live. work. dream.

It’s time for the annual NuRVers Gathering of Friends!

NuRVers is a group of young, non-retired RVers living the dream life now, instead of waiting for a someday that may never happen. We come from a variety of backgrounds but all share one thing in common; the desire to live an adventurous life on the open road.

Come join us in Gonzales, Texas in April for good times and great people! Last year’s inaugural  gathering was a blast, we know this year’s will be even better.

Space is limited. Sign up today!

Just in case anyone was wondering if perhaps we thinking of “settling down” here at Jerry’s Acres, for the record, we are not ready to commit to staying here for the entire year. I know, I know, we just got here. Seems like yesterday we were getting bombed on champagne and playing Scrabble on our first night here.

But the aspens are turning yellow, there is a definite chill in the air. Soon we’ll do the sensible snowbird thing, and head south for the winter. For there’s still so much to see, and far too many adventures in store. And besides, Wyatt Ray needs to get out there on the road and see the great big world that’s out there waiting for him.

We’ve been busy making plans for our flight south. Looks like we’ll workamping in November and December, either in Kansas or Nevada. Then, we’ll head to see my familia in Southern California for Christmas (it wouldn’t be the same unless we had another sweltering Christmas day in the shadow of downtown L.A.). After that, we’ll more than likely turn east and head to New Braunfels, Texas again, to hook up with our NuRVers friends at Landa. But first, we’ll stop at the Slabs again for some free boondocking and interesting ambiance.

But winter won’t be all fun and games. Our budget situation is such that we’ll need to get our butts in gear and start making some real money now.  Getting to Texas is going to cost us, big time. So this means even more plowing away at our online endeavors, as well as workamping or (gasp!) temp jobs in bigger cities that can bring in some real money (well, as “real” as it gets when you live like hoboes) until we return to Colorado in late March.

The fulltime RVing lifestyle beckons.

Almost a year to the date we were in Luckenbach last year with Jerry, we returned to boondock in the same field in April. Remembering the fun Jerry had romping in their field and hanging out at the bar was bittersweet, but the kind folks, cold beer and incredible music of Luckenbach helped to soothe our aching hearts just a little.

How comforting it was to see that some things stay the same. Musican/bartender Danny Terry was still there, and Tuesday night, master fiddler and guitar player Levi Darr and friends jammed at the pickin’ circle.

Poor Levi wasn’t so lucky that night. During a break he got served by the local sheriff for something, but without hesitation he returned to the pickin’ circle, looked at the audience with a cute smirk on his face, and lit the place on fire! Nothing like suffering to make creativity blossom.

We had only planned to stay there four nights (despite the latest increase from $10 to $15 a night to camp in their field…ouch!), but Friday night after the big dance, those big Texas skies opened up. By Saturday morning, there were lightning shows, golfball sized hail, and three inches of water on the field surrounding our trailer.

Later that day, I got the truck stuck in wet, soggy mud while leaving to go shopping, and that’s when we realized we weren’t going anywhere for at least another day.

While there are far worse places to be stuck in, we were running out of waste water tank space, and after five days at the bar, the accumulation of smoke in our hair and our increasingly swollen beer bellies was getting old.

Thankfully, on Saturday afternoon, the sun came out and dried the field. On Sunday, Jim was able to carefully navigate the trailer back onto the road.

Another lesson learned in Texas: If the skies open up and you’re parked off pavement, move!

Here’s a five-song playlist of the great bands we saw.

Visiting the Escapees park in Livingston when we joined the club was a worthwhile 250 mile detour from the Hill Country. Escapees has built a number of parks that anyone can stay at, in various points throughout the nation. Members get a generous discount on stays, activities and more.

The Livingston park feels less like a fulltimer retirement community and more like a college campus. Sure, most of the people are over 65, but they defy their ages. There are clubhouses and activity halls, and the calendar was so packed with activities every day, I couldn’t keep up.

One day I went over to join a yoga class, snickering to myself that it was probably going to be chair-yoga or something like that, but nope, it turned out to be a pretty good workout that even left me a little sore the next day!

One of the highlights of our visit was attending their daily social hour. OK, so there were no cocktails (oops, we showed up with some!) and sure, the meeting started out with obituary announcements, but still, after that sad business was over with, we got to hear the founders of Escapees, Joe and Kay Peterson, give the weekly talk. Joe and Kay have been RVing since 1970, when they sold their stuff and hit the road in their early 40s!

Joe and Kay are a kick! I hope Jim and I are as active and happy as they are when we hit old-timer status. They’ve lived an amazing life, truly something to aspire to. And the group they created is truly a testament to how people with a common identity and purpose can create a tight-knit community that’s as close to utopia as possible. I wish more towns across America were like this.

