Houston

We arrived about 2:30 Monday afternoon into Houston.  We had a good drive with only 1 U-turn in downtown Dallas (Yes, we were not paying close attention to Gladys, our GPS). 

We will leave Houston on Saturday to make the 6+ hour drive down to the southern most tip of South Padre Island where we plan to spend about a month hanging out on the beach.  We will spend this week visiting with friends and family here and making our final trip preparations to the RV (like finding a chair and stocking up food). 

We expect to have beautiful weather here with high's in the upper 70's.  I think last night was the first night we have spent in the RV without the heater on.  Its good to be in the warm South (for at least another month or two...)

On the road again....

After a great week with Angela's family, we will leave Missouri in a
couple hours to start the drive down to Houston to visit with Matt's
family. We expect to drive about 5 hours today to make it half way
there.

I wanted to share my view of the trip out here. I think this was
somewhere before the Colorado border into Kansas.

Missouri

We arrived at Angela's sisters house on Monday afternoon and after
getting both the truck and trailer stuck in the mud around the house,
we did finally get it all setup. We didn't feel too bad as Laura
almost got stuck the next day in the same place. Good ole Missouri mud!

We will stay here through the weekend and leave for Houston on Monday.

Sent from Angela's iPhone

The newest addition to our family...

I wanted to share a photo of the newest addition to our family,
Pinkie. She will be making the trip with us, so stay tuned for her
great adventures!

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Our first night

Exhausted but sleeping in our new home in a RV park a couple miles
from our townhome that is now empty.

Frantic week

Just a quick update on the trip status. We have our home rented out
and will be heading out on Saturday. Our first stop is Missouri to
visit with Angela's family. This week has been spent frantically
packing and scheduling work on the house. The movers come tomorrow to
move our furniture into storage so tomorrow night will be our official
first night in the RV. So close...

And the planning continues....

We are in full swing of planning our trip now with only a week to two weeks for departure.  We have spent the last couple of days over at the trailer finishing up some items. 

We have definitely figured out that nothing is easy when it comes to these things. 

Here are a few things that we have finally gotten accomplished:

• When we bought the trailer, it had a king sized bed installed in it.  We decided that we didn't need a king and wanted some of the space back so our plan was to remove the king bed and replace it with our queen.  Matt and Ted spent a day cutting down the plywood frame to accomodate the smaller mattress and we now have a king sized mattress in our basement.  After all the construction, Matt measured the opening from the wall to the dresser to discover that our normal queen sized bed would not fit, it was too long.  Well, the search then began for a queen short to fit.  We finally found one yesterday and proceeded to struggle the thing into the trailer, only to find out that he didn't quite cut enough off the end of it.  So one more thing to do before we leave is to fire up the generator and attack the bed frame again with a saw.
• Matt finished installing the inverter so that we could run 110 volt appliance off of the 4 new batteries that we installed.  Took a couple of days to take apart all the compartments under the trailer to have it wired up right.
• We found plastic tubs for the storage place under the bedroom.  It took the two of us in Wal-Mart armed with a tape measure and a map on graph paper to accomplish the task.  Needless to say, Sunday at Wal-Mart probably not our best idea.
• The storage box up top and the racks are all installed.  The wind surfers and kite boarding equipment now have a home.  Now if we can just find homes for the mountain bikes.

Below are a couple of pictures from the inside and outside of the RV.

Here is a picture from the front of the trailer.  The first slideout you see is the bedroom and the second is the dining table and couch area in the living area.

This is taken from the back of the trailer.  We loved the large rear window.  You can see the kitchen slide out from this angle. 

This is a picture from the bedroom area viewing the back living area and the kitchen.  It took us quite a while to finally find a model that had a really good kitchen in it.  I guess Matt will be expecting me to cook a lot now!!!

This is a picture taken from the back of the RV and looking at the living/dining slide out.

This is of the bedroom in the front of the trailer.  This was taken with the king bed in it so we actually have a bit more room now.  Great closet across the entire front of the RV.

I'll update in the next couple of days with our preliminary itinerary.