Until Next Time, Austin!

Our time in Austin went way too quickly, as it always does.

On Monday we enjoyed quality time with the family and my mom’s last day in town – including dinner at the Salt Lick BBQ and spinning ourselves under the Zilker Christmas Tree.

After a lovely week of family holiday time, my mother flew home on Tuesday. We were then left with just under a week to get a lot of work done, and trying to balance as best we could a hectic social calendar.

Hosted Events

On Tuesday evening, we hosted one of our live video chats on Ustream entitled ‘Routing & Selecting Campgrounds’. As usual, it was a great deal of fun and we had about 70 folks join us live – wow!

If you missed it, we set up a companion page for the video chat that has both the archive of the video and links to additional resources mentioned throughout the talk. We shared a lot of our tips for picking routes, balancing work & life while making miles and how we go about picking some amazing campsites!

On Wednesday, Monica & Derek of Road Map to Nomad offered up their new home for us to host an Austin-area meet-up. As we were staying at a state park in the area and didn’t want everyone to have to pay a day entry fee to come see us, we were very grateful for this offer!

We started with a Q&A sessions in which we talked about mobile internet and balancing work & life on the road. By the time the session was done, there were well over 30 folks in attendance so we morphed into a meet-n-greet mingle.

The evening went by way too quickly and we didn’t nearly have time to talk with everyone one-on-one. But it was excellent to gather with so many nomadic-minded folks. We saw lots of folks exchanging contact info, so hopefully lots of new connections where made!

It was after midnight when we finally left, as we got immersed into chatting with our gracious hosts.

Home Life

We spent a good bit of time this past week being homebodied and catching up on projects – like producing a Ramblings video, work related stuff, some writing on our next book and getting decorated for the holidays.

We selected McKinney Falls State Park (our review) for our 2-week stay in Austin this time around, mostly because it’s closest to my brother’s home and it’s easy to reserve in advance online.

We love their huge wooded sites, which makes it feel like we’re pulling our home in a nice neighborhood lot- instead of into a big parking lot with landscaping. We scored a sweet pull thru-spot that afforded us a view with no neighbors in sight.

And we also enjoy walking & jogging on their hiking trails, and enjoyed several long afternoon excursions exploring.

While in a big city, we took care of mundane chores like an oil change for our Mini Cooper, donations to a thrift store and an urgent need to get heat into our plumbing bay.

The forecast for Friday turned wickedly cold, but thankfully not as bad as most of the rest of the country. We experienced lows in the mid-20s, and with a 60w incandescent bulb burning in our plumbing bay we were able to keep things warm enough to not freeze up.

But brrrr.  As we yanked out our propane systems including the furnace, we’re still reliant on an electric space heater and now the heat strip in our new front air conditioner. And they have been working overtime!

Part of us regrets not having left Austin early and continuing east – but looking at the weather maps we would have needed to make it pretty close to Florida to have improved the situation.

What’s Next?

We pulled into our favorite little RV Park in Texas yesterday in Gonzalez, TX to catch up with our friends Christine & Michael, who own Hill Shade RV Park.

We’ll stick around a couple days, and then be heading eastward to our planned arrival in Cedar Key, FL on December 20.  We’ll likely spend a couple days this week getting a lot of miles under our tires and then picking a couple spots along the Florida gulf shore to stop for a couple days each.  The weather maps shows nice warm weather that way, and we look forward to thawing out!