Our RV Adventures

First off, Karma’s still doing OK. She’s actually moving a little slower than last night since the long-term time release painkiller wore off. But she’s eating and drinking just fine.

My week of FAST WAVE Wi-Fi here at the park is over, and I did not renew. All I can really say is that the service is just sucky, and at about 2.5 Mbps, not any better than my 3G aircard. Plus it drops out a lot.

Now I know that most RV’ers are used to spotty, low quality park Wi-Fi. But this is a brand-new, park-wide system just completed last month. They’ve got antennas all over the park, with one just 3 sites away, giving us 5 bars of signal. It’s really a shame that the actual service is not any better.

Compare this Wi-Fi at $15 a week to the free Wi-Fi at the Harris County Public Library yesterday, where we had 28+Mbps. Too bad they don’t have hookups at the library.

Apparently an era has ended in Las Vegas. No more free parking. At least at the MGM casinos. This includes the MGM Grand, Circus Circus, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Excalibur, The Mirage, New York New York, Monte Carlo, and finally, The Bellagio. And the last one is the one that affects us.

Whenever we’re in Las Vegas, we drive down to the Strip one night, park in the Bellagio’s parking garage, and take in the famous fountains out in front.

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But now if we do this, it’s going to cost us $10. Bummer.

Now the next question is, will this spread? I guess it could go either way. Either all the other casinos will match this so they all make more money, or the other casinos will use it as an advertising  gimmick, i.e., Play here and get FREE Parking!

It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Recently after talking with our friend Nick Russell about Florida tourist attractions, I stumbled across this site that tracks Florida’s Lost Tourist Attractions. And one of the many listed here was Florida Wonderland.

Florida Wonderland was where Jan and I met July 5th, 1967. Jan lived in Titusville, and I had come down from Alabama for the summer to spend some time bumming around. I had relatives living in nearby Sanford, and while there, saw an ad in the Florida Today newspaper wanting someone to take care of the animals, and do the porpoise shows at the Marine Life part of Florida Wonderland.

The Marine Life facility was located across the street from Florida Wonderland and was right on the Indian River. In fact the two large ponds for the porpoises were fed by the river.

Besides the two porpoises, Thor and Lori, we had a 12 ft alligator, two manatees, Bruce and Vivian, a very large tortoise, and a sea lion, as well as a few other smaller animals.

The fish we used to fed the animals had to be kept iced down, and we didn’t have an ice machine over there, so I had to walk across the street to get ice several times a day.

And on my first afternoon, I walked across the parking lot to where the ice machine was, and encountered a beautiful long-legged redhead. And I was smitten from the start.

Jan was one of the saloon girls working at Miss Kitty’s Pleasure Palace, one of the attractions in the Dodge City western town area of the park.

I was skinny and had hair back then, but even so it took me about two weeks to get her to go out with me. She said later she thought I was just another stuck-up college kid, driving a red sports car. Glad I didn’t give up.

And now, this September 28th, we will have been married 49 years.

It’s been great!

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Jan and I were up at 4:30am and out the door by 5. God, that was early. We were supposed to be down in La Marque by 7:00, and though the trip should only take about an hour and 40 minutes, I was allowing two hours.

You never know when a wreck will cause things to grind to a halt, and we didn’t want to miss our drop-off window. But as it was, we only lost about 5 minutes and got there about 6:45, and then had to wait for 15 minutes until they opened at 7.

Animal Alliance is a non-profit organization that only does spaying, neutering, and shots for dogs and cats. And the non-profit part certainly makes a difference. When I called around the Conroe area, I found one vet that wouldn’t even quote me a price unless we came into the office, and another place that wanted about $300. Ouch.

But our son Chris told us about Animal Alliance down in La Marque that spays cats for $55 plus $14 for the legally-required rabies shot. So that’s a total of $69 vs $300. Well worth the 180 mile round trip.

They have a very nice facility with separate entries for dogs and cats. But what’s kind of strange is that the two separate entries open out into the same large counter area.

Inside it’s a very efficient operation. After filling out a short form, Karma and I were called in so she could be examined by the vet. And it turns out she weighs 7.1 pounds and is in really good shape.

Jan and I were back on the road by 7:30 and headed up to the IHOP on the Interstate, for coffee, English muffins, and some nice conversation. By the time we left the place was getting busy, so we just sat in the parking lot, listened to the radio, and napped a little. It was very overcast and a little rainy, so we were comfortable.

About 10:30 we headed up to Webster to have lunch at our favorite King Food. Always great, and enough to bring home leftovers. Then it was over to the Harris County Public Library where we spent the rest of the afternoon reading and Interneting in comfort. While we were there, I was amazed at the speed of the library’s inhouse Wi-Fi. With a 5 ms ping, 28+ Mbps download, and 18+ Mbps upload, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any faster.

Finally about 3:30, we drove back down to La Marque to pick up Miss Karma. And after some brief post-op instructions, we were on our way home. With our trip occurring in the middle of the Houston rush hour, I took some precautions that turned out to really be needed.

As we headed north, Jan was monitoring the traffic using the Sigalert app on my Galaxy Tab 4. And as we got into downtown Houston, we saw a complete traffic stop on I-45 north that quickly built up from a 30 minute delay to a 2 hour delay as detailed on our Garmin GPS’ live traffic info. That would mean that our 1:40 trip was going to take 3 hours and 40 minutes.

But Sigalert showed me that I could exit i-45 and go east on I-10, then north on US 59. Then at I-610 come back west until I could get on the Hardy Toll Road and head north again.

Surprisingly, all this zig-zagging only added about 3 miles to our trip, but cut down the delay to only about 20 minutes over the normal 1:30 trip. Later, on the 10pm news we heard that traffic was completely stopped for 3 hours, not just 2.

We really dodged that bullet.

Thought for the Day:

Life is short. Smile while you still have teeth.

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