Home Again

We’re home.  We made the usual stop in Shipshewana, Indiana at Deb’s favorite grocery store, then came straight home, arriving at about 1pm.  We couldn’t have picked a better day to winterize the RV and to remove all our stowed stuff.  58 degrees and sunny, no battling ice and snow like we’ve had in the past.  Seven weeks and four days on the road.  More statistics below for the number-oriented..

So this is the last public post for this trip.  I’ll light this blog up again in late April when we venture out to Turkey on the 24th.  Stay tuned.

Statistics:
Time on the road: 7 weeks and 4 days (53 days)
Miles driven: 3909
Total miles traveled (RV, boat, bike, on foot, Uber, and everything else): 6992

The completed trip map:

Travel Day

Not much to say today.  We traveled.  That’s about it.  Kind of unusual for us that we didn’t really stop anywhere except for fuel and food.  I didn’t take any pictures today, but I did plot the route so far on a map and it looks like this:

We are currently in Gas City, Indiana and will be arriving home tomorrow.  Looks like we’re coming in at about the right time: most of the snow from the big storms is gone and there may be more snow coming on Friday/Saturday.  So we’ll slide in between the snow, giving us some time to re-winterize the RV and get it unloaded before the freezing weather sets in again.

547 miles covered today

Picking Up Sticks

We spent the day picking up sticks.  At five different homes, all in the Blue Mountain area just outside of New Albany, Mississippi.  And there are a lot of sticks to pick up.  This place is one huge mess.  A lot of work has been done already, but there is a lot more to go.

We started out right away with an orientation at the First Methodist Church in New Albany.  Everyone had their orange shirts, we sat through a safety presentation, and we were divided in to teams.  Deb and I were put with a team that had already been working together for a day or so, so we had a little catching up to do.  People from all over the states, California, Wyoming, Ohio, Michigan (of course), and others.  From teenagers to mid-70’s, it was quite a diverse group.

The first few jobs were rather small--yards littered with sticks and branches and lots of limbs hanging broken from trees which had to come down.  These were all piled up to be picked up later.

One of the main reasons for these efforts is a chance to talk to the homeowners, show them the love of God by helping out with the mess, and placing a Bible in their hands.  At each site, we all signed the inside cover of a Bible, presented it to the homeowner, and circled around and prayed for the homeowner when we arrived and when we left.  The people really appreciated the help and also appreciated the gift of the Bible.

We did five sites today.  The last site was the most severely hit, with a carpet of downed limbs and trees covering nearly the entire property.  We didn’t have enough time to finish this one and a a group will have to return at some point to finish it up.

This kind of work is very demanding, very physical work.  The limbs are large and many.  And 8 hours of this took its toll.  We were quite exhausted once the day was over.

Samaritan’s Purse has a lot of this stuff figured out.  Chaplains come out to each work site to talk with the homeowners.  They have every sort of tool imaginable.  They have a well-rehearsed safety policy.  They come into town with big trailers and portable offices and workshops. But one thing they don’t have figured out is restrooms for those at the job sites.  There are none.  We are twenty minutes away from the church home base, where there are large portable restrooms, but we can’t be driving back and forth all the time.  We stopped at a couple of gas stations between sites to use the restroom.  The first gas station was a run-down place with a barely functional bathroom.  Deb was one of the first to use it and had to figure out how to get the water to run properly.  The instructions were then passed down the line, hoping that the plumbing would hold up for the remainder of the group.  We managed, but for such a well-oiled machine, this one aspect is a glaring omission.

We took off as soon as we got back to the church, had dinner in a nearby parking lot, and drove for an hour, stopping at a Cracker Barrel in Corinth, Mississippi.

On To New Albany

I can tell we are more north.  It’s getting cooler at nights.  At some point we will no longer be “below the weather” and may have to deal with freezing temperatures and snow again.  From the forecast it looks like that may not happen until we get home on Friday.  We’ll see ... and we hope so.

