Tyler to Lewisville and Beyond

We got all ready to leave Tyler State Park. Ken lined the truck up in front of the rig. I pressed the button to raise the front of the rig to match the height of the hitch. And pressed some more...until I realized that despite the motor sounds, nothing was happening. What to do? We started by calling a nearby RV place, but were put on hold for a long time waiting for their service department, which turned out to be a good thing, because it gave us time to think.

We realized that we could raise the rig using bottle jacks. We had to do that once before, when we first got Venture, so we knew that we could handle it, but we had given the bottle jacks away since we didn't foresee needing them again. Mistake. We went to AutoZone and got two new 6 ton bottle jacks. After only an hour and a half delay, we were on the road. At least we had an appointment with Mays RV in Lewisville, so this would just be one more thing for them to fix.

We were near our destination when someone in a passing vehicle honked and pointed to the rear of the trailer, so we pulled off the freeway. It turned out that the bike cover had somehow come free at one end and was flapping about. Luckily it was still all in one piece. We knew that we needed a strap on the center, but hadn't been able to find the webbing we needed. Now that's a priority.

When we pulled in to Mays, Ken said, "I feel like I've been through the wringer today!" We took our list of repairs needed in and talked to Phil, the service manager. When he came out to look at the rig and check out our issues, the front jacks operated with no problem. The bed slide was fine too, so that's two items we could cross off the list. Phil assured us that they would be able to take care of everything, and we headed over to Ed and Julie's house in Flower Mound. We'll be staying with them for a couple of days while the rig is in the shop.

When we got there, Julie was at the dentist's office with Cate and Sam, so we let ourselves in. She pulled in shortly, so we got hugs all around. Ed came home later and got his hugs.

Julie fixed quick cheesy pasta with mixed veggies for supper. The mixed veggies were different than any I had seen before--asparagus and carrots and green beans and corn.

We had gotten a message from Millenicom, our Verizon broadband reseller, warning us that we were about to go over the 5 GB per month limit for November--but how and why? I emailed them--they said we were at 4.85 GB, much higher than ever before, and that indicated we must be streaming data or doing major downloads of some kind. Ken came up with the answer--it must be our Mozy backup service. Mozy regularly updates its record of our files--2 GB for each of us. We were careful to do the original upload while at Terri's to use their network, and I had figured that the updates, which were supposed to be only changed files, would be relatively small. Oops. We're using Ed's network now. Fortunately, our Droid service really is "unlimited," and we can do almost everything on the Droid.