Week 3 Fall Adventure 2023

Monday November 6th and we have made it back to dry land, the rest of today will just be a down day as we will be pulling out of this campground tomorrow morning. Miss Laurie is planning on catching up on most of our laundry before we get back on the road, thank goodness for our onboard washer, which allows us to catch up on laundry when ever we have full hook-ups, our unit is actually a washer / dryer combination but we usually just hang our laundry to dry. I’m working on our cruise blog while everything is reasonably fresh in my memory banks, we are also catching up on some of the world news as the cruise lines like it better when you don’t know what is happening anywhere off the ship. It is also nice to be able to just grab a snack and a drink from the fridge as opposed to going up 4 decks and fighting the crowd at the buffet.

So if you haven’t read it yet catch our “Anchors Away” blog.

Tuesday November 7th, and we are getting back on the road again today, our plan is to be at our winter home in Superior Arizona by this Friday. So we have over 1000 miles (1600 kilometers) to cover in just four days, which means that our driving days will be a little longer than usual, and today will most likely be our worst driving day of the upcoming week as we head north on I-45 right into downtown Houston traffic and then catch I-10 west toward El Paso. Texas is such a big damn State and when we merge onto I-10 we will be at interchange number seven hundred and something, which means that we are still over seven hundred miles from the New Mexico State line which is just a few miles north of El Paso. Because our next big city to transverse will be San Antonio, my objective is to get through both Houston and San Antonio today, then we can just boondock anywhere. In fact I have scoped out a Walmart parking lot just 25 miles northwest of San Antonio on I-10.

It was good to be back in our bed last night and to be back on solid ground, I’m hoping to get on the road early today, this areas forecast temperature is for 85ºF (29.5ºC) so an early start would be a good idea both because of the warmth of the day, as well as having the sun behind us to start the day, in fact that will be part of our plan all week to avoid driving into the sunshine in the afternoons. By 8:00 am I was disconnecting the hookups, dumping the holding tanks and readying the coach for our early start, we will hook up the toad right here in the campground, as there are nice wide concrete roads through out the park. By the time we were ready to go we were pulling onto the road before 9:00, there was a lot of construction on I-45 as we trek north toward Houston, there are lots of speed restrictions because of the road work, we pass on the “Sam Houston Toll Road” exit, we made the mistake a few years ago of taking the “Sam Houston Toll Road” and without a Texas toll tag there seemed to be a toll booth every few miles, so today we are going to take the downtown Houston route.

The closer we get to the I-10 junction the more stop and go traffic we are experiencing, so with six miles to go, the overhead signs are suggesting that we still have 18 minuets of travel time to I-10. When we finally get to I-10 interchange and get Thunder west bound the traffic is still quite heavy but at least it is moving along just below the posted speed limit. And for a guy who used to drive in Toronto’s rush hour traffic all the time, Houston traffic was a piece of cake. Oh it takes some work to keep enough braking space in front of the coach with idiots cutting us off as they try to save a minute on their commute time. I have planned a fuel stop just east of San Antonio to top off the coach fuel tank, the fuel price is good and Thunder should be just under half tank by then, so now we just need to find a rest stop for a break and some lunch. Miss Laurie had located us a rest stop but as we get there it is closed because of road construction, so the next one will have to do, and as luck will have it, it turns out to be only about thirty miles east of our fuel stop.

When we finally get stopped for lunch I decided that we should try and push on a little farther than the 250 miles that I had originally planned for today, as we are trying to make up some ground early on this four day push to Arizona so another fifty miles up the road today there is a Cracker Barrel as well as another RV friendly Walmart parking lot. After lunch we headed west to a T/A (Truck stop of America) where we took on 58 gallons of diesel fuel before rolling back onto Interstate 10, to make our way through downtown San Antonio. Now because of some very poor engineering and planning way back when they originally designed the interstate network of highways we actually have to jump off of I-10 onto the I-410 bypass before catching I-35 just to connect back up with I-10 westbound just past the downtown area. By now we are just after 2:00 pm and we have decided that we are going to push further west toward Kerrville TX and as we exit off of I-10 the Cracker Barrel parking lot is just to our right and has a large parking area so we will not to have to disconnect the toad tonight, can you say bonus? We started this morning in La Marque Texas at an elevation of 17 feet and a flat flood plain area and now we have climbed into the rolling hills of Texas on our push westward and we are now at over 2000 feet of elevation, tomorrow will see even more changes in the scenery as we move west.