We drove for a while to warm up the rig and to seek some better cell signal before stopping for showers and to watch yesterday’s sermon.  Somehow, that didn’t happen yesterday with all the moving around and the foodie stuff we did.

We covered 165 miles of the Natchez Trace before branching off towards New Albany.  The Natchez Trace is like a nice Sunday drive: very little traffic and it’s okay to drive slow.  In fact, it’s required.  We passed at least two police cars that had pulled people over, I’m guessing because they were speeding. If you want to go fast, take the Interstate!

New Albany is in the area that was hit hardest by Winter Storm Fern a few weeks ago.  We lived through that same storm when we were camped at Tejas, but it was just an inconvenience for us.  A quarter inch of ice encasing everything, temperatures below freezing for a few days, frozen plumbing for some of us.  But here it was much more severe.  The ice took down trees and power lines and made a huge mess of everything.

This picture came from a local Facebook post from January 27.  Most of the streets are now clear and the evidence of the storm is seen in piles of brush and branches lining the roads.  

When we looked fora place to park overnight, we found that there isn’t a lot available.  After exhausting all the other options, Deb called the local police department and asked them if there was a place we could park.  They told us we could park at the Tanglefoot Trailhead, a large parking lot at the north end of the Tanglefoot bike trail, which also happens to be right next-door to the police department building.

We parked there and took the bikes down the trail for several miles, having to dodge sticks and low hanging branches occasionally.  The big stuff had all been pushed off the trail, so a lot of the initial work is done.  What remains now is individual homes that need clean-up and this is what Samaritan’s Purse is here to do.  We will be volunteering for a day in this effort.

We rode our bikes past the Methodist Church that is the command central for Samaritan’s Purse.  The parking lot is full of large trailers with equipment and supplies, more trailers that house portable restrooms, another trailer with a portable kitchen.  They have a big presence here.  We have to show up at the church at 7:30am tomorrow for our day of volunteering.

Should be an interesting day.

234 miles covered today.

A Caloric Day

With a full tank of fuel, a full stomach, and a good night’s sleep, we rolled out of Baytown (East Houston), heading east on I-10.  One thing that becomes apparent, even though we know it already, Texas goes forever. It was well into the morning when we crossed the border into Louisiana. 

We stopped at the information center to walk around and pick up any information we could find.  Data Deb is always picking up pamphlets and brochures from these places and squirreling them away in folders.  They come out on subsequent trips.  This location had a couple helpful workers whom we plied with questions.  When asked about a recommended place to get some good Cajun food, the suggestion was Prejean’s in Lafayette, about an hour and a half down the road.  That amount of time would put us at noon, which was perfect.  We made tracks for Prejean’s.

This restaurant was an entirely new experience.  It was all decorated for Mardi Gras, complete with a band composed of a fiddle, accordion, and a triangle.  We were asked if we wanted to be close to the band or farther away.  We ended up quite close and it was entertaining, for a while.  Then it was the same chords over and over again, and the triangle making the same dinging sound and it got a little repetitive.  We couldn’t understand any of the lyrics.  I won’t be buying the CD.

We both ordered the chicken and sausage gumbo soup.  That was delicious.  It had a significant kick to it, and we left with mouths and throats burning.

Then we went in search of beignets.  We were directed to the Poupart Bakery (yeah, that’s really the name).  Great bakery and we came away with a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread but they don’t do beignets.  We found some at the restaurant a couple doors down.  These were a pastry piled with powdered sugar that are supposed to go good with dark roast coffee.  It was good without the coffee and we learned they are more available at coffee shops than bakeries.

Somehow, we always end up at the local grocery store.  Deb bought some Cajun spices and a few other things to make our own gumbo.

As we were leaving we discovered the freezer wasn’t freezing any more.  Most of the stuff was quite thawed and the fridge was getting rather warm.  I poked around in the back for a bit, even swapping the control board for the spare I had hidden under the bottom drawer in the galley, and managed to get it working again.  I’m not sure what happened although I have some theories.  I’ll have to check this out when we get home.

