Home, Sweet Home

February 18th to March 1st, 2024

When people ask us where we're from, we always say we're from Colorado. Most, if not all, of our adult lives were spent there, and it's the last location where we owned "sticks and bricks" houses. But, officially, we're Texans. It took a couple years, but we finally stayed in our hometown of Livingston, and it was lovely.

Everyone in the Unites States is supposed to have a residence or domicile, a place they call home. We are members of the Escapees RV Club, and membership has its benefits. We are set up through their domicile and mail delivery services out of Livingston, and our address there is a real, physical address. However, we share that street address with around 10,000 other people. Our mail is delivered there, sorted, and then we can have it sent to wherever we happen to be. It's set up like a post office, it has its own zip code, and it gets more mail than the town of Livingston.

We pay federal taxes. We vote as Texans. And we call Livingston our home. But we'd never been there. So we were pretty excited to check it out. It's pretty far north of Houston near a big lake, and it was awesome to get away from the hustle and bustle of San Antonio and just relax for a bit.

This Escapees location (they have many) is the hub and the original location. There is a huge campground, events and event center, and a special place for Escapees members when they're no longer able to drive their RVs around the country. The Escapees CARE Center is a facility that is set up for medical, physical, and mental care of elderly or physically challenged members. You get one of their RV sites where you park your motorhome or trailer, and they come to it to help you with day-to-day tasks. There is a big facility for meals and physical care. There are medical caregivers on site. And they even have a big thrift store to help support costs. We took a tour and it was really impressive.

It's good to know that we can continue to live in our motorhome after we can't really drive it anymore. We love many places in Texas, but we could see settling down in Livingston. The town is really nice, and the area is gorgeous. What a nice find!

Sometimes we have unnecessary adventures on the way to our stops, and we are still reeling from our trip to Livingston. We had to pass through a bit of Houston on the way, and we missed our first highway. We took a different one, but then connecting to our last highway was blocked so we found ourselves in city blocks with the 72 feet of motorhome and trailer we had with us. We couldn't make some turns, so we ended up having to go way out of the way to get back to the highway. It was a bit of a nightmare, but Margot can drive her way out of any predicament.

We were taking it easy in Livingston, for the most part, but we wanted to drive over to see the George H.W. Bush Presidential Museum in College Station. We felt we knew a little about Bush Senior's presidency, but we were enjoying going to presidential museums to learn more. The town itself, a Texas A&M town, was really cool. Their stadiums were huge, and the town was lovely. And the museum was very interesting.

Livingston is pretty because of all of the gorgeous trees. It turns out we were in an old area of the country known as the Big Thicket, so we visited the Big Thicket National Preserve just down the road. Almost all of the original-growth trees were chopped down, and what we saw was regrowth. The area was full of stories.

We were all ready to go bike the Big Sandy Trail nearby through the woods, and then learned it was tick season. They come out in full force when the winter weather turns to warmer temperatures, and that was just what we had seen. We skipped the bike ride after some discussions with the park volunteers there, and went for a quick hike instead. We found if we kept moving that the mosquitoes didn't bother us, so it was a zippy hike with no dilly dallying. We really liked it, even if it was muggy and buggy.