Our RV Adventures

We give all our gates a name, and since we’re right down the road from the Blue Moon BBQ, we’re now officially at the Blue Moon Gate.

Jan and I were up at 6:30 this morning, to get be ready when Jamie got here with our sewer trailer.

Of course Jamie didn’t get here until about 8, but that gave us time for coffee and breakfast bread, so it all worked out. Jamie parked the trailer at the end of the pad, actually off the end, to allow more room to park the generator trailer behind it.

Getting a closer look at the mat shows why it can support semi trucks.

Speaking of trucks, they started rolling in early, enough so that our big pad got a lot more crowded.

As the day progressed they made a lot of progress laying down the metal plates that they build the rig on.

Then when the time comes, they oil them up and use two big cranes to drag the entire derrick over to the next hole.

And since they’re doing three holes here, we get to see them do it twice. And maybe even better, when they did this on a Marathon/H&P rig we were following in 2012, we got a couple of days off. So we hope that holds true here too.

Before Jamie left this morning, heading over to see Dick and Judy Mott, we decided that he would come back early (6:30 am early) tomorrow morning to move our generator trailer into place, and then we would follow with the coach. By doing it this early we were hoping to avoid blocking the trucks coming in and going out.

But about 2pm, there was a knock at the door and they wanted us to move now. When I said we normally don’t log trucks in and out during rigging up and rigging down, and that we planned to move tomorrow morning, the guy laughed and said he didn’t care about logging. He just wanted us out of his yard because he needed to stack stuff where our rig was parked. Maybe they’re running out of room because they’re already stocking up on drill pipe, and they don’t even have the rig up yet.

So I got on the phone to Jamie to see if he could come back over this afternoon to get us moved. Luckily he wasn’t too far away, and said he’d be here in about an hour.

While he hooked up to our generator trailer, I started our onboard generator to keep the AC’s going while we got moved over to the pad.

It took a little jockeying, but we finally got on the pad and parked. We parked as close as we could to the trailers, allowing just enough room to open the slide. This gave us the maximum amount of space on the mat to set up on.

Right now it looks like they may be ready for us to start logging sometime Thursday, maybe. If so, we plan on going into Bryan/College Station for dinner and some supplies from Wal-Mart.

Hopefully it will work out.

Thought for the Day:

Think space is empty. This shows all the satellites in orbit around the Earth. And there’s more going up every day.

asdfasdfa

Jan and I were up at 5:45am to be ready to pull out of our Indian Woods Campground site by 6:45.

Normally Jan drives the truck behind me when we come in to a new site, but after scouting out the site yesterday afternoon and seeing we would have plenty of room to unhitch and get turned around, we got hitched up and pulled out about 7am.

Pulling onto the pad about 45 minutes, we found Jamie waiting for us with our Generator/Water trailer. While Jan talked to Jamie I got us unhitched  and then pulled the coach around and parked off to the side of the gate.

Jamie then parked the generator trailer behind us and got our shore power and water hooked up. Then we waited, waited for anyone to show up to tell us where to actually park.

Jamie didn’t think we’d be able to stay inside the gate where we were now parked since we were pretty close to the three wells. So we looked outside the gate for other ideas, and found two possible sites.

The first one wasn’t really very good, and would require a lot of work to get it ready. Right along the fence line, it was basically a water-filled ditch, and was only wide enough to park the rig and the two support trailers all in a line, as well as our canopy and pickup.

The next, better place, was on the left side, right before you come into the gate. It was big enough, but the ground was very soft from the rain.

Not something I’d want to drive the coach out on. But with 6 inches of gravel, it might be a possibility.

But we’d have to wait and see. But finally someone showed up, someone who as it turned out was pretty ticked off that we had a motor coach, and not as he said, ‘a small camper’ that would fit on the side of the road. But when we showed him the foot of water filling the ditch, he mellowed somewhat.

Jamie finally gave up and left, saying he’d be back tomorrow morning with our sewer trailer, lights, and the rest of our setup stuff.

Then a couple of hours later a pipeline guy showed up to look at the problem, and quickly came up with a solution. He was going to lay down roadway mats, made up of double stacked timber planks. And that’s exactly what he did.

It only them about 30 minutes to get this laid and packed down. I guess if it will hold the shovel, it will hold the our rig.

Tomorrow they’re supposed to bring in a load of rock to build a ramp up onto the pad and then we’ll see.

It rained on and off all day, but it seemed to drain off pretty quickly. And with us at the top of the hill, we should stay relatively dry.

We hope.

It’s beginning to look like this is not a workover, but a full blown drill job of three holes. Looks like they’ve already got the cranes here to drag the drill rig between the holes, and then this afternoon a flatbed came in carrying what looked like the big metal plates that they build the rig on so they can drag it.

But we’ll know more tomorrow, I guess.

Maybe.

For Sale: Parachute. Only used once, never opened, small stain. – Anonymous

asdfasdfadf