C&C Retirement Adventures, February 22-March 1, 2011

A little rain and fog had moved into Lafayette on the morning we departed. It was the first significant rainfall we've experienced since our trip began, so we really can't complain. The fog lifted, but the clouds remained throughout the day.  The gloominess of the day cast an ominous aura over bayou country--we rather expected to see "Swamp Thing" rise out of the murk at any moment!

And there was very little activity along the Mighty Mississippi where we crossed it.

We soon left Louisiana, entered and exited the state of Mississippi in little more than an hour and arrived in Alabama by late afternoon.

I couldn't resist taking a pic of this Bass Pro Shop--what a location!  Right off the highway, it's quite impressive.

Didn't take long before we were entering the tunnel in Mobile Bay.

The battleship USS Alabama is anchored in Mobile Bay.

Here's our home for the week (Tuesday, Feb. 22 through Mar. 1)--Bella Terra in Foley, AL!

We got together with our friends Linda & Bill Brooks who live nearby in Lillian, AL.  We enjoyed a fun dinner at LuLu's Restaurant--LuLu is Jimmy Buffett's sister.

Linda and I spent Friay afternoon browsing through the stores at the Eastern Shore Shopping Center--just HAD to take advantage of the sales!  In the evening, Corky met us at Bill's & Linda's house in Lillian, where "Chef Bill" had prepared his yummy jambalaya for our dinner.  It was quite delicious.   He shared his recipe with us and you can be sure we'll be serving it up sometime this summer in DL.  

We enjoyed a lovely evening reminiscing and watching the sunset from their patio.  Their little Yorkie Monte provided the evening's entertainment--he's quite a charmer!

The trip to Gulf Shores would not have been complete without a libation from the FloraBama!  The FloraBama is slowly being restored, having been nearly demolished by Katrina.  Even with portions of the building being cordoned off and hard-hatted workmen milling around, patrons were not deterred.  I guess if you are here, it's a must-see place.  

Another trip around the area took us to Fort Morgan, a civil war fortress, that now overlooks various off shore oil platforms.

 We had to check out the area where Corky & Ken Roy surveyed in the late 90's--yes, BLM has several small parcels of land here--and he located a survey marker!

Remember to check our picasa albums to view all the photos we've taken: https://picasaweb.google.com/MuskratLake

C&C Retirement Adventures, February 17-21, 2011

On the way to Louisiana from Padre Island, Texas, we overnighted in Houston at an RV park located in a very congested area just off I-10.  We arrived during Rush Hour which is just as crazy in Houston as it is in DC.  As Corky jockeyed the coach from lane to lane and began going through an intersection, sirens started blaring and I could see a rescue vehicle about to enter the same intersection from the left.  Since neither vehicle can stop on a dime, I knew we were going to meet abruptly in the middle!  I am a bit embarrassed to admit that, at that moment, I closed my eyes and braced for impact.  Our guardian angels must have been traveling along with us, as Corky simply pulled to the side of the road while the ambulance drove around us. Whew!  My knees finally stopped shaking after two glasses of wine!

We crept out of Houston (along with countless other morning commuters) the next morning and reached Lafayette, Louisiana mid-afternoon Thursday 2/17.

Corky's buddy Mike Mayeux and his wife Jane, who live within walking distance of our RV Park,  treated us to some real southern hospitality.  On Friday evening, the Mayeux's chauffeured us to the quaint, historic little town of Washington, Louisiana, where we had cocktails and dinner at the Steamboat Warehouse (really--it was converted to a restaurant) on the Buff Bayou.

The next morning we all drove to Breaux Bridge, another small town with cozy little antique shops and boutiques, all decked out in ribbons and beads for Mardi Gras.  Our destination was  Cafe Mes Amies (sp?) where authentic cajun music is offered early on select Saturday mornings (the cafe opens at 8:30 and the band starts to play immediately!)  We arrived about 8:45 to the foot stompin' sounds of zydeco music and a queue of at least 25 would-be diners anxiously waiting to enter the cafe!  Our hunger got the best of us and we reluctantly decided to drive back to Scott, Louisiana for breakfast.  A former feed store, beautifully renovated to a coffee house, had just opened for business the day before, so we needed to give it a try.  We enjoyed coffee, beignets, and ham & egg on croissants at the Coffee Depot.  Fun place.

That warm southern hospitality continued on Saturday evening, when we were graciously added to the guest list of a dinner party hosted by a member of the Mayeux's Dinner Club.  Their friend David has outstanding culinary talent and a gourmet kitchen to match his talent.  Four couples dined on roasted prime rib, fresh tuna, steamed asparagus, baked sweet potatoes, and hot crusty bread.  My, my, my, that was delicious!  Thank you David!

From L-R Corky, Cathy, Jane, Mike, Gwen, John, David & Denise

Jack Stelly (another surveying buddy of Corky's) & wife Barbara met us for a glass of wine at our coach before we headed off for a fantastic dinner at Pat's on the west edge of the Atchafalaya Basin.  The Atchafalaya Basin or Swamp is the largest swamp in the U.S.  Located in south central Louisiana, it is a combination of wetlands and river delta area where the Atchafalya River and the Gulf of Mexico converge.  