During our stay in the Hill Country, I found a great article in Texas Monthly called “The Best Small Town Cafes in Texas,” and mapped out our eating route where we would get to try out some of these hidden gems. If you’ll be traveling through the Lone Star State, I highly recommend printing yourself a copy of this article and keeping it handy.

If there’s ever a state that could turn me into a carnivore, Texas would be it. As we drove across West Texas and into the Hill Country, BBQ aromas wafted out from so many eateries along the way, that, even I, a 23-year vegetarian, had a hard time turning down the flesh.

But I stayed true to my convictions, because we all know that aromas are oftentimes more powerful than taste. Whenever I get close to pondering what a spare rib would taste like after all these years, it’s pretty easy for me to turn it down, once I consider what meat would do to my guts (ick), and the guilt I would feel after eating it.

Luckily, as I discovered at Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, southern cooking has a huge variety of side dishes (some with vegetables!) that I enjoyed, as well as catfish done up every way imaginable. Plus, with the Tex Mex influence, I was happily chowing down on beans, tortillas and all sorts of mismashes of southern and Mexican dishes at the same sitting (like homemade mac and cheese and pinto beans!) wherever I went.

Granted, most of the food in Texas is made with a TON of sugar, bacon fat and salt, but if you’re an easy-going vegetarian like I am and can look the other way, then you won’t starve. You won’t stay skinny (check out these Texas-sized onion rings!), but you’ll certainly eat some of the best downhome cooking in the U.S.A.

All things in moderation, right?

Not when it comes to  Allen’s Fried Chicken in Sweetwater! This home cookin’ haven was listed in the Texas Monthly article as Ma Allens, and has to be one of if not the best regional food experience from our entire trip to date.

The food is served family style, and there’s lots of it. Both food and that down home family feeling that is. We waited in line outside the small nondescript building for just a few minutes before joining a party of bikers from Lubbock, at a table with teo seats left.

These good folks were practically regulars, and knew what dishes to ask for, like butter potatoes! But the dishes kept coming, roast beef, cole slaw, okra, squash, mashed potatoes, potatoe salad, green beans, pea salad, creamed corn, macaroni and cheese, yams, homebaked rolls … and of course a massive pile of some of the best fried chicken Jim has ever had. Sorry mom.

Moderation? not in Texas.

In late 2006, Jim and I were secretly scheming about dropping out of society. Around that time, we went to see our friends Joel and Lynn get hitched, and it was at their reception that we met Joel’s dad, Bob. Suddenly it felt like the universe had conspired to put us together, because over wine and appetizers we learned that Bob was a former fulltime RVer. It was so exciting to meet a real live fulltimer for the first time. He made us laugh with his funny stories of life on the road for nearly 10 years.

We hinted around that we were thinking of traveling for a while, and Bob wholeheartedly encouraged us to “do it now while you’re young!” He was also the person first to tell us about Escapees, the RVing club for everyone, but especially geared toward meeting the needs of fulltimers. “They’re the best people you’ll ever meet!” he said.

After two years on the road, we finally took Bob’s advice and joined. Why did we wait so long? Well, when we started, we just didn’t know if this road tripping lifestyle was going to be a long-term thing. Once we knew we would be fulltimers for the forseeable future, we decided that it was time to relieve Jim’s sister of her generous help in handling our mail and banking issues. And we also wanted to get the hell out of California before we had to pay our vehicle registration and insurance policy extortion bills due in May. So we bit the bullet, and joined up.

Why Join Escapees?
I’m guessing that our Bad Boy neighbor here at Landa RV Park isn’t part of the Escapees establishment. But many other fulltimers we know join Escapees not just for the camaraderie, or their affordable RV parks and get-togethers, but also because the group is incredibly organized and offers us a place to call “home.” Literally. If you join the club, you can sign up for Escapees mail forwarding service and utilize their Livingston, Texas headquarters address for all of your household and business administrative needs. You can also use the address to declare Texas as your “home state” or “domicile,” once you’ve followed the proper procedures.

See, when you don’t rent or own a stick house anywhere, or have a place where you get mail, you literally don’t exist in the eyes of credit agencies, insurance companies, and so on. You can’t even register to vote!

Think about it: every single person in this country must have a “domicile” they call home. For those of us with homes on wheels, this can be a problem. Our RVs don’t count as homes in the eyes of The Man. Escapees solves this problem for us, by helping us to become Texans.

We went to the Escapees headquarters a few weeks ago. The people there were truly some of the nicest RVers we’ve ever met, and were so helpful in getting everything set up for us. We got a new mailing address, and registered our vehicles in Texas. We recently just got our driver’s licenses too, so now, we are official Texans.

