Mission One - Midland/Odessa Texas Part Two

Now, where was I? Ah yes, we were just getting to the good stuff, the fun stuff, what in the world is there to do in Midland/Odessa Texas?  Well, this answer is complicated by the Covid shut down, so the quick answer is NOT A LOT!  But, I am a resourceful girl!  At the time we were in Texas, the only major restrictions were social distancing and restricting the amount of people inside a store at any one time, but most everything was closed anyway. 

Also, all the National Parks were shut down, which is a real bummer because I LOVE visiting National Parks. As many as I can actually! 

Side Note: America the Beautiful parks pass is currently 80.00 and worth every penny! 

So what exactly did we do for fun in Midland and Odessa Texas?

Parks! Small parks. I did mention I am a girl who loves has a bizarre obsession with parks right?  As much as we could, we went to as many parks as we could find in and around this area that were open. I will start with Odessa because we are going to work our way from bad news to good news.  

ODESSA:

I hate to be this way, and again I apologize to those who are from Odessa, but my honest impression of this small city, it is a dump. Never have I ever seen more garbage in a park in my life.  It made me so incredibly sad.  The first park we went to was Memorial Garden Park, right in the middle of Odessa.  This park consists of a small pond with a nice walking path. And TURTLES!  Oh my, I have never seen more turtles in my entire life than I saw in Odessa and Midland!  It was pure delight to see these adorable creatures, and it was also heartbreaking.  This entire pond was rimmed with garbage. It literally looked like a sewage pond with sweet little turtles everywhere.  Much to my dismay, we also caught sight of many disposable gloves and masks floating around as well.  It’s gross to see it in a store parking lot, it’s heartbreaking to see it in an animal’s home. Looking back on it, I wished I had taken photos of the garbage rather than trying to keep it out of my shots. I think there could have been an excellent story there. 

The next park we visited was the Comanche Trail West Park. We went to this park kind of by accident.  It was not the park we were looking for, but we went with it anyway. This park is located in an industrial area, off the beaten path. We weren’t sure about it but decided to give it a shot. There is a nice walking trail, called, what else, the Comanche Trail. I would love to tell you how long it is but I cannot find the information I need for that. What I can tell you is that we walked down a tree lined path from one parking lot to the next.  This trail goes on and on for several miles. Again, we did come across trash but it was nowhere near as bad as the last park.

The last park we visited in Odessa was the Comanche Trail SOUTH Park.  This is where the above-mentioned trail leads. There were not as many turtles at this pond but there were a lot of people here fishing. I would say it was a pretty average place. Nothing fancy. Again, there were a lot of places we did not go here, simply because we couldn’t with the shutdown.

MIDLAND:

 We only went to one park in Midland, but it was worlds apart from the parks in Odessa. The one park we found with a pond was Wadley-Barron Park. This pond was much cleaner, although we did still see some trash in the water.  We enjoyed our walk around this pond and the drive through the Country Club Estates neighborhood behind the park. The homes are beautiful!  Much better than most of the rest of the city, which seems to be extremely run down. 

We really had hoped to go to the I-20 Wildlife Preserve and Jenna Welch Nature Study Center because it looked promising. But when we drove by, the gates were closed and it looked like a big empty field. The website pictures looked promising though.  I suppose if we ever have another mission in this area we will try again. 

There are two nearby cities that we visited while we were in this area, they were Andrews and Big Spring. Andrews has a nice park with a pond and walking path and Big Spring has the Big Spring State Park, which has hiking trails and a loop that you can drive up to the top of this bluff and overlook the city.  There are some really interesting rock formations to see here too.  We enjoyed this park.

Overall, I did enjoy this mission, I think it would have been a totally different experience if it had not been for Covid. I love visiting museums as well but, again, they were all closed. I spent a lot of time walking around our campground taking photos and watching tv. I am learning to slow down in this season of life. There is no hurry. 

I am looking forward to more adventures. 

With Love, Jen Fulks, The Elegant RV’er

A Time for Everything

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

2 a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

3 a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6 a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7 a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8 a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace.