The Stelly's introduced us to Pat's Restaurant--an "off-the-beaten-path" place oozing with cajun ambiance.

Pat, the owner, was quite an entrepreneur, starting in 1940's with a small building and successfully growing his business to its current size that includes the restaurant, motel, fishing pier, dancehall, crawfish processing plant, syrup making facility and a working water mill.  The food was excellent and, of course, abundant!

 We tasted crab cakes, two varieties of étouffé, and fried crawfish and bottelles--fabulous food and the Stelly's are wonderful hosts.

C&C Retirement Adventures, February 12-16, 2011

Almost regretfully we left Kerrville.   The weather had vastly improved and fellow RV'ers were all out and about enjoying the much hoped-for sunshine.  We attended the Park's Happy Hour where we chatted with our new found  DL neighbors, Steve & Kathy who introduced us to Dick & Donee, Mike & Leslie, and Paul & Mary.  They all shared their experiences and insights on the RVing lifestyle--of course, they LOVE IT!  We've all exchanged e-mails with the hopes of meeting up again--maybe here next year.

We arrived at our southeast San Antonio RV park early afternoon and set up quickly.  Then we set out by car for The Alamo.  The Alamo Shrine and what little remains of the compound sits smack dab in the middle of downtown!   It was a Saturday and the first sunny warm day in more than a week--the streets were jam packed with buses, cars--people who knew where they were going and countless other like us who just moved along with the crowds.  Our GPS kept us going in circles, so we finally veered off the main thoroughfare and wound our way up to the 6th level of a parking garage.

Even among throngs of humanity, strolling around the city was enjoyable.  There must have been several conventions in town--there were young people in formal orchestra-wear toting their instruments, tots to teens sporting their cheerleading outfits, and of course the old farts and their "Hello, I'm So-and-so" nametags.  We toured the Alamo and took the riverboat cruise along the Riverwalk.  I was impressed with the Riverwalk when I first visited San Antonio 40 years ago, and am more so now.  It's a lovely city and has much to offer a visitor.

Sunday was another bright sunny day, so we returned to San Antonio's AT&T Center, the venue for the month long San Antonio Stock Show.  Spent the afternoon walking the grounds, browsing the exhibits, and watching a few performances.  We caught a cutting horse demo and a few sets of the sheep dog trials.  Of course, we stuffed ourselves with healthy fair fare, then waddled back to our car.  Gotta buy some Pepto Bismal!

Back at the Braunig Lake RV Park, the boys were ready for a run and really enjoyed chasing birds, but they REALLY WANTED THOSE DUCKS!



Next day--Valentine's Day--we're off to South Padre Island, TX.

As soon as we got settled in our KOA park we contacted our DL neighbors, Bob & Marlys, who invited us to their condo only about 4 miles away.  Their balcony offered us a gorgeous view of the city.  We had a wonderful dinner of Bob's freshly-caught Whiting Fish--as usual, the Santwire's Fish Frys are scrumptious.

Next day we took the boys for a run on the beach--their first real sandy experience.  Woody was quite interested in what the surf brought to shore--dead marine critters, seaweed, but he was really enthralled by the aroma of the horse apples!







Bob & Marlys came to our place for cocktails on Tuesday and took us for a quick tour of the area before we went out to the Big Donkey (I love the name) for dinner.    We had a great visit.  Padre Island is a beautiful area.  And we have been so fortunate to have made such good friends and to have met so many wonderful new friends.  Life is Good!!!!

Next stop probably Houston area enroute to Louisiana.   Later.

P.S.   Now that I've figured out how to post photos in the blog, I'll put a few in the blog, but if you'd like to see more check the picasa album site (cut & paste the url):   https://picasaweb.google.com/MuskratLake

C&C Retirement Adventures Monday, February 10-11, 2011

Not much to report.

Will spend 3 nights here at the Buckhorn Lake RV park in Kerrville, TX; nice place with fairly spacious sites.  In nicer weather this place would probably be a lot of fun, they have a large outdoor "cowboy bar", a big barn for social events/meals, two pools, a catch-and-release lake, a 35-seat movie theater where we saw "The Social Network" last night with two other couples.  However, the cold seems to be keeping most of the RVers hold up in their coaches or fifth wheels OR they are out of the Park doing touristy things.  We see a few people out walking their dogs or tinkering with their coaches, but it's mostly very quiet here.

Corky made arrangements to have the car's rear window replaced.  Fortunately, our insurance will pay 100%, so no out of pocket expense there.  Yay!   The installer should be here Friday.

I found a local salon to have my hair trimmed--which took 3 hours--why??  Well, the heating element in the salon's water heater stopped working--with a shop full of customers.  Not wanting to turn away any business, they resorted to their microwave and coffee makers to warm water for shampoos!  It slowed things down a bit, but they actually did a pretty good job.  The repair man had arrived as I was leaving.  The chatter at the salon was mostly about the seemingly endless bitter cold weather--lots of frozen pipes around here.  Forecast is for a nice warmup over the weekend.

