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.