Texas: Residency and domicile are established (2020)

After 90 days, we have finally completed the final step in establishing our residency and domicile. We have driver’s licenses – or at least the temporary paper version. 🙂

The story

When we arrived in Livingston, we had no idea it would take us 90 days to do our four step process. We managed to complete step 1 (vehicle insurance) and half of step 2 (state vehicle inspection) before all the offices shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

When we left Livingston to head to Dallas, we finished step 2 on the way out of town, by getting the RV’s state inspection. Once we had both inspection forms, we did all the paperwork for step 3 (vehicle registration). Even though we were in Dallas, the county tax commissioner in Polk County agreed that we could send in all of our paperwork instead of showing up in person.

We received our license plates on May 28, and promptly scheduled an appointment to step 4 (driver’s licenses). Unfortunately, because the offices had been closed for 3 months, the earliest appointment was on Tuesday, June 9. We scheduled both of us, and drove 200 miles round trip to complete step 4. We talked with Dallas area residents, and they said that even with appointments, it can take up to 8 hours to get your licenses. They also said that a lot of folks drive out to other counties to get their licenses.

The good news

The trip wasn’t a total waste of time – we drove through and had lunch in Paris, Texas.

We had lunch at a restaurant called 107 – named for the street number in their address.
Menu and beer bottle on a table, with a guy holding a cel phone.
I had an amazing root beer craft soda from a Texas company. Not too sweet, not too tart – the perfect amount of sasparilla.

Once we arrived in Clarksville for our appointment, we still had time to kill, so we looked for a park. We found the Langford Lake Park, which also has RV sites run by the city. We’ll definitely have to come back with our RV at some point to stay here, it’s beautiful.

Langford Lake from the edge of the water at the RV sites.
You don’t often see concrete pads or 50 amp RV sites at a city run RV park. While I suspect our RV would not fit wholly on this concrete pad, we’d still be able to stay.

There was a dump station available on the way back out of the campground area – only electric was available at the sites. The really cool thing about these sites was the lack of road noise. We checked out the actual park area, and you could clearly hear the road noise from multiple roads. At the RV sites, all we heard were the birds chirping.

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