Tonight we just kicked back, watched some television while I tried to plan out tomorrows route, the disadvantage to covering the extra fifty miles on day one is having to rearranging our next afternoon’s stop as my previously destination is now only 200 miles down the highway this wouldn’t be an issue normally, but here in western Texas the amount of possible overnight spots just keep getting further apart and harder to find. So the RV friendly Walmart parking lot in Fort Stockton will no longer be Wednesday’s destination, We turned in after watching the Voice and the night was quiet, until the dumping of the trash dumpsters at 5:00 am, but still a small price to pay for a nights accommodations.

Wednesday November 8th, and for the record I was awake before the garbage truck arrived at the Cracker Barrel, I was working on a fuel stop and an end destination for todays adventures. My thinking is that today will be our easiest driving day of the week as we continue west on interstate I-10 we will not encounter any large cities today, and the highway will be reasonably flat and straight so today is the day to tick off some serious miles. But that will all happen after our Cracker Barrel breakfast, first things first, so we place an order on the Cracker Barrel mobile app and fifteen minuets later we are enjoying breakfast in the comfort of our coach. Bacon, eggs, hash browns, biscuits & gravy for me and pecan pancakes for Miss Laurie, a good start to what will turn out to be a very long day. It is overcast this morning as Texas is experiencing some light scattered showers and we would like to try to stay ahead of the next oncoming cold front that is moving south. So this morning we are planning on being on the road by nine o’clock.

We will have another hour of rolling hills as we climb up onto the high plains of western Texas, the big lush trees of eastern Texas turn into the scrub trees of western Texas and now huge patches of prickly pear cactus take over as some of the highway median main foliage. Of course no road trip would be complete without some proverbial “road construction” and today was no exception, I have to admit Texas highways are usually some of the best that we have travelled, but they are not without their rough spots. One of the bonuses to travelling late in the fall season is that a lot of the bigger highway construction projects are nearing their completion, as opposed to the heavy construction time associated with summer. So today we experienced mainly completed sections of highway construction, and we experienced something new today, today we encountered something called a “work convoy” and it would be best described as a way of doing some minor highway repairs without having to set up an actual road construction area with all the required construction warning signs.

So a “work convoy” consists of a rolling signal crash truck with the big arrow announcing a lane closure, then a couple of hundred feet ahead of the first truck there is a second rolling crash truck with another big arrow protecting the actual workers that could be doing any number of tasks from small asphalt patches, to repainting highway lines, or replacing the missing “cat eyes” that so many of the southern States use to mark the highway lines, These are reflectors that they adhere to the southern highways that certainly would not stand up to a Canadian snowplow operator, and that’s why the northern States they recess them into the highway center line area. It has always been neat to see the differences in highway construction as you move from the snow States to the sunshine States and the reflectors to mark the lines is one that is very obvious, exit and entry ramps onto the highways have also always amazed me from State to State and the ones here in Texas often feature “service roads” that run either side of the main highway that can be a wee bit confusing at times but generally work well.

Well we have seen a lot of highway construction and work convoys today and other than a couple of rest stops for Mister Sam and myself to have a break, we have been ticking off lots of miles today and now we have stopped to refuel at a Loves Truck stop in Van Horn Texas and we hope to find a overnight spot shortly after the fuel stop, with four hundred miles under our belt today, Mister Sam and I are both ready to call it a day. Our first hopeful parking area past Van Horn was to small and uneven to be acceptable for us to overnight, so we pushed on and settled into the next “picnic area” and I knew as soon as we pulled in that it would be a noisy night, but decided it would just have to do for tonight.

