Arrival At Texas Lakeside RV Resort
Thanks for your hospitality Chip and Joanna, but it’s time for us to head south. Yes, we had just one more travel day of slightly under 300 miles to complete our month-long relocation from Bar Harbor, ME to Port Lavaca, TX. With our final destination clearly in sight, adrenaline carried is through this fairly typical travel day. Our travels had us traverse some Interstate highways, as well as some county and state roads through rural Texas.
While they say things are bigger in Texas, we also learned on todays trip that things are also FASTER in Texas! It’s not uncommon in our travels to see 70 MPH speed limits on limited access highways. Ok, so today we saw some 75 MPH. Then a little later an 80 MPH speed limit sign caught our attention. Then our eyes got bigger when we saw an 85 MPH speed limit sign on a toll road heading east from Austin! Yes, 85 MPH! Now, keep in mind that no matter what the speed limit signs say, the Big Tow’er, Charlie and the Pilot rarely, if ever, exceed 65 - 70 MPH. It’s more fuel efficient, and quite honestly it’s just safer.
We pulled into Texas Lakeside RV Resort in Port Lavaca, TX mid-afternoon on Sunday. We had looked at so many pictures and Google images of the Resort it seemed almost like we had been here before! We went into the office and after we explained to Dorothy why she didn’t have a reservation form for Gibbons, we were ready to head to our site. All was well and good, but to what site? Dorothy had no information on that, but after a quick call to the owners we were in. Site 24, a lakeside, back-in site, it would be. Yep, if all goes as planned, Site 24 will be our home for the next 365 days. Yes, one year! We got backed in and settled into our manicured, concrete site. And yes, since the Big Tow’er is a little bigger than your normal tow vehicle, there may have been some slight damage to the grass on the site across the road. But have no fear, I’ll probably be the one to fix the damage.
So, why are we in Port Lavaca, TX? Well, when we began to plan our next workamping job after Acadia Bike & Coastal Kayaking, we had decided that we would be open to a job for the winter season, or longer if necessary. While our initial searches took us to Florida, Texas and Arizona, since that’s where most of the savvy full-time RV’ers head for the winter months, we realized that those same places would get really hot in the summer. We came to the conclusion that we were ok with a year at one place, if that’s what the job required. The summer heat would be a welcome change since we had not been anywhere for a while where it was actually hot! We’ve obviously been places with very nice, moderate weather, but not anyplace we would call hot. We had also decided that we would prefer to work at a campground for our next gig. Since none of our previous workamping jobs had been at a campground, we both felt it would be good to have campground work on our resume. With all of those things in mind, our search led us to Texas Lakeside RV Resort in Port Lavaca. It was a fairly new RV resort with 138 sites. All of the pictures we saw showed it was well taken care of and definitely a place we could work. After chatting with the owner, Doug, on the phone a couple of times, we determined it sounded like a good fit for us. Doug asked us to commit for one year, our site and all utilities would be paid for, and we would be paid for all hours worked. His immediate need was for three days a week, eight hours a day, for a total of 24 hours a week. We were hoping for a few more hours than that, but with our site and utilities paid for, we decided we could make it work. Besides, we would have four days free to be creative with ways to make some extra money.
All of that led us to today, our arrival day at Texas Lakeside RV Resort. We settled into our site and started setting things up anticipating our longest stay in one place for the next 365 days.
On Monday we met the owners, Doug and Dana, in person, with plans to start working the next day. Hey, we’re here, why not get started. We look forward to learning the ropes here and also having the opportunity to explore Texas over the next year. Talk to ya’ll soon!
