Planning my way south.......

I will be leaving Mesa Verde 2 weeks from today.

This is my first workamping job and there are mixed emotions with leaving.  I work with a great group of ladies, but I am getting anxious to travel and to visit with my daughter. The lodge at Mesa Verde closes on October 20th, there would be no work for me here anyway, so it is time to move on. And it snows here...don't want to stay the winter in a snowy place.

I will be starting a volunteer job in Texas on November 4th. I will have 10 days for travel, RV maintenance and visiting.  My daughter lives around 25 miles from my new job, hopefully we can coordinate our days off of work.

There aren't too many workamping jobs available near my daughters house and the volunteer job will provide a nice, quiet RV site in exchange for the hours I work in the Visitor Center. I am only scheduled to work for 2 months, but I am hoping they will have a space for me to stay longer. 

When I leave here, I will go east a bit, then head down into New Mexico. I'll go east across New Mexico and then cut across the panhandle of Texas and down into the Hill Country area of Texas.

I will probably be driving between 200-275 miles a day.

I'm making notes, on index cards, of RV parks along the route.  I make a card for each park that I would consider staying at. I list the address, phone number, rates, discounts and notes about any reviews that I have found.  Each day, during my travels, I make notes on the cards about how far the next set of parks are from my current location. No need to drag out the computer along the route.  I sometimes still refer to some apps on the iPhone, but usually the phone is too slow when I am in the "middle of nowhere".

I also make cards for places of interest along the route. I will usually note the addresses and phone numbers of "Travel Information" locations. I also make a card listing the mile markers of rest stops along the highways - this information is easy to find on the internet ahead of time.

Having these cards makes it easy to make a decision when I get tired of driving.  I can look over the cards at a rest stop and decide how much further I want to go. Sometimes I program the addresses of several parks into my GPS and then I just have to choose the location and I am set to go. If I arrive at a park and don't like the looks of it, I have more parks to choose from.  

We all know that the GPS can take us in the wrong direction. Having basic directions on the index cards will help me out when the GPS is lost.

It takes a long time to drive across Texas

I'm going to make an appointment at the Camping World in New Braunfels, TX. I'm planning a few updates and some routine maintenance for the RV. Having the appointment will help me to stay on schedule, but it will cut back on the amount of sightseeing I will do on this trip.

I have a head start on the RV maintenance today. The water heater would not stay on, it turned out the be the PC board. When the mobile mechanic was here to fix that, he also changed out the valve that was leaking on the water heater.

I asked him to remove the propane furnace and to cap off the propane. The furnace was too big for my small rig and it was noisy. I prefer my Eden Pure electric heater. Removing the furnace gives me additional storage space, too.

My extended service plan covered the water heater repair, after the deductible, of course. My extended service plan is through Cornerstone, this is the 2nd time I have used it without any complications or problems.