Another "who'da thunk it" moment happened this morning.  Corky was walking the dogs when he ran into another RVer from Minnesota.  Asked where they were from--Detroit Lakes!  They live on Lake Sallie, just about 3 miles from us and only two doors from one of our good friends!  How crazy is that!

We plan to attend the Park's Happy Hour tonight--it's a beautiful sunny afternoon in the upper 50's so they may hold it outside at their Cowboy Bar.

We will leave tomorrow and try find a site closer to San Antonio and do our siteseeing from there.

All for now.

C & C Retirement Adventure, February 7-9, 2011

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!!

Don’t know why, but for some reason, the window must have been stressed and when I shut the door after bringing back the laundry, it cracked.  Egad—I hope this isn’t the start of another round of problems. 

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!!!

C&C Retirement Adventures Monday, February 7, 2011

Kimm, Steve & Jenna drove to Palm Creek on Saturday for the afternoon.  Steve & Corky worked a bit on setting up a communications network in the coach; then we just HAD to return to Eva's for lunch; it's a fabulous Mexican restaurant that we had visited the week before with the BLM buddies--oh my, we waddled out.




We had a fun fun Sunday at the Packers-Steelers SuperBowl Party at Kimm's cousin's house.  Again, we gorged ourselves on wonderful munchies and some of us really enjoyed toasting the Pack, so Sister Mary Catherine ended up being the DD!  There was one lone Steeler's fan who brought his Terrible Towel to the party, but he graciously (and intelligently) maintained a low profile.

On Monday morning we buttoned up the coach and headed to Las Cruces, NM--back to the Hacienda RV Park.  We were surprised when we pulled into the Park because there were several sites available--the last time we stopped here it was almost full.  The unusually cold temps had caused several of the Park's water pipes to freeze and burst--their exercise room had flooded and many of the RV sites had frozen water pipes.  Fortunately they had managed to thaw a few sites by the time we checked in.  So, we are now enjoying one of Las Cruces' spectacular  sunsets.

Tomorrow we'll be heading toward San Antonio, TX--may stay a few days in that area doing some housekeeping and being tourists.  May take in the Stock Show, see the Alamo, and stroll along  River Walk.  Looking forward to it.

All for now.

C&C Retirement Adventures Friday, February 4, 2011

It has been surprisingly cool this past week; it has actually dipped low into the 20s at night and reached only into the 50s and low 60s.  When we tried to buy a small space heater to take some of the chill off at night and lessen our propane dependence, we found that area stores were sold out--there was a "run on space heaters" apparently by all the snow birds!!!  Luckily, the Sears store had one small ceramic heater left which is currently in the coach warming my tootsies!

Despite the chilly temps, we continue to enjoy our stay in Casa Grande.  We drove to Chandler on Wednesday to do a little shopping--found a dandy little portable Weber gas grill that will be initiated soon.  Then it was dinner at the Rustler's Rooste with Steve and the girls--what a fun place.

On Thursday, we donned our "tourist personna" and went to the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument where the remains of the once-thriving Hohokam culture are being preserved.  According to the National Park Service (NPS) brochure, the Hohokam were hunter-gatherers who lived in what is now Arizona for several thousand years.  There is evidence of a distinct Hohokam culture in place along Arizona's Gila and Salt rivers at around 300 A.D.!!!!!  Archeologist Emil Haury who studied the Hohokam called them the "first masters of the American Desert."  The relics reveal the Hohokam were a farming people; they were enteprenuers as well, trading their pottery and jewelry with neighboring villages.

In the early 1300s the Hohokum at this settlement finished building their Great House (dubbed Casa Grande by early Spanish explorers) within their compound which also contained other shelters.  NPS determined it was about 4 stories high and 60 feet long, the largest known structure from these times.  It took 3,000 tons of a mud-mix called Caliche piled in layers to form the walls; additionally, the Hohokum used saguaro cactus ribs and timber from fir trees harvested 60 miles away as support beams.   All this construction done by manual labor!!!!  However, its purpose remains a mystery--there is no defining evidence yet found to determine why this structure was built.  Fascinating!

The brisk evening temperatures discouraged get togethers on the patios, so we invited our RV neighbors to join us for cocktails in the Road House on Thursday.  Lots of laughs and shared stories among Brian & Carol and Doug & Anna from British Columbia and Del & Jan from Wisconsin.  How fortunate we are to have met such wonderful folks.

The Park hosted a fund raiser for cancer awareness on Friday evening--residents gathered at the Registration Parking area where three hot air balloons were staged.   music, popcorn, ice cream and comaraderie.  There was a dance in the ballroom and a silent auction outside.  A truly awesome sight were the four thousand luminaries lining the Park's main thoroughfares in support of breast cancer awareness programs.  WoW!!!

Have a good weekend all.

New pics have been added to albums at http://picasaweb.google.com/MuskratLake