All in all, the fridge has worked pretty well since I set it on fire five years ago.  It probably has an excuse to be a bit cantankerous.  I just wish it wouldn’t do it when we have expensive meat in the freezer.

Now it will take at least a day to cool everything again and our ice cream is probably a goner.  We went back into the store and bought a bag of ice for the fridge and a cake of dry ice for the freezer. Hope this helps.

Leaving here, we continued down I-10, turning north at Baton Rouge to get on the Natchez Trace, a 440-mile scenic route that ends in Nashville.  We will be traveling on this for a while and then leaving to stop in New Albany, Mississippi, to help out with the clean-up effort for Winter Storm Fern.  After seeing an email from Samaritan’s Purse about volunteers needed for this effort, we signed up as we were coming through that general area on the way home.

It was dark as we left Natchez and drove the first 60 miles of the Natchez Trace.  Our aim was the first of three campgrounds along this route.  This is a great route to drive, it goes through some beautiful country and you don’t have to deal with a lot of traffic.  With a speed limit of 50mph, you aren’t going to get there fast.  If you need to get there fast, take the Interstate.

It’s a great route to drive, just not at night.  It’s super dark at night and the recent Winter Storm left lots of broken tree branches along the way.  They have all been pushed off the road, but there is a lot of cleanup needed along this route.  Even more concerning are the deer.  There were lots of deer, especially in the open meadows, and we had to hit the brakes several times for deer crossing the road.  We were grateful to finally pull into the campground and shut down for the night.

One thing about this campground is that there is no internet.  Not by any means.  Cell phone signal is non-existent.  The heavy tree cover renders Starlink inoperative.  So we are offline for the night.  This is when you realize how dependent we are on the internet.  How far do we have to go to get to New Albany?  Don’t know, the maps won’t update.  Can’t send or receive emails.  The sibling call we were supposed to participate in went on without us.  We can’t watch the show we were in the middle of.

I guess we’ll just have to make do without it ...

423 miles covered today.

Turning North

The kites were still flying once it got dark last night.  Only then they were all lit up from within, creating this cool lighted sculpture, slowly moving about in the wind.  We watched them from the window of the RV.  Lighted kites, who would have thought?

It was a rather warm and humid night so it was a little more difficult to sleep.  As we were laying there a little later on we could see shapes moving outside the window.  We initially thought they were dogs running around but later identified them as coyotes, several of them.  Deb looked it up this morning and that’s definitely a thing.  There are somewhere around 40 dens of coyotes on this island and they do roam around the beach at night.

It was an overcast day today, low 70’s and so humid that any glass fogged up, making eyeglasses rather hard to use.  It was also very windy.  And the combination of the high wind and every surface being a little moist meant the blowing sand stuck to everything.  There seems to be a grittiness to every surface.

We took a bike ride into town and managed to stop at the Farley Boat Works.  This time, it was open.  The one person there was friendly and happy to answer questions and show us around.  Perhaps the most interesting thing was his story.  He came from New York City, in the Bronx, and had an interest in boats since he was young.  He did some schooling in Maine, worked for a guy on his yacht, and ended up here, on Mustang Island, two years ago to manage the Farley Boat Works, which is mostly a museum, which was being rebuilt and relaunched after shutting its doors in the 1970’s.  He helps people build wooden boats, one at a time, and is restoring his own.  He claimed that Farley was the first to put a motor on a boat back in the ‘teens, a few years ahead of Chris Craft, but information found on the internet contradicts that.

We also stopped by the Chapel on the Dunes again, hoping there would be a Saturday tour, but there was an actual wedding going on there, and we were not in wedding clothing.

Back at the RV, we racked the bikes, had lunch and then took our last walk on the beach.  It was then time to start heading north.

