The Duchess has returned

On Wednesday morning we finally got The Duchess out of the repair shop. The new transmission had been installed on Monday afternoon and the shop had finished it final testing on Tuesday. After some issues with the invoice (the repair shop's computer servers went down on Wednesday morning), the final invoice was faxed and paid so we were able to drive off in The Duchess. We have had a great relationship with National Indoor RV Center in Lewisville TX where we purchased The Duchess. They have done what they promised us to make sure that everything on the motor home is in working order even allowing us to have the repair work done here in Austin rather than having to take the RV back to Lewisville.

We took the motor home out to my dad's farm which has full hookups (electric/water/sewer) and got her all set up.  The new transmission worked great on the 50 mile trip from the repair shop to the farm. My dad, who is 82, is on the road with his motor home for the next three months so we will take advantage of his absence from the farm to get to know The Duchess.  We need to spend time learning about how all of the systems in the RV work and see what we will be able to store in the closets, drawers and basement storage. We took another load of clothes and other items from the apartment down to the farm's barn and gave a desktop computer and shredder to Connie's sister.

I spent a couple of hours trying to get DirectTV set up in The Duchess. First of all they sent us the wrong receivers (they sent three HD receivers all with DVR's instead of HD only receivers) and so before we could activate the receiver they had to "re-organize" our account. We decided to keep one of the HD-DVR receivers and send the other two back. DirectTV will be sending us a replacement HD receiver but without a DVR for our bedroom TV. We tried for a long time to get the HD-DVR receiver to work, but it kept losing the satellite signal. We finally ran out of time and I gave up for the day. I will try moving the RV location a few yards to see if the signal is being blocked by trees and hopefully get it working this week-end.

Today Connie and I attended our last yoga class at the Brushy Creek Community Center. Connie has been going to these yoga classes for a lot longer than I have, but we will both miss all of the people in the classes. We will especially miss Katie McBrearty- Shield who taught the class. She is a great teacher, a great friend and an inspiration to both of us. We also made a trip to visit the grave sites of Connie's mom and dad who both died with-in a month of each other late in 2013.  Tonight we will get to eat fish one last time at Brooks and Heidi Ivey's house and enjoyed one last visit with our friends.

Down to our last couple of days here at the apartment dog-sitting Murphy and Emma. We will leave Saturday morning after feeding the dogs to head to the farm and spend Saturday night sleeping in our own bed inside The Duchess. HOORAY!!