Our RV Adventures

For A Month, anyway.

A little after 2pm, I went back down to the park office to set up our month-long stay here in July. Once I got that set up I cancelled our two  two week stay’s at Conroe and Colorado River for that time period.

One thing I want to check into further is about longer duration stays. At first I thought we could only do an annual lease, but it seems we can also do shorter periods of time.

As I said before, we’re not settling down, but the 3 or 4 months we normally spend in Houston area would be nicer if we didn’t have to keep moving every couple of weeks. I’ll find out more when I go down to pay for our month stay next weekend.

You may or may not have heard of Fiverr. It’s a website where you can hire people to do stuff for you, usually pretty cheaply.

Draw a carton, design a logo, write your resume, put your lyrics to music and sing it for you, write you a business plan for a load, or even do some programming for you . . .  or me, as the case may be.

I’ve got some simple but time-consuming programming that I need done. But I’ve also got a lot of website stuff to take care of, So I decided to give Fiverr a try for this. Now Fiverr is called that, because many things are priced at $5. But actually it’s a haggling type of thing.

After signing up, I posted what I wanted done in some detail, and then waited for the offers to roll in. You get them 6 at a time, and as you eliminate ones you don’t like, another one takes its place. Then when you pick one, the bargaining starts. The points of contention are price, # of revisions, and how long to delivery.

My guy started off the negotiations by asking me what the budget was for this project,

Wrong!

I countered by asking how much he would charge for the job, telling him to keep in mind that if it was too expensive, then it would pay to just do it myself.

He came back with $70, but said he would drop it to $60 since this was my first buy on Fiverr. The $70 would cover 3 revisions and 1 Day Delivery. By the time we got finished, we were at $25 for 1 revision and 3 Day Delivery.

Works for me.

Later in the afternoon, I went through a couple of outside bins and finally found my old Winegard Carryout satellite dish power cable. I thought I had saved the old one. This will give me a cable to go with the Carryout Dish I found by a dumpster at Lake Conroe. So now I’ve got a complete set.

In fact I’ve been using the found one ever since, and I can’t be absolutely sure, but it does seem to find the DirecTV satellite at 101.1 degrees faster than my old one.

I mentioned a while back about problems with our DirecTV remotes. All three have developed flakey keys and I was hoping that Strike-Hold would fix the problem. But apparently even a miracle liquid like Strike-Hold couldn’t fix these keys.

When that didn’t  help I tried to take one apart, but the cases are firmly glued together, so  no luck with that. But I did have luck with Amazon. 

I found that I could buy two DirecTV Remotes for $8, with Prime 2 Day Shipping.

A great deal,

So good in fact, that I ordered two sets to have spares.

“After death, hair and nails continue to grow, but phone calls start to taper off” – Johnny Carson

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I  spend some time this morning finishing up booking our trip to Alabama the end of next month.

So here’s what I’ve got:

Sun – Jul 31 – Poche’s
Mon – Aug  1 – Hollywood Casino
Tue – Aug  2 – Gulf State Park 
     |
Mon – Aug  8 – Gulf State Park 
Tue – Aug  9 – Athens
     |   
Sat – Aug 13 – Athens
Sun – Aug 14 – Benchmark Meridian
Mon – Aug 15 – Poche’s
Tue – Aug 16 – Back at Lake Conroe

So I’ve now got all our reservations booked.  The Poche’s and Benchmark stays are both Passport America parks, so I’m saving $20 for each Poche’s stay, and $15 for the Benchmark one.

So in only three nights, saving a total of $55, that more than covers the $44 a year that a PPA membership costs. We’ve had a PPA membership since we first rented a Cruise America Class C to check out RV’ing in 2007, and it’s never taken more than a week or so of traveling to pay for our membership.

Around 1pm I went down to the office to see if we could stay over here a couple of extra days so we wouldn’t have to go back to Lake Conroe on July 3rd, in the middle of the 4th of July weekend. Not something I was looking forward too.

So, the answer to the question of whether or not they will let us stay here a couple of extra days was . . . NO!

Our Alliance membership doesn’t give us the option of two $29 week stays like some do. But I was hoping they could at least cut us some slack, but apparently not. But I did learn something that will help out even more.

I knew that we could rent a site here on an annual lease, but what I didn’t realize is that we could rent a site on a monthly basis, outside of our Thousand Trails membership. And it’s a really good deal, at least for us

We can get a 50amp site for $375 a month plus electric @ $012.5 per KW.  Right now, because we’ve used up our 50 free days, and are paying the extra $3 per day for 50amp, a month stay, (two weeks at a time) costs us $240. And when you figure in 35 or so gallons of diesel going back and forth, we’re looking at about $335 a month, and we still have to move every two weeks.

And, as Jan says, “ . . . . the wear and tear on the rig, and us.”

So as it stands now, tomorrow I’ll book us a month here starting July 3rd, which means we’ll stay here until July 31st when we’ll leave for Alabama.

Hopefully it will all work out, and we’ll be here for six weeks straight.

Thought for the Day:

I posted the other day about using Photoshop, or in my case Paint Shop Pro, to ‘doctor’ photos. But this video takes it to a whole new level, seamlessly mixing Cary Grant in North By Northwest with elements of Star Wars.

It’s called Alfred Hitchcock’s Star Wars: Darth By Darthwest.

Check it out. It’s amazing!

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