As we tried watched a bit of television but it was obvious that the AT&T cellular service was very poor in this part of Texas. Cellular service becomes a real problem the further west you travel in Texas as the population density reduces, so does the cellular service, and when you stream your entertainment, that shows the weakness of the cellular network very quickly, so tonight our Maple Wi-Fi has been poor. Texas has a number of areas that have virtually no population and in return have no cell coverage and as we are just a little more than an hour south of El Paso and are soon turning north along the Mexican border, this is an rest area that we will try to avoid on future trips across I-10. One of the issues with flying by the seat of our pants, we covered a lot of miles but ended in a bad area for creature comforts, anyone that has transversed Texas has experienced these areas.

Thursday November 9th, and we woke this morning after a very noisy night at this rest stop on west bound I-10. We are still in Texas, but today we are aiming to make it to Arizona by the time we shut down for the night. The interchange of I10 & I-20 is just a few miles up the road, and then we will start the turn north toward El Paso and up to the New Mexico State line. We had a little rain overnight but it seems to have let up as Miss Laurie prepares a quick breakfast, before we move out of this picnic area. It served a purpose but was not a great overnight location, but as of this morning we are now just over 300 miles to our final destination. As we head further west on I-10 we find a couple of spots that would have been better overnight options but when you are tired you just settle for what is available. But we will remember them for the next trip, this life style means having to adapt to what ever happens, but as we find better spots we make notes for the next trip, and some of these hardships are caused by the speed of our travel on this trip

El Paso is a large busy border town on the Rio Grand river as we drive along within site of the Mexican border, traffic is getting heavier and the major construction that greeted us on the south side of El Paso on our last trip through this area is complete, and has produced stretches’ of new smooth roadway. But now that heavy construction with it’s road restrictions is located on the north side of the city and the highway lane restrictions made for a slow hard go as we edge closer to the New Mexico State line, and hopefully some better highway.

It’s not long until we see the New Mexico state sign, we are still on I-10 and at Las Cruses I-10 swings back to the west as we are now pushing toward the Arizona state line. We have taken I-10 all the way into Arizona a couple of times and the drive is reasonably good, but on this trip we are planning on taking US-70 into Arizona, it is a more direct route to our destination and will take us through areas that we have not seen before. So after refueling near Deeming New Mexico, we venture onto some secondary highways as we head toward Safford Arizona, we have never been this route before which is always interesting but there appears to be a Walmart in Safford that is RV friendly and just a couple of blocks off of US-70.

Today was a much shorter driving day as we only covered a couple of hundred miles, which will leave us an even easier day tomorrow as we coast down from the highlands into the Superior area, but it will be an enjoyable early night with some good cell service in a nice quiet, clean Walmart parking lot with trees along the lot edges. Miss Laurie went in to pick up some supplies and said it was nice neat & clean store as well. This will be a quiet relief after last nights spot we will have some dinner followed by some television (good AT&T service here) and a reasonably early evening as we have covered close to 900 miles in just three days, a pace well higher than our usual.

Friday November 10th, and we had much quieter night at the Walmart parking lot in Safford Arizona and as we have our morning coffee and catch up on the world news we already have a much more laid back feeling as we are so close to our winter destination. Our plan is to arrive in Superior just before noon today, giving us enough time to get settled into our winter home. We should be meeting this years host volunteers as well as catching up with some staff members today, and as with every year we are sad that some of last years team members have not returned but we are also looking forward to making new friends.

After some fried eggs and a bagel we prepared to get on the road by nine o’clock we are only around 100 miles from our final destination but Navi our GPS is showing nearly two hours of travel time. We are heading westbound on US-70 toward Globe Arizona where we will join up with US-60 which will take through the mountain pass to our destination at The Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior. As we leave the Walmart parking lot and slip back on to US-70 we are surrounded by farms many that are harvesting cotton along the banks of the Gila River, tucked in between two mountain ranges, just another example of the diversity of Arizona, about fifteen miles down the road we leave the farm land back into the rolling hills that are part of the Apache Indian Reservation. As the hills become more larger we are looking out over the horizon the mountain ranges start to poke up on either side of US-70, we can see the river canyon now on our left side and traffic is light.

