Lake Livingston

Sunday was overcast and grey with a promise that the sun just might break through.

We decided to drive over to Lake Livingston State Park and possibly hike a couple of trails. Lake Livingston is very pretty and on a warm, sunny day would be gorgeous, but due to the recent heavy rains there was lots of water lying around and it was chilly, so after a drive around and a walk around the marina we gave up on the idea of the hike.

After leaving the park we drove over to the townsite of Swartwout http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/tx/swartwout.html which was at one time a ferry boat crossing and the original county seat of Polk County. Unless I missed it there is really nothing left to see.

Mobile Broadband

We still had the mobile broadband to sort out, so we decided we were going to have to go with the very expensive pay-as-you-go option, but only use it for banking. As we were staying in Livingston, we decided we may as well go back to the very helpful Jennifer in Walmart and get it from there, now it’s all set up and ready to use, but with a very careful eye on how long we’re online.

Things are starting to come together.

We have a fifth wheel!

We drove up to Nacogdoches on a sunny Saturday morning to check out a fifth wheel we’d been following on the website of Genuine RV www.genuinerv.com.

The dealership was very busy when we arrived, but the very nice lady on reception gave us the key and told us to go ahead and have a look around she’d send someone out to us as soon as she could.

We found the model we’d been following and spent the next 2 or 3 hours poking our heads into every nook and cranny. One thing we couldn’t understand was how come the propane storage areas didn’t have a lock on them but apparently it is illegal in the US for them to be locked unlike at home where everything is locked.

We now have a fifth wheel! This is soooo exciting!

We bought a truck!

We bought a truck! It is a fabulous beast with 4WD, a camera for reversing and, especially helpful for vertically challenged folks like me a cute little step! It has lots of other stuff as well, but I’m not technical and as long as it tows what we need that’s all I need to know.

We took it for a test drive around the block, Mike drove out and Mike survived me driving back – he is a terrible passenger!

We have a Big Black Texas Truck!

Mobile Broadband

None of the Wifi we’ve come across is secure enough for us to use to do our banking, so mobile broadband was a must. All the information pointed us to Verizon as having the best coverage for our needs.

The best option would be to take out a monthly contract, but as we’re not US citizens and have no SSN we weren’t sure this route would be available to us.

The Verizon store manager assured us it would be doable, unfortunately Verizon’s credit control department disagreed, so despite his best efforts, that was the end of that.

Sorting out legalities

Thursday we drove up 59N to Livingston to sort out the legalities. We now have an address so that we can legally register our vehicles and thanks to the very helpful Jennifer in Walmart we also have a pay-as-you-go cell.

Houston, we have………………

Wind, cold, rain! After leaving Newark where it was cold but sunny with lots of melting snow from a storm that had passed through earlier in the day, we arrived in Houston to wind, cold and rain!

This may not bode well for a few days on Galveston beach I could get sand in my margarita!