Valero Truck Stop where we made our phone call to Brandi last night. We wanted to grab a couple of breakfast sandwiches to eat on the road.
Luckily since it was a truck stop I had plenty of room to park right next door and run in. As the manager took my order, I juked about the fact the fact that if his drive-thru cover was a little higher, I could have just taken the RV through. He laughed and said that some people don’t care, and that this was his 3rd cover in two years. Oops!
We were on the road and headed east on I-10 by 10:15.
We passed more fields of bluebonnets and this one of Indian Paintbrushes. Really beautiful country through here, in contrast to the stark beauty of Arizona and New Mexico.
We took Loop 410 south around San Antonio and headed out on I-37. And about 25 miles down the road, we reached our milestone.
We hit 50,000 miles of travel on our coach. Of course our coach had 62,511 miles on it when we bought it, so now we’ve passed 112,511 total miles on our coach, and it’s still going strong.
Right after this, our daughter Brandi called and said Landon was home and doing fine. She said they had already taken the IV out, and after they heard from the doctor that they could leave, she ask Landon if he was ready to go home. He nodded, grabbed his toy, and headed out the door and down the hall to the elevator. He was ready!
Our first stop was in the town of Pleasanton at the Wal-Mart so we could stock up on groceries for the upcoming New Chapter in our RV life.
We were heading for Whitsett, TX and the local headquarters of Gate Guard Services
For the next 5 months or so, we were going to be oilfield gate guards.
The job of gate guard consists of parking our RV at the entrance to an oil well drill site and checking in and out all visitors, deliveries, and employees.
In most cases it’s 24/7 job with Jan and I each working a 12 hours shift. We may be parked right outside a town, or miles out in the boonies. You never known until you get your site.
The company furnishes the site and all utilities. In most cases that’s done with a trailer containing a diesel generator, diesel fuel tank, and a water tank. Sometimes a sewage storage tank is also included. If not, they have someone come by once or twice a week and pump your waste tanks out.
The good part is the job pays $125 to $150 dollars a day. Nice.
We pulled into the Gate Guard Services lot about 4:15, and after talking to an employee, were directed to a place to park and hook up to 50 amp power with water nearby if we need it.
There is a full hookup area on the other side of the lot that we should be able to move to on Monday when some of these people move out to their gates.
Later I walked around the lot looking at the utility trailers that will supply us with power, water, and sometimes sewer, at the jobsite.
And it looks like they’ve got a bunch of trailers ready to go,
with the parts for more ready to be assembled.
The people we needed to talk to had already left for the day, so we’ll have to catch them first thing tomorrow to see how we get started.
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Thought for the Day:
“To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first. And, whatever you hit, call it the target.” – Ashleigh Brilliant
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