For now, it feels pretty good to sport Texas license plates, since Californicator plates don’t exactly buy you a lot of respect in the rest of the country. We’ve met many people who like to pin the downfall of the U.S. economy on California’s greedy real estate market (Florida gets lumped in there too, however).

So today, we know we’re not really Texans, but we also don’t feel like Californians anymore either. Great. Now when people ask “where are you from?” they’re going to get an even longer story than before!

I really don’t think it was the fact that we were hung way over from SXSW partying the night before, but I swear, the breakfast we had at Dan’s Hamburgers in Austin’s East Side ranked up there among the best best biscuits and gravy we’ve ever had in the United States.

Founded in 1973, this local chain used to be called “Dan and Fran’s,” until the couple split up. They each went their own way, and started their own separate restaurants. We only tried Dan’s, but next time we’re back in Austin, we’ll be sure to sample Fran’s fare too.

Go to Dan’s for breakfast, and if your eyes are bleary like ours were, make it easy on yourself and just order the #19 Special. For just $3.69, you get a heaping of eggs, toast, biscuits and gravy, and sausage too.

And believe me, if you’ve been hanging out with crazy Austinites like our friend Skinny Chef, you’re gonna need it!

I called that first NüRVers Rally Review “part one” because nearly everyone who attended moved on to Landa RV Park in New Braunfels and they talked us to joining them. We ended up staying a month.

Needless to say, there were quite few more get-togethers with the Nü Crew. But thankfully, not nearly as debaucherous.

Landa was the first RV Park where we ever stayed a full month. And when the month was over, we were definitely ready to go. Don’t get me wrong, the company of fellow NüRVers was great, and the price was right. But you get what you pay for at Landa.

A month paid for in advance at Landa RV Park only cost you $225. I’ll do the math for you. That’s $7.50 per night, for full hookups. Utilities are not included, but we only paid another $50 and were comfortable running our heater and air conditioner plenty. More math averages out to about $9.17 per night for our full month in New Braunfels.

That’s cheap! Especially considering we could float down the Comal river from our doorstep and walk to nearby bars, restaurants and stores in old town, including the oldest bakery in Texas.

But stay longer than an hour or two at Landa and you find out why its so cheap. The train. Or trains, rather. Loud ones, that rumble right through the park. Many times a day.

We left nearly a month ago and I still hear them in my sleep. I fear our stay may have killed the romance of a distant train whistle for me, for good. But I am digressing.

If you’re hanging out with NüRVers, it’s a good thing you’re staying somewhere cheap. Because you’ll end up spending money on other things, like good food and alchohol. Once again, a good time was had by all, and we look forward to another fun gathering some time down the road. Just not at Landa.

If you’re familiar with Austin’s South by Southwest music festival, you know that it took place in mid March. It’s now mid-April. So as you can see, we’re a little behind in our postings but hey, we’re busy out here on the road.

We were so stoked to finally catch this scene. The whole city comes out for it, and they’re really quite welcoming to the hordes that show up from around the country, clog the streets, and run around showing off their prestigious wristbands to bartenders.

And while you can pay the high ticket price and get into some really incredible shows during the festival, there’s plenty of great bands, free music and free beer (I told you Texans know how to party!) to catch on just about every block. We rode our bikes all around town with Skinny Chef and Flux (thanks you two!), and sampled some great tunes, all for F-R-E-E! Here’s a sampling . . .

On the farm in Florida last year, I wrote how snowbirds should prepare for freezing weather when trying to escape just that. Then, when we were getting ready to leave the ranch last August, I wrote about the sudden Colorado seasonal weather changes.

But after hanging out in New Braunfels for nearly a month, I must say Texas has some pretty crazy weather patterns!

Landa RV Park on the Comal River is the first place we’ve ever paid for a full month’s stay. The price was right, but it didn’t include our utilities. So René was actually calculating our kilowatts the first few days of our stay because we had run the air conditioner nonstop. Cooped up writing in the humid heat was unbearable.

But almost the whole following week, we had to run the heater because it was so cold and rainy! Within days, we were warm enough to go tubing again. About a week later we heard a severe thunder storm waring on the radio alerting us to golf ball sized hail and potential tornadoes nearby. That same day, after the clouds passed, I had to change back into my tank top pretty quickly.

I’ve heard it said in many a town across the country, but now I believe that if you don’t like the weather in Texas, wait an hour or so.

Epilogue: Since I drafted this post, we have endured more heat, I scrambled atop our rig to cover our solar panel in a hill country hail storm, we got stuck in the mud after a downpour in Luckenbach, and we have withstood the wind of the Texas prarie. I rest my case.