Rainbow's End Park

Monday:

Today was a travel day for us (the first one out of Central Texas). We completed all of the departure check-list, disconnected from our hook-ups and left Rosanky around 11:00 AM. We traveled the 200 miles to Rainbow's End Park which is located outside of Livingston Texas. Connie spent most of the trip "learning" how to use the Garmin RV GPS that we had been given as a retirement gift from the group of surgeons that I worked for before my retirement. Previously we had used a TomTom GPS  and of course everything is different with the Garmin. The trip took about 4 hours and we arrived at the campground at 3:00 PM. The Duchess handled the trip well and was much easier to drive than the Kountry Star we had before. The diesel engine in the rear is much quieter and the Comfort Drive System that Newmar uses makes The Duchess a joy to drive down the road. As I always tell Connie, just remember you are big and slow.

We checked into the campground and were assigned to Site 122. It is a back-end site near the edge of the campground closest to the highway. With Connie's assistance I was able to back it to the site on the first attempt (our first time backing a motorhome this large) and we got set up
.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that everything Connie had attached to The Duchess had remained in place during the trip.

Magnetic Knife Holder (Connie put up a catch bag just in case)

Our one painting inside The Duchess

The floral arrangement in the window shield attached with velcro

Once we had finished with the hookups, put the jacks down and extended the slides, we decided to go into Livingston for dinner and to pick up some groceries. We ate at a small bar/restaurant in downtown Livingston called the Blue Duck (from the Lonesome Dove books). Connie and I shared an order of fried catfish and fried chicken. After finishing our dinner, we went to the local HEB to shop. It is the smallest HEB either of us have ever been in, but we were able to get the items on our list. We returned back to the Duchess, took our evening walk through the campground, and then settled in for the evening. I spent about an hour on the phone with Direct TV to figure out why we got about 80% of the HD channels but not the other 20%. After going through a couple of people at Direct TV, I finally was able to talk to someone who knew about motorhomes and their issues. He determined that we were missing something called a "B Band" cable that is attached to the satellite cable and then to the receiver. Direct TV will ship this to us here in Livingston in a couple of days.

We opened up the second bottle of wine from the three we received at our Bon Voyage party, watched a little bit of TV before calling it a night. It always seems like a long day when you have to put everything up for departure and then get everything back out upon arrival.