I'm still waiting for an empty trailer in Brownsville, Texas.  I was informed that there would be one here at 2:00 pm - it's now 3:15 pm.  I assume one will show up today, but it's getting to the "I'm not driving straight back" point.  I mean, I may be asked to do so for there are no empty trailers in the yard in Longview for the Brownsville run. We have a bunch of trailers dedicated to this account, but the customer hasn't been sending them up and has cut back their orders to one truckload a day...

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And as soon as I started writing this, an empty showed up.  Put the computer away, got with it.  And I mean, I got with it. It's almost 3 am - I can't just come home and go straight to bed, normally anyway. I'm too wired up to go to sleep. They had no trailers available for anything but one Oklahoma run tomorrow, they needed this one.  She didn't actually ask me to drive half the night but it was obvious what they wanted.  

I hate night driving, literally despise it. Just as the hours tick away and it goes from 10 to 11, to midnight, ,to 1am - it gets harder and harder to stay awake.  But about the time I hit Lufkin and stopped for fuel, I knew I would be able to get this done and get home.  I'll actually have more time later on today after I get some sleep for personal stuff than if I had stopped somewhere for the night and taken a 10 hour break.  

When I got back to the yard, there was only one trailer sitting there - at least for what we haul. 3 other trailers sitting there - 2 oxygen and one LNG trailer.  I don't get this plant in Mexico.  They had 2 trailers come down today - the only trailers available. But they have ALL of the rest of the trailers down there at their plant, saved the 2 loaded trailers sitting in the Brownsville yard.  They must have 15 plus trailers sitting down there.  Why? And why order more product when you have so much of it sitting there?  

I guess I haven't even revealed the news here yet.  That's what I was writing this one out for, now that I think of it.  The seller counter offered at $4,400 per acre. My realtor called with that news and I immediately agreed.  It's time to get this land portion of this deal behind me.  It's going to be somewhere around $57,000 total for 13 beautiful acres of property.  With $11,400 down, I'll only be financing $46,000. If the mortgage calculator I am using is correct, it's only $313 per month payment.  They want me to pay off 2 particular credit cards and an unsecured loan that has $2,500 left to go on it as  part of their stipulations to get the loan. So, I'm losing around $410 in monthly payments by doing that and therefore, I actually have more money at the end of the month.

Well I take that back. They'll probably add taxes to the mortgage, I dunno about insurance. It's just land, I want liability insurance on it but I need nothing more than that, at least until I get the business up and running.  And that, as I have stated a few times already - is going to be a while.  

But, I have at least decided that only the front of the property, initially, is going to be set up for the business. The back half of the property will be left untainted, nothing more cut down unless there is some need for it and all the natural beauty of tall pines will remain. In fact, I suspect 3/4'th of the property will remain intact.  I'm only starting out with 25 spots and I can make that work on less than 3 acres of land.  Maybe 4.  That leaves 9 acres that I don't have to cut down beautiful trees for.  

I'm just going to do the minimum that I can get away with at first, but of course going to have to be up to Texas code for various things.  I probably don't fully grasp what I'm getting myself into here, but that's fine. I see so many experts casting doubt on anyone that wants to build a new RV park.  They call themselves experts anyway.  I don't really care what they say or the vast amount of money they determine it will cost per lot (15 - 50 thousand).  It's just amazing how many people will tell you not to do it. Fortunately I found a group of people that are building their own parks and I get to see through their eyes the snags, the difficulties, the screwups they made and - yes - learn from all of that.  

Well that's enough. Fatigue is finally settling in.  I want to go traipse the property later on today  - all of it - without having to use an umbrella and probably take the dogs with me as well. Yes, I know I don't have it yet, but that didn't stop me with any of the other properties I wandered around looking at and - never got.  "At least in this case we have an agreement on the price. I have no idea how long it will take for the seller to get to signing all of that stuff - I did it online and they assigned me a signature instead of having to physically sign everything.  I doubt this seller is going to want to do that.  It might be many more days before there is a fully signed contract by all parties involved and get it to my lender.

Whatever the case, time to zonk out. 

G'nite.