Does an RV feel like home?

Trent is your driver for this post.

Last Sunday we left Texas for New Mexico.  On the way out of Texas I got a weird feeling that we were somehow leaving home. The next day I told Susanne this and she said she felt the same way. I wasn’t expecting that feeling at all. When we left Indiana I felt like if we broke down on the side of the road we would already be home because we were in the RV. 

The overlook of Ohio River in Hanover, Indiana

However, in western Texas I got the feeling that if we broke down we would somehow not be near home. That doesn’t make a lot of sense because although we are now Fexans (fake Texans), we don’t have a home in Texas - we have a mailbox.  I guess I was starting to feel our home was in Texas State Parks.  It’s also possible San Angelo, Texas felt a little bit like home since I lived there for 9 months in the early 90’s.

However, now that feeling is gone. The RV and our new RV park feel like home. We love our new place again and just signed up to stay almost another week. When we are out and about in Roswell, it feels like we are just a few miles from home. If we at a park and it's starting to get dark we ask Sam, “Are you ready to go home?” and when we walk into the RV it feels like we are home again.

Home

Slowing down: Update on travel plans.

Trent will be your driver for this post.

Our original plan had us coming to Texas (check) and then heading out fairly quickly up into Colorado and toward the Pacific Northwest for the summer and fall and back down south for the winter. Now however we will be in Texas for all of July (Austin and San Antonio) and then only plan to make it to southern or central California by the fall or early winter by taking short hops west from Texas. We plan to head north in the spring and be in the Pacific Northwest for the summer of 2017 - a year later than first planned.

Why the change?

We like Texas a lot. 
We are dealing with the heat better than expected. Our AC unit keeps our living space cooler than our little window AC unit did in the house in Indiana so the summer is actually better so far. Plus we lived in Tennessee for about 10 years in total and the heat and humidity there are not that much different than here in Texas.

Slow travel is more fun and relaxing.
We moved quickly between Tennessee and Livingston, Texas. Moving every few days or every day is not as much fun as staying somewhere for a week or two.  Moving day ends up taking most of the day making getting work or anything else done much harder. Staying longer at each place makes it easy to work and allows us to explore more of the area before moving on.

Money: Instead of making two trips north and and one south we will be taking one trip west and north over the next year. This basically should cost about half as much as doing two trips in terms of gas.  Plus the longer you stay at RV parks - the bigger discount you can get.

All that said, our plans are subject to change. This is one reason we moved into the RV. If we change our minds - it is very easy just to drive in a different direction.

Scenes from Texas

We're in Texas now! AND we're Texans! With Texas plates and Texas driver's licenses! (However, a Texan friend tells me - and I believe her, because she seemed very serious about it - that we are  not actually residents until we make our chili without beans and have our photos taken amongst blue bonnets, some sort of flower that Texans apparently really love.) 

Yesterday we established our residency all in one day. It involved a lot of filling out of forms and writing of checks, but it got done and now we're Texans. Or fake Texans. Fexans. That sounds more honest. Trent is going to write a blog post very soon detailing how one obtains Texas residency. You know. Just in case you want to follow in our RV tracks.

As he'll describe, the first step to establishing a Texas residency is obtaining a legit Texas address. You could go whole hog and buy or rent a place, OR you could be cheap like us and get an address through the Escapees RV Club. 

 

That's right: you can get a mailing address that the DMV and tax offices will recognize and honor even though everyone involved knows that you're not a real live Texan. They will even welcome you to the state and do an Oscar-worthy job of acting like they want you here (I don't think that has ever happened to me at the DMV before now).

Escapees also has a campground, and that's where we're currently parked. Despite the heat (shockingly, it's hot), Clark is perfectly comfortable beneath a nice little stand of trees.

 

It's not a swanky RV park, but it's got everything we need and the management is super professional. They've clearly been doing this a while and know what RVers want, like laundry machines and shade.

 

To celebrate our Fexan status, Sam and I drove down to Houston today to visit the children's museum. Can I just say that Houston + heat + lots of children = a really loud museum experience? But that was fine. Sam enjoyed it, clearly:

 

 

 

A coup for us: the museum honored the ASTC reciprocal membership we have through the Kentucky Science Center, so the visit was free! (Parking was not.)