I had never seen a thirteen line ground squirrel before!

Our campground was surrounded by oils fields. One evening there were two explosions that rocked our camper. Those in the know told us this frequently happens with batteries. I'm not even going to pretend to know what that is in relation to oil fields.

I added flowers to our porch!

And they promptly died in the heat.

Mission One - Midland/Odessa Texas

Hi there!  Thank you for joining me today. I am going to need to go back a few months to where this journey began.  I have decided that each new job on this journey will now be called a mission.  Because it’s just more fun that way! 

Mission One was in Midland/Odessa Texas. We left Colorado around March 24th 2020. Right at the beginning of the Covid outbreak, right as everything in the United States was being shut down. We were so scared staring this life like this. We knew we needed to be together in this uncertain time. That was all we truly knew. We didn’t know if we would be able to get groceries as people had begun to hoard food products and of course, toilet paper, of all things!  Toilet paper?  I can only imagine how this will sound to future generations.  Well, we had a global pandemic respiratory illness and people hoarded toilet paper. Future generations are going to wonder if it was a global pandemic of the loss of common sense, I’m sure. But I digress. When we packed our camper, we packed as much of the food from our house as we could fit.  And we headed south.

Welcome to Midland/Odessa Texas!  Now first things first, I am going to apologize up front to all those from this area.  What I have to say may not be very nice, but it is my honest impression.

The campground we stayed at was very basic. Let’s face it, the company hubby works for is paying for the space and they are not going to spring for the Broadmoor of campgrounds. So we stayed at Oasis North, it was basic, but it was very accommodating. It is actually located between and to the north of the two cities in a small place called Gardendale.  Hubby’s job site was about 20 minutes away. Perfect!  It is very much a large dirt lot, but it does have full hook ups, very clean laundry facilities and showers if needed. They also provide basic cable TV and internet.  The internet is not amazing, or so we thought, more on that in Mission Two.

The first thing that struck me when we arrived was just how darn cold it was!  This is Texas! I thought I would be roasting!  I used our heater for the first two weeks we were there, and then, the heater went out. Welcome to the RV life. During a pandemic. Since we had just purchased our camper, the warranty information was not in the system yet, it takes about a month she said. That was problem one. Problem two, this is our HOME, we are living here. If I take the camper in to be repaired, where will we LIVE while it is in the shop?  We decided to take care of it when we get back to Colorado and just go find a space heater…. In Texas…. During a pandemic…. I cannot tell you how many lines we stood in, in front of how many stores, but we finally located a fan/heater combo at Walmart.  And it worked fine.
You would be surprised at how easily a camper heats up.  It is amazingly fast!

Of course, as time went on, we needed the heater less and less. And by the time we reached May, we were hitting temperatures in the high 90’s, low 100’s. Remember how I just said, you’d be surprised by how easily a camper heats up? Well, let me tell you!  It is like an oven in those temperatures!  You know what an RV’ers best friend is?  Besides the stuff that makes the black tank not stink. Foil bubble wrap! This stuff is great for deflecting the heat.  You can buy it precut specifically to the size and shape of different windows and vents or you can buy a giant roll and cut it to the size you need it to be.  I have both. I don’t prefer one over the other, just get me some relief!

If there is one thing I have quickly learned, it’s not to believe what the salesman says about the insulation in an RV. Sorry to my awesome salesman at Windish RV in Fountain, Colorado. I’m scared for this winter.  Even though I was told our camper is specifically made for cold temperatures, well, we will see how the future missions play out.  OK, so back to the heat, the bubble wrap and now, the A/C.  I am not all together familiar with the A/C jargon, but I’ll do my best here.  I KNOW for sure, we do not have the largest A/C unit available, I think we are one size down from that. 12,000 whatever, not the 15,000 whatever. In Texas, this unit struggles. I would recommend the larger unit for sure, if you have a choice.  Another option, and I think we may do this, is to have a second unit installed elsewhere.  For us, that would be the bedroom.  Then we will have a unit on each end of the camper. Or as we affectionately call them, the “wings”.  Right now we are parked in an east/west position, so we call the bedroom the west wing and the living room of course is the east wing. Speaking of the direction you are parked.  When camping in the heat of summer, be sure, if you can, to orient your camper so that the side your refrigerator is on, is NOT directly in sunlight!  We had a heck of a time keeping the refrigerator temperature down as we were parked in a north/south direction with the afternoon/evening sun shining directly on the refrigerator side of the camper.

