On the Road Again!

We left home at about 11:00am today, and are currently sitting in a truck stop in Duson, LA………. just outside of Lafayette.  We stopped to eat the stew that we have had in a crock pot all day, and to let the rush hour traffic in Lafayette die down a little before we go through.

We expect t drive late tonight, and arrive in Red Bay in the early afternoon Thursday.   Hopefully, we can get a level site, since our levelers don’t work, and that is one of the repairs that we are having made.

Our next planned stop is the Wal-Mart in Amite, LA for fuel.  We filled up in Wharton, TX at $3.69/gal, and the fuel at Amite shows on the website as $3.83 / gal which  with our Wal-Mart Discover card 5 cent discount will be $3.78…… which is a lot better than a lot of the $4.03 to $4.12 that we have seen at the major truck stops along the way.

After fueling, we will drive until about 10:00PM.

More later…………..

El Paso, The Flores’ & Home

After getting on the road following the ‘fix’ on the rear jack, we made good time and arrived at El Paso, TX at about 3:30pm.  We contacted Ed and Patsy Flores as we crossed into Texas at Anthony, and they confirmed our plans for dinner at their house.

Ed Flores is a Mechanical Engineer that I met in the summer of 1969 at ALCOA when both of us hired on as Summer Engineering Interns.  I was from The University of Texas at Austin, and he attended The University of Texas at El Paso.  We also both accepted offers that summer to return after graduation in the Engineering department.   However, Ed and Patsy decided about 1972 that they preferred the dry climate of West Texas over the humid conditions on the Gulf Coast, and he resigned to move back to El Paso.  He currently owns his own Engineering and Inspection company.  He also contracted and built his own house with some nice amenities.

During the drive, we had talked to our DIL and found out that our grandkids had a basketball game on Saturday morning at 9:45am, so we decided that we wanted to get to Victoria on Friday evening.  I decided that we would do some driving after dinner, so we drove the Bus with the car attached to the Flores’ house, which was pretty high up on a hill, rather than disconnect and then have to drive back and reconnect.   Ed had assured me that the road into the neighborhood was wide enough for travel.   It was,  although I had a nasty turnaround on the cul de sac at the end of his dead end street all worked out!!

Here’s a picture of the Bus in front of ( and hiding most of) the Flores’ House…….

Here is a picture of Ed and Patsy…….

Here is a picture of the ‘open’ dining area…………

…….. and some pictures off his back deck:

My Patsy and I were treated to a nice Lasagna dinner, and good reminiscing conversation.   We found a lot of common results in our lives…… both at work and in family!

We left about 8:00pm and after filling up with diesel at a Wal-Mart that Patsy Flores told me was “in tha hood” at a price of $3.51 after all discounts, which is a really good price.

We drove to Ozuna, TX which, left about 550 miles to drive on Friday.   We got home about 7:30pm after driving to the local park to dump our tanks.

We made it to the basketball game, but pictures were with my iphone camera, which does not ‘stop action’ very well, but here are a couple of Matthew.  In the last picture, he made an “all net” shot from the edge of the court!  Good shot, Matthew!

This was a good three-week trip.

Leaving Tucson for El Paso, TX

We had a nice two days at the Lazydays campground in Tucson. 

On Wednesday morning, we ventured out into Tucson.  Our goal was to see the Old Tucson area (not much), find a post office to mail a package to our granddaughter in Little Rock, stop at a Wal-Mart for supplies, and to go to a Kohl’s to buy a matching bowl to the one that we purchased in Yuma.

All was successful except for the Walmart……….. they did not have all we needed, so we hit a Fry’s supermarket.  We did well here, plus they took our Kroger card for a bunch of specials, and to top it off, we got a 10% discount for being over 55!

We got back to the campground, and spent the rest of the day planning our trip home, cleaning up the inside or the Bus (mostly from Quartzsite dust), and relaxing.  Patsy cooked a stew in the crockpot, and it turned out to be really good.

We got up this morning to leave, and after dumping the tanks, and putting in the slides, I pressed the button for the levelers to retract.  All was good for a short while, then they stopped and I got an error light on the DS rear!  I turned off the system and started again, and they retracted a little more…….. then the error light again.  After repeating this process a couple more times, the indicator lights showed all was well.  I decided to check, and found the DS rear jack still almost all the way down!

Unlike in El Paso earlier in the trip, the air bags stayed inflated, and the jack could not be hoisted by hand.,  I decided to call the Atwood factory service center.  After discussing the situation, they told me that they had had previous problems with the motor amps indicating ‘jack up’, when in fact the motor was just pulling high amps!!  They instructed my on how to raise the jack with a portable drill motor, and that worked!

It is a really good thing that we are due in Red Bay to get the whole jack system upgraded to a more dependable system.

We left Tucson about 10:30am and expect to arrive in El Paso about 4:00pm to have dinner at the home of Ed and Pat Flores.  Ed and I started at ALCOA the same year, but he quit to come back to El Paso in 1972.

By the way, Patsy is driving the Bus for the first time in almost 2 years on I-10 in New Mexico.  That is giving me an opportunity to watch Fox News and do this blog update!

I will do another update after our visit with the Flores’,