Covington, LA

We left Holt on Sunday morning after it stopped sleeting. We had debated about leaving in questionable weather, but felt the need to keep moving. And, again, we did not know where we were stopping for the night. We left it up to the weather gods to make that decision for us. But it would either be Mississippi or Louisiana.

It ended up being a beautiful day. The skies cleared as we headed west, so we continued through to Covington, LA. We learned that many parks closer to New Orleans are still closed or full with workers. Not that we wanted to head into New Orleans, but this affected even the towns just north of Lake Ponchartrain, too. As we drove closer to our destination we called ahead to a campground to confirm that their sites were "satellite-friendly". Considering the name was Land 'O' Pines Family Campground, we thought we should ask. Another warning for us should've been the word "family". We arrived to a parking lot with lots of kids running around and a crowded office, and pine trees towering 150'-200' high. The staff considered it "open" because they had lost so many trees in Katrina. As I said before, it's all relative. It took us 1 hour and 45 minutes and changing sites three times to find a clearing through these great trees. We used a compass to help us find holes in the canopy to the south/southwest and thought we picked good sites the first two times. At least the third site was the charm. Unfortunately this delay caused us to rush through our Easter dinner as we were hoping to have camp set up before dark.

So we were laughing that we no longer needed to check for campgrounds who had WIFI, call ahead to verify the WIFI is working, and then pray that it was consistent when we there, but now we have to check Google Earth to see if campgrounds are clear of trees and use compasses to pick out the best sites.

That's ok, its worth it. It did nothing but rain all day today and we didn't experience any problems with, what's called, Rain Fade (degradation of satellite signal). I had just sent an email to Jim, our Datastorm Installer, to tell him how happy we were with the dish, when...bump! A loud thump hit the roof right over my head...where the dish is...we scattered - did the dish topple over? No, there's still a connection (all lights were lit), then what? A tree? Close enough - a tree branch hit the roof, probably missing our dish by a foot or less. Andy had to go outside in the rain to make sure all was ok and no other dead branches were going to fall 10 stories onto our dish. So, now we ask Jim, what's the warranty on this thing?