Well, this feels like it’s getting long winded without even telling you about the area, so I will stop here and write another post where I am actually talking about Texas and what we liked and didn’t like.

With Love,
Jen Fulks, the Elegant RV’er

Lord, I may not understand your ways, but I trust that you are good, and that what you do is good. Help me trust you even more, in Jesus' name, Amen. ~Sharon Jaynes

The Realities of RV Living

In this video, I give you a tour of our home away from home.

The Elegant RV'er

A funny thing happened on the way to midlife...  That's my favorite thought, ever, A funny thing happened on the way to... It just really sums up life doesn't it? 

If you know anything about me, you know I always seem to be in some sort of constant state of change. I have a difficult time settling down and just being. This is why there is yet another name to this blog and a new direction. Unlike previous attempts to settle, I will not be deleting previous content. It can stay. And I wish I hadn't deleted all of my content from previous blogs. It's all me, it's all who I am, the good, the bad and the downright ugly sometimes! I mean, who hasn't experienced an unexpected detour on the road of life. I've had many! Some might say too many! But, it's ok. Each and every thing I have experienced has made me who I am today. And I think I'm pretty alright.

So, let me tell you how I got to this RV and what makes me so darn elegant!

Just over a year ago, my husband was offered a position with a company as a superintendent. He is in construction.  The job, as it was presented to us, and I do mean US, as silly as it sounds, we both did the phone interview and the dinner interview with one of the owners, because as crazy as it may sound to some, we really take this Mark 10:8 stuff seriously y'all!

Mark 10:8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh

Anyway, so as the job was presented to us, hubby would be running a hub out of our hometown. He would run jobs in and around the area, traveling to jobs around the state as needed and out of state on a very limited basis. HA!  You know what they say about the best laid plans right!  Oh how this is one of those funny, not funny moments.

Proverbs 19:21 Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand.

This new company quickly realized what a valuable asset they have with my husband and it wasn't long before he was running jobs everywhere but home. And it wasn't too bad at first, nothing ever is right! But then...Covid-19.

UGH, no one wants to talk about The Rona Karen! OK, but, this is the WHY part of the RV story... Picture it, March 2020... Oh sorry, no Golden Girls either?

OK, so long story short. We didn't want to be away from one another during the virus, should one of us get sick. And we really didn't know how things would be with hotels or how easily the virus could spread, yada, yada, yada, so we decided the best plan would be to uproot our entire lives and live in an RV!  YAYAYAYAY! or not. I'm not going to lie and say this is a piece of cake. I miss my home, I miss my family, my kids, my grandkids. I miss my yard, I miss my craft room, I miss my shower! I miss it all.

But God...

Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Oh Lord, give me strength, cuz this girl sure needs it!  I have shed many tears on this journey and I am sure there are more to come, but I have had many amazing experiences too! I really hope you will stick around and share those experiences. I will be posting pictures and videos. I am not a professional, but I am learning, so bear with me on technical stuff. I'm just a girl who loves to share, probably too much. Hello, my name is Jennifer and I'm an over sharer. 

And so, what exactly makes me elegant?

Elegant ~ pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner.

                 (of a scientific theory or solution to a problem) pleasingly ingenious and simple.

Hmmmm, graceful, stylish, ingenious, simple. I like these words and although they may not describe me every moment of every day, I do like to have aspirations. In upcoming posts, I will share some of the ways I have made our travel trailer into a home. I will share the challenges of this lifestyle and of course the awesomeness of it too! For now, I need to go pick up an online order from Walmart. Please feel free to ask questions and I love, love, love getting comments and feedback on posts.

Love, Jennifer, the Elegant RV'er