Monthly Archives September 2014

We took a left turn in Albuquerque and headed North to Salt Lake.
I usually don’t post an update about the drive, but this is a special place. I’m not sure the pictures will even do it justice. I really should have gotten out the good camera for some of these.

Another Tengo Park, but it is free and the speed (at 6:30 am) seems to be decent. I was able to make my morning video call without much interruption.

I didn’t want to be so harsh on the WiFi signal here. I worked all day from here so I know it was at least usable during the day. But I did these tests at about 2:30 and these were the results. The first one is connected to my wifi bridge (and going through my work VPN) the second one is directly connected to the hotspot with my laptop. The manager of the resort mentioned that they were upgrading their wifi and adding new repeaters sometime soon. The new service will also have the ability for a user to pay for a limited time boost in bandwidth to download a program or stream some Netflix. I think that would be a welcome addition to the RV Wifi Industry.

We stayed on the west side of Dallas so that we could be nearer Laurel’s family.  On Thursday laurels dad flew into Ft Worth and came to see us at the park.  It was nice to let someone else see how we pack up and leave,  our process has improved so much since our frantic first days.
He rode in the RV with us for the hour drive through Ft Worth to Weatherford.  We checked into the park and went straight to meet the grandparents at Olive Garden.

Say what  you will about chain restaurants but at least you know what you’re getting.  You can’t beat the value of unlimited soup and salad.

The RV Park was new and clean.  We didn’t get a chance to use anything because we were constantly out meeting family...

We actually stayed in Arlington, about 6 miles from Cowboys Stadium. But if they get to be the Dallas Cowboys, then this post is called Dallas, Tx.

Treetops Carefree RV Resort
Another Tengo Internet based park. But this time you only get 1 day free then it’s $5.95 per day (discounts for bulk purchases), it was passable. I really wasn’t expecting much. It’s one of those that get’s a ‘B’ rating but then varies greatly during the day.

Their Tengo account page seems to indicate that you get a lot more bandwidth before they start to throttle you, the last Tengo site only had a max of 700mb. I’ll have to try to use that tonight!

Another thing that we found out is that you’re only paying for one computer to connect at a time. So I used the wifi bridge to connect our router to their network. Which also had the benefit of speeding up the connection to and ‘A’ rating and knocking 40ms off the ping time. (a 3x increase!)

Austin is one of those cities that everyone tells you that you will like before you get there and they’re probably not wrong. I say probably because it seems like everyone would love a city with a college town vibe, tons of live music, great beers, friendly people, clean rivers, low-ish prices. The only down side is that it’s in the middle of Texas!

Again, not the best. But I was there on a weekend, so I didn’t have to work with it.

New Orleans is somewhere we have talked about going to for a while. Laurel spent a lot of time there with her cousin Sam after high school. She always said that someday we should go down there for a weekend, well this was someday!

So this happened.

As we were rushing to get the RV to the courthouse so that we could register it in Florida we ran into a little snag. We got ourselves into a tight parking lot in the back of the courthouse. As I nervously positioned the RV to make a tight turn around a corner I forgot to account for the fact that the back of the RV swings out when you make tight turns. In doing that I clipped the fender of a Jeep and got the tire and fender of our tow dolly stuck under the front of the Jeep. Whoops.

The back ‘panel’ of the RV got ripped off on one side and the tow dolly fender has some pretty substantial dents. But nothing structural is wrong with either of them. So we’ve just duck taped the damaged fiberglass to keep the moisture out and got back on the road.

The owner of the jeep, a local firefighter, has been very nice about this incident (so far) and Progressive Insurance has been very pleasant to deal with about all this (so far).

We will keep you up to date on all of this.