Our RV Adventures

Turns out I had a last minute client get-together down in League City this morning so I was up about 8:30, and Jan and I were out the door about 9am. My appointment wasn’t until noon, but we wanted to have time for lunch at our favorite King Food Chinese Restaurant down in that area.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been eating here since 1978, and we’re on our 4th owner. But lucky for us the menu has never changed.

We both had our usual Chicken with Hot Garlic Sauce with Jalapenos, Extra, Extra, Extra Spicy.

Very spicy and very, very good. And it’s the reason we eat here just about every time we’re down in this area.

Getting to the client’s about noon, my  first job was to figure out why a laptop would no longer print to either of the two wireless printers it had been connected to. But it turns out it wasn’t connected to anything, not the Internet, not even the router. But it should have been.

The Wi-Fi was on, but it wouldn’t connect to anything. Well, it couldn’t connect to anything else, because for some reason it was trying to connect to a SonicWall VPN Client. Which is not even a Wi-Fi signal, but is really a virtual hardware device, just like the Wi-Fi itself.

And it wouldn’t let go. The Wi-Fi was hung up on the VPN client and wouldn’t stop. After trying a lot of different things, I finally had to go into the Device Manager and just delete the SonicWall VPN client completely. Then after a reboot, everything worked, the Wi-Fi connected to the router and the Internet, and the printers now worked. 

Next up was to set up her new ASUS laptop. This was my second time to get an in-depth chance to play with Windows 10. And so far, operationally speaking, I’m pretty impressed. It was easy to set up and use, and a big improvement over 8/8.1

I was also impressed with how easy it was to connect to the two Canon Wireless Printers. When I originally connected them to the Win7 laptop, it took me about 45 minutes of back and forth to get them working. But with Win10, I just selected each one in the Printer Manager, and then a minute or so later I was printing a test page. Easy Peasy.

Once I had everything set up, I plugged a 64GB flashdrive into the old laptop and started copying over about 18GB of Contacts, Favorites, Documents, Pictures, and Videos over to the new laptop. This took about an hour each way, but since I had my Galaxy Tab with me, I kept busy.

The next part was the only place I had a problem. But the problem wasn’t with Win10, but the Office365 that I was trying to download. But after a lot of starts and stops, I finally got it working too.

By the time I was finished up and we headed out, it was a little after 5pm. And since I didn’t want to spend an hour or more extra in Houston going-home traffic, we decided to have dinner in the Clear Lake area before we headed back to Columbus.

It only took us a couple of minutes to decide on Floyd’s Cajun Seafood, another long-time favorite of ours. And like most places we frequent, we have our favorites. And Floyd’s is no exception.

And we both started out with our usual favorites this time too, with Jan’s Crab Bisque and my Seafood Gumbo.

Just full of shrimp as you can see.

And then we both went with 1/2 and 1/2 Shrimp and Oyster PoBoy’s.

Just looking at the photo makes me hungry all over again.

As I’ve mentioned before, the ‘Floyd’ in Floyd’s Cajun Seafood is Floyd Landry. He and his brothers started the Landry Seafood chain before they sold it to Tilman Fertitta.

There are now six Floyd’s, five in the Houston area and one in Beaumont. We’ve known Floyd for about 20 years, and all he has to do is open his mouth and you know exactly where the ‘Cajun’ in Floyd’s Cajun Seafood comes from.

Now by the time we headed toward Columbus, it was 6:30 and just a straight shot with no traffic. And after a quick stop at Brandi’s, and nearby Kroger’s, we got back to the rig about 9.

Another long day, but with fun and good food.

MORE ACTUAL COMPLAINTS RECEIVED BY “THOMAS COOK VACATIONS” FROM DISSATISFIED CUSTOMERS:

“We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow.”

“It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallarta to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time — this should be banned.”

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Well, it was up and out by 7:30 this morning, on our way to meet Vance and Bonnie Clegg for the breakfast buffet at Schobel’s Restaurant in Columbus. On the way, I did make a quick stop for gas at $1.48⁹ a gallon, the cheapest I’ve seen around here so far.

We thought the buffet started about 8am, but they seemed to be running late today, because it wasn’t up and running until about 8:15. But we were having so much fun talking we didn’t even care.

But when they did get it put out, it was great as usually. Scrambled Eggs, Bacon, Ham, Sausage, Chicken Fried Chicken, Fried Potatoes, Grits, and Biscuits with Sausage Gravy. And they even had Bread Pudding for dessert.

All really, really good.