We are well into the San Carlos Apache reservation and we start to recognize spots from this spring and the supper bloom, so we know that we are closing in on Globe, the traffic is heavier now and a few people have started to pass us. As US-70 turns into four lanes we pas the Globe sign and see the signs for US-60 that has weaved its way south from Show Low through the Salt river canyon. Speed restrictions as we enter Globe and wind our way through familiar territory. We are just one mountain pass from Superior as we make our way past the working copper mines along US-60, up through Top of the World the down through the tunnel, past the truck run away ramp, the big turn over Queen Creek then the village of Superior and as we continue west the Arboretum and our winter home. It is 11:45 and we ease into the lot and work our way to our site.

Because it is the same site as last year, I pull the coach into the site without even unhooking the toad, as I will need to fine tune the exact spot I detach and I jockey Thunder into the right location for the hookups as well as the cocreate patio. Now we can shut Thunder down and settle into the site, water, power, sewer, extend the slide, camping mat on the patio, install the rat lights, find our camping chairs, crack a beer and suck in some sunshine. Today will be a day of just settling in, I will unpack most of the toad, kayaks and roof rack removed, the propane fire pit, propane tanks, set up the barbeque, make sure there is cold beer for todays visitors, as there will be visitors.

Damn it is great to be back.

Saturday November 11th and we have woke up to another amazing Arizona sunrise here in Superior, but before I get into todays adventures lets take a moment to remember our veterans who have sacrificed so much to allow us to live in these amazing countries with all of our freedoms. So a huge THANK YOU to our VETERANS!

This morning it is like Mister Sam is now aware that we have settled in for a while, he spent most of the night in his own bed on the coach dashboard and he even graced me this morning with a little lap time. An honour that is certainly not given out on travel days.

So it seems that our fall travel has come to an abrupt end, as we are both volunteering today at the Arboretum, Miss Laurie is back in her happy place surrounded by all of the arid plant life & rocks, Miss Laurie will start in the gift shop this morning and I move into the admissions booth at eight o’clock.

Arizona! Our winter home!

Blog 494

Day 2229

Week 2 Fall Adventure 2023

Well here we are, Monday morning the 30th day 0f October, in a Cracker Barrel Restaurant parking lot in Legion City Texas, which is somewhere between Houston and Galveston Island and that cold front that has been making its way from the northwest has finally caught up with us, here at the Gulf of Mexico’s western shore. We went to bed last night, with a temperature at 80ºF (27ºC) and woke up this morning to 55ºF (13ºC) which has been a bit of a shock, as I had just nicely settled back into my T-shirts and shorts wardrobe, so this has been a bit of an unwanted set back to say the very least, but this was the cold front that had been setting our pace of travel over the last week. So now we will have some time to explore the area and enjoy the warm weather, oh well, at least there is still the exploration part.

We ordered a takeout breakfast from Cracker Barrel this morning to enjoy in the coach, Miss Laurie tried a dish that came with a piece of “cinnamon roll pie” and I had bacon and eggs with a side order of biscuits and gravy. While watching some morning television, I realized that its going to be a tough battery day with no travel time and no solar to replenish our batteries, there is going to have to be some generator run time today for sure. We have a “Harvest Host” boondocking spot booked for this evening, at a Winery just a few miles down the road but until then we are headed to a local outlet mall to spend the day, with this chill in the air I’m not expecting this outdoor mall to be busy. We fired up Thunder around eleven o’clock and pulled out of the Cracker Barrel and headed down the south bound service road toward the outlet mall where we will try to get parked on the extreme outside of the parking lot.

