Date: January 8
Location: West of Austin, TX
As I write this, we are prepping for another 16 degree night at a park, “glamping” again. Why? Well, I’ll tell ya – we chose not to winterize our RV because here in Texas it can be in the high 70’s and then tumble down to the 30’s or 20’s in one day.
State: Texas
Location: Austin
Yes, home. We are temporarily grounded with a broken right rear-view mirror on the RV. Can’t drive one of these without one of those. Continue reading
Since the ride to Santa Fe is thirteen hours by car, we decided to break it into a two-day drive in the RV, stopping halfway in Lubbock, Texas. Continue reading
I live in Austin, right smack-dab in the middle of the the state. The Heart of Texas. On a road trip it takes a whole day of driving to get outside of state lines, and when you’re driving westward, as we were on our way to Santa Fe for Thanksgiving, it can get flat-out boring after a while.
Photo from GuerrillaGraphix.com
If you are squeamish, you may want to STOP reading now. There is no delicate way to put this, since there is no synonym in Webster’s Thesaurus for roadkill.
In my boredom, I began doing something I’d never done before; I whipped out my phone and kept a Roadkill Tally in the Notes.
I’m sure this isn’t a new car-game, but I think HASBRO could make money off of this. As I began adding things to my ever-increasing list, three things stood out to me:
1) There is a really wide variety of critters here in Texas.
2) The deer and rabbits disproportionately outnumbered everything else.
3) While there was a ridiculous amount of roadkill in Texas, there was a definite deficit of dead things in New Mexico.
This came up, of course, over cocktails with our friends when we finally arrived in Madrid. Randy had noticed that too, “Why do you think that is that when you cross into New Mexico there’s no roadkill?” Truth is, it’s not something you want to ponder too much, so we dropped the subject, but not before I dropped the bomb – I saw a dead Mountain Lion!
I had wanted to turn around and go back when I saw it, not out of morbid curiosity, but because I couldn’t believe my eyes! I’d never want to run into such an amazing, yet deadly, creature if he were alive. In the end, we didn’t go back because it’s not easy to turn around a motor-home towing a truck.
My Roadkill Tally:
30+ Deer, 7 Coyotes, 8 Opossum, 9 Skunk, 10 Raccoon, 2 Cats, 40+ Rabbits, 1 Mountain Lion, 2 Roadrunners, 2 Fox, 1 Giant Toad, 1 Owl, 3 Ring-tail Cats, 1 Armadillo, 1 Turkey Vulture. (Mind you, this is not counting “the indistinguishable.” Remember, I’m not morbid.)
I hope that Mountain Lion now has an endless desert with lots of prey, and no highways in his heavenly hunting ground.
XO Donna
*Note – Article title is respectfully filched from John Updike’s brilliant book.
It’s here. Our first BIG trip is coming up next weekend. We are going to load up and head west to Santa Fe to visit friends for Thanksgiving. If I were a Labrador Retriever, I’d be shivering with excitement. But first – Continue reading
“All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey
I went for a walk
Ona wintersan autumn day.”
Mamas and the Papas, California Dreaming
… where the rain gets in.
And, just like in the Beatles song, it stopped my mind from wandering. There’s nothing like getting out of bed first thing in the morning and having water squish through your toes to wake you up!
We are good detectives and quickly figured out the general vicinity of the leak, and a temporary solution: close the slide! After drying it as much as humanly possible, we aimed a fan on it, and let it run all day and into the evening. The carpet finally dried out.
Days later, when it stopped raining, we discovered that the topper covering the slide was torn. I volunteered to climb up on the roof, bringing my trusty roll of duct tape with me. In the end, it was all for naught… when we closed the slide again it tore my artfully arranged duct tape right off!
We drove our RV down to Houston last week, where we put it in the shop with a mechanic who comes highly recommended by our motor-home manufacturer. Besides the leaking slide, we gave him a “honey-do list.” He is a good-natured man, and took it all in stride.
He’s been keeping us updated; it should be ready sometime next week. We will pick it up, celebrate with dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant – El Tiempo in Montrose – then drive home in the morning to begin packing for a trip up north, which includes a detour to Lincoln, NE, then on to Wisconsin to see 2/3 of my sisters.
It was 91 degrees here today, and I am more than ready for some cool weather, autumn color, and apple cider!
What’s the weather like where you are?
XO Donna
The only thing that tells me it’s the first day of autumn… is my calendar.
Continue reading
We took our motorhome on our first long drive, from where we keep it stored, three hours away to Fredericksburg, TX. Since we’ve had so much rain this summer, the drive was greener and more lush than I ever remember seeing it. Continue reading
In eight days of staying in our motorhome and learning the ropes, we had only one sunny day. And, woo-doggy, it was a beauty! It was warm, instead of scorching hot or raining cats & dogs. Fluffy white clouds floated across the sky in a checkerboard pattern, pushed along by a soft breeze.
This is the kind of weather we dream of down here in Texas!
I took a long walk in the morning, and it was so nice that I did it again in the evening. Then I pulled out my camera as the sun was setting, to document what was right outside my windshield.
One perfect day in a summer filled with rain; the fourth wettest August on record.
Lest all the campers in the park get any ideas that this is what Austin is like all of the time, (and make plans to move here) the next day was hot and rainy and gray again. I’m certain they were glad to pack up and get home. I hate to admit it, but I sure was.
XO Donna
