The Next Hundred Miles: August 2020

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Continuing in Texas (and Oklahoma) Plus an exciting announcement!

We completed our stay at Lake Texoma Thousand Trails and loved every minute of our time there.

I have to say that this is one of the nicest Thousand Trails properties we have stayed at. Incredibly well manicured and maintained. And our site was huge!

As usual we did our daily walks around the property when we weren't hiking someplace. The route around the outside of the park is about 3.2 miles, but on the 100+ degree days it felt more like 10 miles, all up hill 🥵

Our first week there we had a cold front come through and had to deal with frozen pipes and scraping the ice off our windows (because everyone knows Texas water freezes at about 85 degrees 🥶).

But seriously, we did have low humidity and daytime highs in the low to mid 80s for a full week. That was great, but we knew it couldn't last. Soon we were harshly reminded that this is July in Texas. Overnight the temps roared back to the upper 90s with "feels like" temps around 105.

We took advantage of the cool down and did a bunch of sightseeing and hiking. We visited Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge and did some cool hikes. This is a sanctuary for migratory birds, famous for the thousands of Canada geese that come in the fall. This time of year it is quiet there but still very enjoyable hiking.

We also visited Eisenhower State Park for some more incredible hiking and beautiful lake views.

The area in the photo below is called Lovers Leap. It is sheer cliffs that are breaking away in huge chunks. If you were standing on the edge when a piece let go it could give "falling for you" a whole new meaning, if you catch my drift 😁.

The hiking trails were impressive with deep woods alternated with huge lake vistas.

We also took a ride into Oklahoma for a world famous Arbuckle Mountain Fried Pie.

Now there are fried pies and there are FRIED PIES, and Arbuckle Fried Pies are definitely the latter. OMG were they good. If you have never had one, add this to your bucket list as a must do.

In case you have not seen one, they are flakey pie crust wrapped around a mound of fillings and then deep fried until golden brown. They make fruit pies, cream pies and breakfast and dinner pies, and each is incredible (I know because I had one of each 😁).

We have now moved to another spot on lake Texoma in a COE park. Juniper Point is probably the most incredible lakeside COE park we have ever visited.

The sites are all concrete, water and electric (30/50) and most are overlooking the lake. Some like ours are perched high above the lake with views across and into Oklahoma. Others are down at lake level where you could almost jump off your RV into the water. Everything is impeccably maintained and outfitted. The only downside for our time here is that the temps have been in the 100 degree range. Still it has be tolerable with the shade of the big trees and the breezes off the lake.

And I also have some incredible news! My youngest son Jon and his wife Amber just had their 2nd baby. This is our 5th grandchild, the 3rd boy and there are also 2 girls. Kaiden Young was born 2:54 pm Monday August 10th weighing in at 7lbs 7oz and 19 in long. Mom and baby are doing excellent and we are very proud and happy for Jon and Amber! Exciting times!

That's it for this post. Tomorrow we continue our time in Texas, moving to a park outside of Bridgeport. Again this park is on a lake and we are looking forward to exploring the area, and maybe even some of our old stomping grounds.

Until next time, thanks for reading. Please stay safe.

_______________________________________

Cindy and Terry

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Saturday, August 1, 2020

Cry baby and something cool 😁

So right off the bat let me say that I am not posting this seeking sympathy. This is strictly to explain why the infrequent posts.

To base line it, I am rapidly getting old. Over the past couple of years I have developed a couple of health issues.

The first is what we believe to be BPPV which is an ear issue that causes extreme vertigo.

I have had this for probably 2+ years but until recently it only affected me when I would try to lay flat on my back. Typically I would experience it when attempting to do work on one of our vehicles which required me to be on my back under it. Recently it has become significantly worse, lasting for several days after an attack.

I have been working through several well published manuvers which are touted to have great success, but so far have seen only mild improvement.

The second is an issue with my left shoulder.

About 2 years ago I had surgery for a torn rotator and nerve issue in my right shoulder. Now it seems I have the exact same thing in my left. Were it not for Covid I would have already had this looked at and likely have had surgery. But with my high risk profile, I can't imagine walking into a hospital today. I deal with the pain during the day, but it gets worse at night and keeps me awake. I don't think I have had a full night's sleep in 6 months.

So not to belabor the subject, between being extremely tired with a hurting shoulder and a spinning head, I just haven't felt up to blogging much. But that's enough of the downer stuff.

We are still in Texas, currently up near lake Texoma. We are in a beautiful park here and the weather has been pretty nice. I am writing this while sitting outside under the RV awning with blue skies and temps in the mid 80s. It's pretty hard to top that for an August day in Texas.

We are still discussing where we go from here. We had contemplated going North, perhaps into Colorado, or west into New Mexico. But honestly, given the continued Coronavirus issues, we will probably stay in Texas for the rest of the summer. That would have us here at Texoma for 1 or 2 more weeks before begining our migration south again.

Regardless, we are both healthy, eating right and exercising daily, doing our best to keep the corona beast at bay.

I promised something "cool", so let me tell you about this week's shopping trip to Walmart in Sherman TX.

We have been posting on the incredible curbside pickup service at most Walmart stores. You order on the Walmart app, the store picks your items an hour before your pickup time, and loads them into your car when you arrive at the store. 100% touch free from begining to end. And if you haven tried it, you should.

The veggies they pick for us are the absolute best, the meats are amazing, and if they substitute something, they upgrade it at the original price. So I order Great Value Oatmeal and if they are out, I get Quaker Oats at the Great Value price. We have not been disappointed even once. And the service is free.

So on to this week's experience. The way the program works is that you go into the app and select the store you want to pick up from. Not all stores have this service but the vast majority do. Then you shop using the app which has everything grocery in your selected store as well as most of the non grocery items in the store. The app works from the real store inventory so you won't be shown items your selected store doesn't carry.

When I selected the Sherman TX store there was a notation beside the address that said "Automated Pick Up". Not knowing what that was, we called the store to find out.

It turns out it is something akin to a giant vending machine with individual kiosks and elevator looking doors that you back your car up to. You simply go up to the kiosk and scan a barcode that has been emailed to you, and then step back.

Inside this machine there are two areas, one refrigerated and one frozen. Everything you have ordered is inside, in plastic bins, and when you scan your barcode, they are shuffled to the doors you are parked at. We had a relatively small order this week so we had a total of 6 bins. We unloaded the first 3 and then clicked "Next" on the kiosk and the next 3 bins were delivered.

This is pure Jetson's stuff.

We don't even see a person in the entire process. I'm sure there were real humans doing the shopping for us in the store, but we didn't have to see or talk to anyone. This was an incredible experience.

As we drove away, Cindy commented that this could be the way we all shop in the future. They could have a big warehouse on the back side of this where no customers actually go inside. How cool!

Oh and yes, the success rate continued. There was nothing missed, nothing picked incorrectly, and the meats and veggies were excellent. It may have taken corona to get us to try this, but I doubt we will ever go back to in-store shopping unless we just want entertainment.

That's it for now. I hope you are doing well, staying safe and making the best of this situation.

Thanks for reading!