Just eight miles south of the Cracker Barrel we found the outlet mall and worked our way to the outside edge of the lot where we just settled in for a down day. Our toad has been low on fuel since we left Canada but I have been waiting for some better fuel pricing of the southern states. Many of you may never have heard of a growing chain of Texas fuel stations called “Buc-ees country stores“, they are famous for a number of things, like having a hundred gas pumps at each location. They also have stores that are so large they offer full size shopping carts at the entrance just like a Walmart, and the “Buc-ee’s” logo is on everything, clothing, preserves, snacks and the like. The stores are also famous for their smoked brisket sandwich as well as their own line of jerky, they use a beaver as their mascot and is also part of their logo. The reason for the hundred fuel pumps is to allow people time to go shopping after fueling their vehicles without worrying about rushing back to their car, and with some of the best fuel prices they are usually a busy spot, today their fuel price was $2.65 US per gallon which is equivalent to 91¢ CDN per liter over fifty cents less that the current Canadian price which was $1.42 when we left a week ago. So we unhitched our toad and headed to “Buc-ee’s” to top off our fuel tank and wander around the store.

Next we headed off to find the closest Costco to pick up some items, and although we still to have get through Halloween, Christmas was on full display at both Costco & Buc-ee’s and as usual Costco remains our go to for many of our liquor purchases while in the States, although here in Texas they do not carry any of the Kirkland brand liquors so still there is no Kirkland’s Irish Cream for us yet oh well we really haven’t have had time to enjoy a coffee with a little Irish blessing yet, but I’m thinking there will be time in the near future. So after our little excursion we headed back to the coach to have some lunch (roasted chicken wings that we picked up at Costco).

As the afternoon rolls by we reattach the toad and head to our Harvest Host spot for the night a Winery here near the gulf coast, not a location that I expected to find a winery, but the winery has a nice big parking lot with lots of room to turn our rig around, so no need to disconnect the toad for the evening. And again I’m finding that it might have been cheaper for us to just pay for a campground, then staying at a vineyard and letting me enjoy a wine tasting, but I have picked a nice bottle of red that I’m sure Mister Anderson may enjoy with me this winter in Arizona. So it’s the “Haak Winery” in Santa Fe Texas for the win, a beautiful spot in the country, a quiet parking lot, some good wine, this has been a great boondocking night.

Tuesday October 31st Halloween and we are waking up, still in the winery parking lot in Santa Fe Texas, we had watched “The Voice” before turning in for the night again streaming television over our cellular based internet provider, because it was a chilly night and we both used our mattress warmers to take the chill off of the bed last night. But I woke to 45ºF (7ºC) and the threat of todays high only being 61ºF (16ºC) which while that will be better than yesterdays high it’s still not anywhere near the temperature that we were hoping for. And yes I know that you folks back up home in Ontario are bordering on the freezing point this morning, and that must seem really cold compared to our southern cold, and although it will be a slow warm up at least we will see some serious warmth within the next week. Miss Laurie made us toasted western sandwiches for breakfast this morning, I’m on my second cup of coffee blogging as our travel distance today will barely reach double digits and because we are moving into an actual campground today we will have a late start as we wait until check in time before making the move.

We have booked a week at a campground just a few miles from Galveston Island, we first visited Galveston Island on our first winter south, way back in 2017, when we spent a couple of nights in the State park on the island, but as with most State Parks I was unable to book a site for seven nights. But this campground we found is close by and is a bargain at only $175 for a week with full hookups, it appears to be a park that is reasonably new and has a lot of expansion happening right now and they expect to double in the amount of sites over the next year. Now you may be wondering why are we in the Galveston area? And that would be a very good question, and there are a few reasons, some of which will become very obvious soon.

