We left Las Cruces, NM about 9 Tuesday a.m. and headed southeast toward El Paso, TX, 35 or 40 miles away. It proved to be a much larger town than we had expected (maybe I’ve watched too many westerns); it took more than 30 minutes to drive I-10 around the El Paso metro area, city limit-to-city limit! Surprised us both!
I took a few pics of the scenery going through El Paso (I was trying to show our proximity to the Mexico border—don’t know if you can see the Rio Grande well enough in the pics.) Most of the rest of the new photos are simply of the west Texas scenery from the coach window.
Although the temps hit well into the high 70s, the famous Texas wind reared its ugly head in the afternoon. Corky fought the strong gusts for about 3 hours before we reached our chosen destination for the evening—Fort Stockton, TX. The lady at the registration desk told us quite matter-of-factly, that “the wind doesn’t blow so hard here, it usually blows at lot harder!” Geez!
Fort Stockton isn’t a very big place—maybe a population of 1500—anyway TV reception via antenna was not to be had. No big deal—Steve gave us some DVDs so just pop one of those into the player, right? Okay, where are they? In my quest to keep the coach neat and efficient, I have put them away, out of sight. Put them away so well in fact they are not to be found. We’ve nearly unpacked the coach to no avail. I’m almost convinced we have a prankster ghost riding along with us because first, Corky hasn’t found the bungee cords he’s certain he packed; I’ve lost the DVDs, and this morning when we had breakfast at the RV Park’s Roadrunner Café, Corky’s orange juice mysteriously disappeared—glass and all! He did not drink it! We both saw 2 small glasses of OJ on our table one minute and the next there was only one glass on the table—strange. We didn’t get THAT close to Roswell or Marfa!
Oh, well. The wind continued to howl, so Corky decided it would be in our best interest to pull in the slides and just hunker down and go to bed. The temperature outside was dropping fast and when we awoke Wednesday it was 13 degrees!!!!! With the wind chill it was 3 BELOW ZERO!!! And, of course, along with the frigid temps comes other problems to deal with—like a frozen water hose. Fortunately we stored some water in gallon jugs so it wasn’t a big deal. It’s just that south Texas isn’t supposed to be THIS C-C-C-COLD!
So we set out for Kerrville, TX about 180 miles down I-10. Much to my dismay, along the way we noticed some “white stuff” in the ditches and under some trees—yup, snow. Oh great! We settled into our site at the Buckhorn Lake RV Resort in Kerrville and began our housekeeping chores. With the temps being so cold, we found the water pump and sewer line frozen. Even though the sun was shining, it was still too cold to thaw our frozen equipment, so while I was doing some laundry, Corky moved our little space heater to the compartment housing the water pump. After a while the pump started working so all is well again. Or so we thought.
I returned to the coach after laundry chores and began to remove the clothes basket from the car when I discovered the right rear window of our Acadia was shattered!!
The weather report is for one more cold day, then a nice warm up for the end of the week and weekend.
Hey, this is an adventure—we’re still having fun!
Later.
Note to readers: Even though our misadventures make for interesting reading, I promise you it's all true. However, we'd much prefer the rest of our trip be boring with nothing much to write home about, but that will never happen. You just can't make this stuff up. Never a dull moment!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment