Deep in the heart of Texas

Well, I finally had enough of Florida. The car sales business is in the toilet (along with the rest of the economy) and Alan and I went three weeks without work before Pierre had the nerve to tell us that he was shutting it down. He waited till the last possible minute which pissed me off because I could have been looking for other work instead of thinking that we had events coming up. I found out on a Friday so I went back to workamper.com to see what was in there. MainGate, Inc. had an ad for independent contractors so I called them to see what the deal was. I talked to Ned, one of the owners and he said they had an event in Gainesville the next weekend and invited us to come out to the track to check out the operation. They sell souvenirs at the NHRA drag races. Their IC's pull trailers behind their motorhomes from track to track and they make decent money.....

but....

after talking to the other IC's and weighing our finances against what we could clear after operating costs (fuel, insurance, possible DOT fines) I'm not sure if we could afford to work with them. Not only that, but I'm not too keen on abusing my house by pulling a 12,000 pound trailer that is 2,000 over the weight limit of our hitch.

But we went ahead and talked to all the owners and a few days later, Sean called us to let us know they definitely liked us but that they didn't have a trailer available for us at the time. So now we had a little over a week to figure out what to do and where to go.

One of the things I wanted to do was to get our house registered in Delaware so we made the trip up to Dover to take care of that. After four tries, I finally passed the brake test and I left all the paperwork with David to take care of for me. I also went down to vital records and family court to get a couple more documents that I needed for Alan's green card paperwork. We only had about three days in Dover before we had to leave to go to Houston, TX for the next NHRA race. I was gambling that a trailer might become available as the IC's were bitching about rising fuel costs to MainGate when they were at Gainesville. But MainGate gave everybody $300 Flying-J gift cards and that seemed to make them happy so nobody quit. So I worked in the NitroMall all weekend to make some money and after the race we left for San Antonio.

And now we are in a place called Spring Branch which is near Canyon Lake just north of San Antonio. We are staying in a small campground called Mermaid Cove for the month of April and we're going to give Air Photo a serious try. Jon tells me that full time workers can clear $1000 to $1500 a week if they work an area for at least a month. Alan is not too keen on selling but he is willing to give it a try. If it works out, then I'll be happy as selling pictures is a LOT easier on our house than pulling a 6-ton trailer.

Speaking of which, we weighed out rig and the truck. Our rig weighs right at 30,000 pounds give or take 500 pounds or so depending on how full the tanks are and the truck weights 3700 pounds. It was a lot lighter than I thought it was.

Other from that, I have no more news. We are awaiting Alan's travel and work papers. Once he gets those, he'll make the trip back to England to wrap up his affairs. After that, he'll wash his hands of the UK and live the American nomadic lifestyle. Once we finish up all the rolls Air Photo shot around San Antonio (around 10 or so), we'll go to the next place where they don't have anybody and work that area.

Sounds good to me. Maybe we'll go check out the Alamo sometime this month.