Be Careful Opening the Overhead Bins

Be careful opening the overhead bins, as contents may have shifted during flight.

If you do any amount of flying, you’ve heard these words just before disembarking.  If you fly a lot, you tune them out as you have heard them so often.

If you drive an RV, these words are just as relevant, perhaps even more so, because so many contents may have shifted during flight.

Today was a content-shifting day.  I don’t recall it being particularly bumpy, but we did have a couple curb cutouts that caused the RV to sway side-to-side a little more than usual.  I always have to take those entry roads into gas stations or grocery stores quite slowly as some of them will have a bit of a low spot or a bump which may cause the RV to rock like a ship in a tempestuous sea.

Anyway, at lunch time I opened the refrigerator and an entire shelf in the door collapsed and clattered to the floor.  Fortunately, its contents were mostly bottles of sauce and a couple sticks of hard butter which made a lot of noise but didn’t result in any damage.  One thing, though, was included in that cascade: a cucumber which Deb has been unable to find for three weeks.  Must have been buried under the butter.  The cucumber managed to hit every wall protrusion on the way down, leaving a piece of itself behind at each one before finally mashing itself to the floor.

We stopped at a small park to make dinner later on and Deb had just put a bunch of veggies to fry on the stove when she opened the door above the sink.  Out came the only glass thing that was in there: a small bowl she uses for breakfast.  It hit the sink cover and shattered into a million pieces.  The blast radius wasn’t all that large, but when you live in a space of about a hundred square feet, that small blast radius covers a lot of stuff: the entire galley, including the pan of food on the stove, most of the floor, some of the bathroom, and, as we later found out most of the bed.  We were looking forward to having those veggies but had to throw them away.  Fortunately, the brats were on the grill outside and were unaffected, so we at least had those.  So dinner was a bit smaller than planned and the cleanup was a lot more extensive.

This just reiterated for us the rule of thumb that we too often ignore: don’t use glass containers in an RV.

At breakfast this morning we found out there is a difference between a Pomelo and a Melogold.  We picked up two Pomelos yesterday and found that they may look alike on the outside, but a Pomelo has a rind about an inch thick.  It was still very good, but we felt like we got less than we bargained for.  A Melogold is a cross between a pomelo and a grapefruit and you get much more fruit for the money.  We’ll look a little more carefully next time.

After breakfast we took a walk through the state park and ended up back at the mission.  There was a volunteer there who talked with us about some of the things in the museum and then followed us out to the next building where there was a display of some of the skills that were taught by the missionaries.  One of those was weaving.  This woman was passionate about weaving and is a member of a weaver’s guild and has looms of her own.  She talked with us at length about the looms there, how they worked, how the thread for the weaving was spun and colored.  We got our own personal presentation and tour of the various weaving machinery here.

Several of the colors are made using a bug found on the prickly pear cactus.  The cochineal is a tiny little red bug that makes a red dye when boiled.  Adding other items to the mix can change the color so it was used for several natural dye colors. During colonial times, the Spanish had a monopoly on this now-popular product for nearly a century.  It was second only to silver and gold in value and was frequently the target of pirates.

And yet it’s just a bug.

By the time we got out of here it was after lunch.  Where does the day go?

We stopped at a couple different mission sites, both reconstructed and still in ruins.  We’re finding out that there is a lot more to Texas history than just the Alamo.  The normal history books don’t cover much of it so we were mostly unfamiliar with the players and the places and events.  So we were playing catch-up when reading some of the signs in these museums.

On the way back to Palacios, we stopped in Victoria to pick up some groceries.  It was a bit late in the day to do the driving tour of the historic homes downtown so we just concentrated on supplying ourselves for the next week or so.  We made sure we picked up a couple of Melogolds this time.  We want to enjoy those a couple more times.

After the glass bowl explosion and the reduced dinner size, we decided to stop at the Dairy Queen in Palacios and drown our sorrows in a medium Blizzard.  Ice cream always helps, especially when mixed with little crunchies like M&Ms.