So lets take a little trip back in time to early November of 2017, and the Buchanan’s were on their first winter adventure. They landed in the welcome center of the State of Texas on interstate 10, and had some time to kill as it was mid November and our next reservation wasn’t till December the 1st in Why Arizona. The attendant at the Welcome center suggested a drive down the gulf of Mexico to explore Galveston Island which would be assessable to us by a free ferry ride across Galveston Bay, so we were introduced to Galveston Island and we spent a couple of nights at the State park on the Island. We were impressed enough to think it would be worth another visit later on. But that is not the real reason we are here now. The main reason will show up in the next blog until then just enjoy our little adventure for now.

We started Thunder and prepared to leave the winery around noon, we are travelling less than ten miles today, I have scouted our route on Google maps, and there appears to be some construction to deal with but we have all day to get there. My plan was to just stay on the southbound service road, but that failed because of the construction, so we had to enter onto the interstate highway at one interchange then jumped back off at the next interchange, to a secondary road that would lead us to the campground. As we are making our way to the campground we pass through flood gates, because this area of Texas sits at just a couple of feet above sea level much of this area floods during hurricanes. These gates have not been used for sometime as they now have guardrails blocking their operation but I’m thinking we are now going to be staying on the flooding side of the berm.

Well our campground in not nearly as pretty as it was shown on their website, but it has everything that we will need for the next week, it is obvious that many of the people in the park are fulltime working residents. This is not uncommon in the States as people are finding regular housing options either too hard to find or too expensive, so many workers find a campground near their work location and settle in, being close to their jobs and also being able to change locations as their jobs demand, because many of these works are in construction. We first discovered this reality when we started to find southern Arizona campgrounds hard to book sites and their prices jumping up. This was when construction workers were moving to the Mexican border to build “the wall” a few years ago, now those campgrounds are struggling as the workers have moved on and many of these campgrounds have lost their regular snowbird clients. As you can see from the photos above that we also had some noisy neighbors across the street that serenaded us most evenings. I even got a photo of some smoke but we never discovered where it was from, although I suspect it was on or near the interstate highway.

The balance of today was just spent kicking back and relaxing, it is nice to be plugged in, and having unlimited water for those longer showers and unlimited power for electric appliances. This is a strange stop so we are not unpacking a lot of items, in fact I’m just unpacking the toad enough to do some island exploring that we have planned for tomorrow. It is still cold enough that we have the electric space heater running to take the chill off of the coach as soon as the sun sets. Again we are getting good internet from our Maple Wi-Fi, and we have caught up on some YouTube videos that we had been putting off.

November 1st, and it’s still cool here in Texas, although I’m still wearing shorts, the space heater is running in the coach, we’re watching some morning television and I’m catching up on the blog as we have a day of exploration planned on Galveston Island. We have not been on the island since 2017 and we have good memories of the area, but first a nice breakfast before this adventure starts.

We are heading onto Galveston Island today, we will be taking the interstate highway across the causeway and heading toward the seawall that we last seen six years ago, it is surprising how different things look from the toad as compared to the coach. And the beach area seems abandoned, I suspect mainly because of the chill in the air, but we drove the coast all the way to the State park, making note of all the new construction of homes, resorts and even some RV resorts. Today is not a good representation of the area although things are getting busy because of a bike event that is planned for this weekend. We were not aware of this event, but I don’t think it will effect our plans, but it could explain the difficulty of trying to get into the State park.

After cruising the coastal drive we ended up at the Walmart, we needed to pick up a couple items for tomorrows adventure, before we headed back to the coach. Again tonight we are just kicking back and relaxing with full hookups and good internet, we are trying to eat up some of our leftovers from our refrigerator. We ended up having a busy evening as we are getting packed for a little get away from the coach!

We woke this morning November 2nd, with anticipation of an adventure that will be totally new to us, we have developed an ability to approach most adventures with an open mind and a positive outlook. But we have no reference to compare this one to, so as we do our final little bit of packing and prepare to leave our coach (home) as well as Mister Sam for an extended weekend away, I have to admit to a wee bit of anxiety.

Some breakfast, some coach preparation, rechecking our luggage, our passports & boarding passes, our Uber ride to the terminal and I guess we are ready.

And the Adventure continues!

Blog 491

Day 2219