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| Overalls-very Texan! |
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| What's more Texas than football? Go Broncos! |
OK-I'll take any excuse to post pictures of the grandbaby!!
We’ve just spent the last two weeks enjoying ourselves in
Texas. We said good-bye to Emily and
left Tempe very early in the morning to avoid as much of rush hour traffic as
possible. Our plan was to drive to Las
Cruces, New Mexico; spend the night; and then drive on to Fredericksburg, TX
where we planned to eat BBQ and German food, and listen to music for a day. Well, we hit Las Cruces, NM at about noon,
and the new, retired, flexible version of Pat and Elaine looked at each other
and wondered what on earth we would do all afternoon in a city we knew nothing
about………and decided to keep driving.
Ended up spending the first night in Van Horn, Texas which is located in
just about the middle of absolutely nowhere which was just fine with us since
all we wanted was to drink a glass of wine, eat dinner, and get some
sleep. I have to say that one advantage
of being in the middle of nowhere (which means no smog, no dust, no hills, no
city lights) is that the stars are absolutely brilliant! They totally filled the night sky and it seemed
like you could reach out and touch them.
Spectacular! Drove on to
Fredericksburg the next day and managed to pull into the RV park right as one
of the tires on “the 5th” went flat; so that extra day we gained in
Fredericksburg was spent, in part, getting the spare put on and the flat tire
fixed; but we still had a great time. Wandered through town, went out to Luckenbach, ate great food, and
relaxed.
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| South Padre Island |
From Texas hill country, we headed for the Texas gulf coast
and South Padre Island.
We stayed at a
county-run RV park that was, by far, the largest we’ve ever stayed in (about
500 spaces). It was located on the very
south tip of the island; so it was surrounded on three sides by ocean and
bay-it was beautiful.
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| Sunshine on the sea |
Pat and I walked
through the entire park thinking there would be quite a few others folks there
from Oregon. However, the entire time we
were there, we only saw one other RV from Oregon. We spent our days walking, hanging out on the
beach/in the sun, eating great seafood, and just relaxing. One thing we did do when we realized that we
were going to spend the rest of the winter and spring on the gulf coast, was to
pack up all our winter clothing and break out the Capri pants, shorts, and
t-shirts!
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| Pat relaxes on the beach |
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| South Padre Island sunset |
From South Padre Island, we
headed up the Texas coast, north of Corpus Christi, to Port Aransas on Mustang
Island. This time, we were in a very
small RV park (less than 60 spaces) right on the beach. When we arrived, there were two other RV’s
from Oregon already there – who would have thought! Mostly did the same thing here as we had in
South Padre – relaxed. We did drive the
pickup, “big Bertha”, on the beach which is allowed in Texas; but was a first
for us.
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| Outside dining in Port Aransas |
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| Pat and "Big Bertha" on the beach |
We realized that this time on
the Texas coast was the first time in the six months that we’ve been “on the
road” that we’ve had no other agenda. No
specific sights we wanted to see, no genealogy that we wanted to do, no
children/grandchild/friends that we wanted to spend time with – just doing
whatever we wanted to whenever we wanted to.
We are feeling very decadent!
Our plan was to leave Port Aransas for Lafayette, Louisiana
on Friday, January 24th.
However, we started hearing about a big freeze that was predicted to
create sleet, freezing rain, ice, and/or snow as far south as Port Aransas and
in the Houston area (which we really couldn’t avoid) Thursday night and into
Friday. Since we didn’t know how long
the bad weather would last and weren’t certain that we could extend our stay in
the Port Aransas RV park, we decided to hitch up a day early and haul ourselves
to Lafayette ahead of the storm on Thursday and spend an extra day there. We pulled out so early in the morning that it
was still dark and took the ferry (a five minute ride) to mainland and hit the
road.
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| "Big Bertha" and "the 5th" take a ferry ride! |
So, we arrived in Lafayette, Louisiana yesterday around 2:30
pm.
It was cloudy; but still close to 60
degrees out.
Lafayette is in the middle
of Cajun Country in south central Louisiana.
It doesn’t snow much here.
But
the forecast was calling for some sort of freezing precipitation; and they didn’t
mess around.
By 6:00 pm, they had closed
schools, city offices, county offices, state offices, and some highways for
Friday in anticipation of the icy stuff!!!
We were under three different severe weather alerts:
Winter Weather, Wind, and Hard Freeze!
Well, the temperatures did fall; precipitation
did fall; and we woke up this morning to a very thin layer of snow/ice on the
ground.
It is now late afternoon and the
temperature has not reached 30 degrees yet and it’s been sleeting or freezing
rain all day.
We are still under a
severe winter weather advisory until 6:00 pm.
We’ve decided to stay another day until the weather is supposed to get
back up into the 60’s again and then we’ll head on to the Florida gulf coast.
So, presently stuck in Louisiana in the
snow!
Do you think maybe we packed up
those winter clothes a little too soon?
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| "Big Bertha" and "the 5th" in Louisiana snow! |
