Texas Twosome:
Monday morning March 14th, we are well into our 3rd week of this safari and heading into the wild state of Texas. We finished up the Caverns with a morning walk through the Big Room and hit the dusty trail for Fort Davis, TX. We made some changes to the route after talking with others who live in the area, it was recommended that we not go down as far south as we had intended and we were being to feel the effects of going and going. The old folks think they need a more leisurely pace? The road was a good one and a bit more varied than our earlier dessert drives – quite a bite of sage brush, rolling hills and live stock made the route a good one. After getting into camp at the Prude Dude Ranch, we headed up to the Mc Donald Observatory on 6,791 foot, Mt. Locke, the highest point in TX. We had an educational evening with a great presentation on the solar system; the constellations; and the galaxies. Surprising how much one can forget about astronomy and how interesting it really is. The evening ended with the Star Party, where they had a dozen or so big telescopes set up each aimed at a different astronomical site, this was really fun. Mike wants a telescope!
Day # 19, now this is going to prove to be an odd day. We awoke, and prepared the rig to head off towards Fredricksburg, TX, when Karen said I smell something “hot” – Mike quickly scanned the coach – finding smoke wafting up from next the navigator’s seat. “What the hell?” Not just smoke, but flames: imagine this, Karen’s magnifying glass was sitting in her cubby shelf, pointing towards the front window, the sun shining brightly caught the New Mexico map and a paper sack with brochures in it on fire. YIKES, talk about an adrenaline rush, quickly outside, the fire was extinguished, the map only a bit worse for wear, but no damage to anything important. Jeeze that got our morning going. Needless to say that could have been a lot worse if we had walked the boys a few minutes earlier. Mike then went outside to finish the readying tasks and took the Boys out to enjoy the cool morning. Mr. Guinness’ lead was hooked up to front awning arm, when suddenly he spotted the neighbor dog coming over for a visit, guess who pulled that arm off the body of the coach? All of this fun within about 10 min. of each other. Time to go back to bed?? Thank goodness the day got much more boring; we had an easy route to Fredricksburg, where we enjoyed a nice Tex-Mex dinner out on the patio of a local restaurant on the main street of the very attractive little town.
Next morning we intended to stay in Fredricksburg, but with the broken awning we thought maybe we should find a repair stop and tend to our mistakes. We drove to San Antonio, where there is a Camping World. By mid afternoon we had the MoHo all fixed up and we off to our campground for the night.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day. We spent the late afternoon and evening walking in downtown San Antonio. We walked by the Alamo and then enjoyed the River Walk area with many 1000’s of other folks. Spring Break for Texas kids and of course St. Paddy’s Day, it was CROWDED. We went in to Michelino’s (Italian? not Mexican or Irish??) The Margaritas were quite good, the pizza - yummy and the Texan Wine, Falls Creek Red Blend – Very Nice! Karen paid the Mariachis (yes strolling Mexican Band Guys) to play a romantic song to Mike. This was a lot fun, we sat for quite a while enjoying the river view, people watching and soaking up the balmy evening air (81 degrees still at 8:30pm).
Our last day in San Antonio – we headed into town and visited the San Antonio Museum of Art. It is housed in the old Lone Star Brewery Building. There were a number of great exhibits from ancient Greek and Roman Antiquities to many interesting modern projects and a very interesting show featuring pictures, art, and audio visual set-ups on the Dali Lama. We spent over 2 hours and still only saw about ½ of the offerings. We then went to the Spanish Governor’s Place and took a tour through the dwelling and beautiful gardens. This old adobe home has been well preserved and the exhibits provided some good history of how things were almost 300 years ago. The day ended with a GREAT Dinner from Rudy’s BBQ – “the worst BBQ in Texas”. DELICIOUS!!! We feasted on ribs, brisket and a sausage link served with an incredible sauce, should have bought more of that for future enjoyment. Tomorrow we are heading back north to see Austin.