250 miles later, here we are, at a Cracker Barrel just east of Houston.  We drove through a thunderstorm for the last hour, and my affection for Houston driving is about on par with driving through Atlanta, which is none at all. Forty miles of Houston concrete spaghetti, driven at night, in the pouring rain, in very heavy traffic, was not what I call fun.  Several sections of roadway do not have good lane markers, and they disappear in the rain, leaving me with two options: (1) blindly follow the tail lights in front of me, which is not a good idea because he is just as blind as I am, or (2) estimate the distance between the concrete barriers on each side, divide by the number of lanes that I think there are, and position myself in one of those imaginary corridors.  Both of these options are bad, since everyone is blind and has a different idea of imaginary corridors.

I white-knuckled it for the entire distance and managed to cross the entirety of Houston without connecting with a single vehicle.

We made one stop in Houston, at a H-E-B store, and picked up some more Wagyu beef patties and more grapefruit.  Much harder to find as we go north. We will continue to eat well for a little while yet.

High as a Kite

This morning when the sun rose, it wasn’t foggy.  Still some sort of light mist in the air but not socked in like yesterday.  So I actually got to see the sun come up.  It popped out of the clouds on the horizon and immediately started warming the day.

We took a long bike ride on the beach earlier today to beat the tide.  This time we made it all the way to Mustang Island State Park, ten miles south of here.  In the morning, the beach wasn’t so crowded with vehicles and fishermen with their lines stretched across the beach, however, the ride was made a little less pleasant by the large road graders grooming the sand and pushing it towards the water.  Anywhere the graders had been was unsuitable for bike riding as the sand was disturbed.  On the way back, at least three areas had been completely groomed all the way to the water’s edge, and we were forced to ride in the surf to keep on firm sand.  It made a real mess out of the bikes.

We’ve noticed that the wind always seems to be blowing here.  And on a warm day it helps keep things cool in the RV when all the windows are open.  Even late into the night, the wind is blowing, this steady offshore breeze that enhances sleep at night.

We’ve noticed another thing this wind is good for: kite flying.  A steady wind is ideal for kites and there have been some flying every day we’ve been here.  Today there were a LOT of them, most of them flying all day long, strung out and tied to stakes in the sand.  When we were on a walk this evening, we walked by some of the larger ones, and there was a trailer parked there with a logo that said ​Kites in the Field over Texas.​  In it were lots of packed up kites and accessories. They didn’t appear to be selling anything and when we looked them up later on, their Facebook page said ​Kites in the Field over Texas main goal is to promote the enjoyment of flying kites.  It’s a great activity and makes for a beautiful picture on the beach.

After lunch we biked into town to check out some more of the 8 Wonders of Port-A.  The Farley Boat Works was closed, so we couldn’t see boat-building in action. The Chapel on the Dunes is a tiny chapel and sits on one of the highest points on the island (which isn’t saying much).  It is often used for weddings--very small weddings--as it will only fit 22 with some standing.  The inside of this chapel is painted with murals that depict the Old Testament on one side and the New Testament on the other side.

And, lastly, the Tarpon Inn is the oldest surviving structure on Mustang Island, built in 1886 using lumber from Civil War barracks.

Having seen these we returned to the RV and made dinner.  It only took about six miles on the bikes to see them all.

Dinner was hamburgers using Wagyu beef that we found at H-E-B.  It has a higher fat content than ordinary ground beef, which made a real mess of the grill, but, it was oh so good.  This is more expensive than regular ground beef--this package was seven dollars for two patties but it was immensely enjoyable.  We’ll have to pick up more of these on the way home.

Add to this the Texas grapefruits and we have been eating well.  We love coming here during grapefruit season and enjoying a half grapefruit at nearly every meal.  We found a couple particularly large ones at the last H-E-B we were at, grapefruits nearly the size of a small beach ball and so tasty.  We’ll be sad to leave that behind once we turn towards home.