Monday, May 19, 2014

An Update from Hereford

We arrived Saturday morning and had zero problems with the MBAT (Mom's big ass truck), our 14000 pd. 5ver or the pickup we agreed to deliver. It was only around 500 miles or so; but when you have that much equipment, and weight to move, it becomes a challenge. Our odyssey started around 1300 hours (1 pm) on Friday from Hidden Valley RV Park in Von Ormy.
By the way we continue to preach about the many virtues of Hidden Valley and have referred a lot of folks to them. It makes no pretense about being some high dollar luxury park; but it does have beautiful trees and landscaping. It is also a great place to decompress and seemingly get away from it all; yet San Antonio is only minutes away. Teri and Mark live on site and are the best hosts we have met in over 5 years of fulltiming. I make no promises, but Teri knows the gate guard community and goes out of her way to make the cost of your stay very reasonable.
But, I digress, yet again. That morning we had to go to Floresville to pick up a pickup that the company asked that we deliver. We would have done it anyway; but SiteWatch is a great company and we were glad to accommodate them. Since that pickup needed an oil change, we went ahead and also had the MBAT done. A couple of bags of ice, some drinks and a top off of fuel and off we went. We swung by Von Ormy and hooked up the 5ver and headed toward the panhandle. The MBAT is a 2005 Ford F250 with a 6.0 Powerstroke diesel and it handled the hill country with aplomb, the transmission fan serving as the only reminder of the work the truck was doing. Oh; we did slow down, but that was primarily for the sake of fuel mileage (aprox. 9.5 mpg). We made it to Post, TX just before night fall, found a RV park (with trains yards away), ate dinner and crashed for the night. We hit the road fairly early, rolled through Lubbock and caught I-27 towards Amarillo. Then it was off the interstate and on to Farm to Market roads and two lanes, through Dimmit, TX and on in to Hereford, TX, arriving around noon. Our RV park is down a gravel road, just a outside of town, and is bare bones. SiteWatch is paying a percentage of the rent, and we have been told that this is about the best you can find in the area. At least we don't have to traverse miles of caliche lease roads to get here. We are adapting to a life without gate alarms, no logging, unlimited water, no generator noise and civilization just down the road. Hereford doesn't have a lot to offer and "country perfume" permeates the air on a regular basis. It supposedly is the beef capital of the world. However, we don't have to drive 150 plus miles to get groceries either. We also happen to be less than a mile from a major rail route and the cacophony of train horns requires some getting used to. We are working on a wind farm, about ten minutes from our RV park. There is a central yard that we will work out of with wind generator sites spread out through several counties. One of us will be responsible for the yard and the other will roam, providing security for the sites and equipment. It is very rural and surrounded by grazing country, so night time should be interesting. Our shifts are basically four days long with two twelve hour shifts of days followed by the same at night. We are enjoying being able to spend time together and are looking forward to the challenges of the new job. I'll update soon!

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