And as I said, so was the conversation. Turns out we have a lot in common with our travels, military stuff, and music. Both Vance and I were in bands, He was in the Marines as a RIO in F-4 Phantom Jets at MCAS Beaufort. I was a DOD contractor working on F-4’s at MCAS Beaufort, although I don’t know if we ever nailed down the timeframe.

We talked well after we were finished eating, until we finally had to relinquish our table to the busy restaurant. Hopefully we’ll be able to do this again soon.

Getting back home I checked in with Brandi about our visit this afternoon, since we had just remembered about the Super Bowl today. We figured Lowell might not want to go out and miss part of it, so we were going to offer to come tomorrow night. But it turned out, Brandi was cooking dinner so we would be staying in anyway.

Weighing In:

We headed out a little before 3pm for Brandi’s house in Katy, about an hour away. We did make one small detour along the way, circling through the Oasis Truck Stop about 15 miles east of Columbus. We had noticed that they have CAT Scales in the back and we wanted to check them out for weighing our RV.

Getting a straight front/rear weight is no problem. Just drive onto the scales and tell them on the intercom that you want to weigh. No problem. But with an RV, it’s also important to get your side to side weight too. In other words, how much weight is on each individual wheel.

For example, our coach is rated for a maximum of 12,000 pounds on the front axle and 20,000 pounds on the rear axle, for a total of 32,000 pounds. But it’s important to know how much is on each front tire, and each rear dual tire set.

In our case, ideally there should be approximately 6000 pounds on the each front tire and 10,000 pounds on each rear tire set. I said ‘ideally’ because it’s usually not the quite the case. Due to the weigh of slides on one side, batteries on the other, waste tank locations refrigerator, etc., it’s sometimes hit or miss. But you want to get it as close as possible.

And to do that, you need to be able to get a normal front and back weight, and then a one side only weight. So you need to be able to pull onto the scales so that only your right or left tires are on the scale platforms. Then you can just subtract the single side weight from the total axle weight, and then you know the weight on each tire.

So that’s what we were checking out here at Oasis. Can we pull onto the scales with only side registering. And here, as seen below, the answer is ‘yes’.

But over the years, we have seen CAT scales with guardrails along side that prevent this. This is done to keep truck drivers from ‘fudging’ their weights the same way.

But here it looks like we’re good to go, so we’ll probably stop here this Sunday as we head back to Lake Conroe.

When we got to Brandi’s, she was whipping up a delicious meal of Pork Tenderloins, Roasted Parsnips, Carrots, and Pearl Onions, Wild Rice, and French Bread. And homemade Brownies and Blue Bell Ice Cream for dessert.

YUM!

And as soon as Brandi said ‘Come and Get It!’, Miss Kitty assumed her position under the table.

Everyone knows that anything that hits the floor belongs to Miss Kitty, and she doesn’t want to miss anything.

This was certainly evidenced back in August by Landon and Miss Kitty bumping heads, knocking out two of Landon’s front teeth. When they hit the floor, Kitty ate them.

You can read all about it again here:

https://ourrvadventures.com/2015/08/the-rest-of-the-story-2/

After a really great meal, we all curled up to watch the Super Bowl, including once again, Miss Kitty who also has her place on the sofa too.

We all watched the game until a little after the start of the 3rd quarter, when Jan started nodding off. So we headed home, getting back to the rig about 9pm.

A very long day, but a very nice one too.

Wrapping things up, as far as the SuperBowl goes, here’s a couple of interesting facts.

1. There are five friends who have attended every Super Bowl since SB 1

http://www.today.com/news/meet-5-friends-who-have-attended-every-single-super-bowl-t70936

Tickets for that first contest were only $10.

2. There is only ONE known recording of Super Bowl I. But no one is allowed to see it.

Played on January 15, 1967, it was broadcast by both NBC and CBS, one holding the rights to AFC games and other the rights to the NFC games. Neither one saved their tapes, recycling them after use.

This was before any type of home video recording, with everything saved on large 2” reels recorded on large RCA VTR’s (video tape recorders) like this.

Not something found in the average home.

Check out the link below to find out why this recording may never be seen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/sports/football/super-bowl-i-recording-broadcast-nfl-troy-haupt.html?_r=0

(Hint: It’s the lawyer’s fault)

Maybe Shakespeare was right.

Thought for the Day:

Sticking with the SuperBowl theme, I saw an article online about Marshawn Lynch, who plays for the Seattle Seahawks. It talked about how, unlike many NFL players who retire broke, Marshawn still has all of the $49.7 million he’s made in his nine years in the NFL. Instead he’s lived on just his $5 million a year from endorsements and business ventures.

When I told Jan about this, she looked over and said, “He’s not married, is he”

Truer words were never spoken.

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