Travel – RV Castaways

Van Horn RV Park

February 15, 2019/0 Comments/in Campgrounds, Photography, RV, Travel /by Richard

An overnight stay. In the dirt. But with a lot of Texas character.

Our travel plan, when we left Myakka River Motorcoach Resort on February 6th, looked like this:

The drive from Alsatian RV Resort to Van Horn RV Park was one of the longest legs of our trip clocking in at almost nine hours behind the wheel. We were now better than halfway across the southern United States.

There are very few choices in places to stay in this part of Texas. I must admit that our arrival into Van Horn RV Park was not very promising.

Entering the park confirmed my suspicion that this was really not much more than a dirt field.

There was character here. Especially with a few of the rigs that were clearly planted for the long term. Those of us looking for an overnight stay were placed in a faraway corner of the park. Safety in numbers I guess.

There was a certain rustic charm to the place. We walked back out to the sign thoroughly enjoying the experience of being in this part of Texas.

The sign does say free WiFi. And you definitely get what you pay for namely unusable WiFi. I couldn’t pull in any cellular either. Unplugged for the day.

The toad was covered in dirt. I found a spray wash about two miles from the RV park and gave the car a bit of a bath. Detailing the coach and toad will have to wait until we get to California.

We made a decision to drop our next stop on the way. Hacienda RV Resort, a mere three hour drive from Van Horn RV Park, was cancelled and our stay at the Motorcoach Resort in Chandler, Arizona, extended.

A very long day behind the wheel to get to the Motorcoach Resort.

Here is a quick video of our trip from Alsatian to Van Horn. Aside from the congestion in San Antonio, the drive was wonderful.

The Drive to Alsatian

February 14, 2019/0 Comments/in Campgrounds, Travel /by Richard

You missed the video, didn’t you?

Well, the WiFi and cellular at Alsatian and at our following stop, Van Horn, was pretty much useless. A few hundred kilobits per second. Possibly enough for basic email. Nowhere near enough to upload several hundred megabytes of video.

Until today.

We are now in Chandler, Arizona for a couple of days before our last leg to California. We have a short hop of about five hours to complete our drive from Florida.

A bit of catch up on the blog over the next few days. I’ll share a few highlights from our time in the Texas dirt and our close encounter with the U.S. border patrol as we drove from Texas through New Mexico.

Here is that missing video from our post about Alsatian.

Alsatian RV Resort

February 12, 2019/0 Comments/in Campgrounds, Photography, Travel /by Richard

Another day closer to California. A somewhat shorter drive of roughly five hours brought us from Rayford Crossing RV Resort to the Alsatian RV Resort near San Antonio, Texas.

First day of rain although it did not hit us until late in the day after we had set up the coach.

Nice park. Concrete pads, concrete roads. Good separation between sites although we lucked out and we have a very large corner site. Internet is very poor. Went down last night due to saturation. Very weak cellular and I was unable to post until this morning. The rest of the park is still sleeping as I post.

A few photos to share from Alsatian and then it is time for Lorraine and I to get up and going again. Long driving day today, probably nine hours or so. Fortunately the last two stops on our run to California, one in New Mexico and the other in Arizona, are much shorter legs. After today’s drive, the long hauls are finished.

Here is our site. Nothing much in the way of landscaping, just a very level run of concrete. Easy to enter and exit.

The sites have reasonable separation although if you score a corner site, like ours, you get an oversized lot.

Alsatian does have a small clubhouse, a pool, and a golf course. A good spot for a few days on the way to somewhere else.

Rayford Crossing RV Resort

February 10, 2019/2 Comments/in Campgrounds, Travel /by Richard

Shake, rattle, and roll. That would characterize a fair section of our 11-hour drive yesterday. To be fair, most of the drive from Heritage Motor Coach Resort in Orange Beach, Alabama to Rayford Crossing RV Resort was fine. Good roads and pleasant driving conditions.

There were sections of I-10, particularly in Louisiana and at the border into Texas, that were remarkably bad.

We did make it safely to our site at Rayford Crossing. Traffic in Houston, late in the day Saturday, was heavy and the last 30 minutes or so of a very long day behind the wheel, proved a bit challenging.

I was very happy to get our coach up on the jacks, despite the somewhat uneven concrete pad.

Rayford Crossing is a nice place to park for a couple of nights. Clean, quiet yet very much in the middle of a large, busy urban environment.

Rest and recovery day. Tomorrow’s drive is a bit shorter, only 4 hours behind the wheel.

Here is a video of our drive from Heritage Motor Coach Resort. The video ends before we made Houston because, well, you will see why towards the latter part of the video.

Heritage Motor Coach Resort

February 8, 2019/2 Comments/in Campgrounds, Photography, Travel /by Richard

We are now in Alabama. Three days of driving and we have at last cleared the state of Florida. We are staying at the Heritage Motor Coach Resort in Orange Beach. We will be here for two days, giving us a bit of a break as we make our way west to California.

Heritage is a surprisingly small but beautiful Class A resort.

The clubhouse is on two floors, overlooking the water.

Coming into the resort, you will see this one street with the clubhouse at the end.

The road continues along a sharp u-turn and comes out the opposite end. One way in. One way out. The road is not much longer than a quarter mile. 79 sites.

The sites are on the narrow side, roughly 40 feet across. Fairly deep. Well appointed. Each site has its own coach house.

The middle row, the heart of the resort, has sites with a common walking path in the middle. I suspect that it would be a very loud part of the resort in season as the sites in this section are connected to each other by this walking path.

One shot of the walking path from the bottom of the U-shaped road.