Another week of mainly putting on miles as we have seen most of this part of the country on previous visits. Our plan is to get to Columbus by the weekend so that we can go to the Cowboy Action Shooting event in which our friends James and Melissa participate. Should be fun...
Sunday we drove from Gallup to Albuquerque. A nice easy drive for us. The car performed very nicely, thank you very much! We opted to stay at the Albuquerque Central KOA, a place we have stayed numerous times before. After getting checked in we got the wee trailer all settled in then headed for the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. We arrived at the centre about 1:30 PM and found that there was a Pueblo Indian dance demonstration starting at 2:00 PM... BONUS... we headed directly into the restaurant where we had an excellent chilli rellenos and cobb salad lunch. The dance demonstration was mostly a singing and dance exhibition performed by a husband and wife team.
At one point he did a sacred eagle dance which was very neat to see (no photos please). Fantastic. We did, however, take a photo of one of the courtyard murals depicting an eagle dance...
... note the date on the bottom right. 1978. This was a real throw back for us as we visited the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in the summer of 1978 when they were first painting the courtyard murals. Very cool memories and an excellent museum. A must see place.
Afterwards, a bit of shopping then back to the KOA to do some laundry, have a light dinner and call it a day.
Monday we headed east on I-40 then south on US-84 to Fort Sumner where we stopped in at the Billy the Kid Museum. Neat place to stop and visit. We saw many Billy the Kid wanted posters, numerous articles on his life and times and artifacts including his rifle...
... and a leather pouch full of his hair. A bit strange, but we can now say that we have seen one of Mohammed's beard hair (in New Delhi, India), a lock of George Washington's hair (Winchester, Virginia) and now a pouch of The Kid's hair. We aren't sure where that stacks up in a list of things to see in your life time but there you go. Nevertheless, a cool museum to stop at as they also have a large collection of late 1800's and early 1900's memorabilia including numerous old buckboards and cars. After the museum we headed down the street to the Rodeo Grill where we both had, of course, a Billy the Kid burger. Definitely worth stopping for :-) A few more pics from the museum are on our Picasa album for this trip. For the night we stayed at the Clovis RV Park in Clovis New Mexico.
Tuesday we headed southeast into Texas with our goal being Big Spring for the night. Not long after we crossed the state line we hit the town of Littlefield where we used our GPS to find the nearest BBQ. We decided "hey, we are now in Texas...it's time for some que" so we stopped at The BBQ Joint, a little hole in the wall place on the edge of town...
... a decent lunch of ribs, sausage and brisket (a little on the dry side but we've definitely had worse) and we knew we were now in Texas... the "que" will get better over the next few days. When we arrived in Big Spring, the only RV park listed by Good Sam turned out to be full up but the lady at the desk was nice enough to call a new place down the road and arranged a spot for us. The Suberban East RV park is an old KOA being refurbished into a more modern RV park. Needless to say, they have a ways to go. For dinner we picked up some deli meat and salads at HEB. As we left in the morning the manager came and asked if we could park in front of their office so she could take a picture of our trailer in front of the building, to be used in advertising. Why not? So we did.... maybe we'll see ourselves in some future ad.
Wednesday we headed into the Texas hill country west of Austin. As we got closer to the hill country, the famous wildflowers started to appear and before long we started to see large patches of Bluebonnets along the highway and into the fields. The Bluebonnet is the Texas state flower. For lunch we stopped at one of our favorite BBQ places, Cooper's Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que in Llano where we were unable to finish our order of ribs, sausage and brisket along with some potato salad and slaw...
... more pics of the pits etc from Cooper's on our Picasa album for this trip.
It was all delicious and the leftovers will make another delicious lunch tomorrow. For the night we stopped in Fredericksburg at the Fredericksburg RV Resort. When we checked in, the woman at the desk informed us that "she might be able to fit us in somewhere" and did. Turns out there were numerous empty spots for the night. Anyway, a beautiful park with great restrooms and showers. The only thing missing is a pool. Oh well, it is still early in the year but another month from now and most people staying there will likely wish there was one. It gets brutally hot here in the summer. After getting settled in, we went downtown and strolled the main drag but by that time the stores were all starting to close. Fredericksburg is a bit like Banff... a total tourist destination with lots of kitsch and cutesy items mostly all decked out with something Texas if not the flag itself. Early evening we stopped in at the Lincoln Street Wine and Cigar Bar. We sat outside under the arbor, in the shade where we chatted with a couple who are from Charleston SC but have rented a place in Fredericksburg for 6 months as they are trying out the best of the wines of this area which is billing itself as the Napa of Texas. Oh, after getting checked into the RV park earlier in the evening we decided we should try to reserve ahead for Austin as we are finding many RV parks almost full.... not expected at this time of year, but chatting with various folks are finding that many of the parks are filling with full timers, a lot of young men who are traveling to where the work is. As for Austin, we had planned to stay a couple of nights but after calling a few RV parks, the best we could do was one night (Thursday), so we made a reservation at Oak Forest RV Park (where we have previously stayed) for one night. We decided to just stay in Austin the one night and go to Columbus early Friday so that we would have time to whip into Houston to a Nissan dealer, have them do a diagnostics and if need be order parts on Friday rather than waiting until Monday.
So, before heading out Thursday morning we made reservations for Columbus for Friday through Sunday and in Houston for Monday through Wednesday (that may change depending on the car!). Done. Leaving Fredericksburg, we stopped at the WildSeed Farms just east of town. This is a spectacular research garden center with large wild flower gardens...
... more wild flower pics on our Picasa album for this trip.
Then it was off to Austin. We arrived at the Oak Forest RV Park around 1:30 PM and were assigned spot 7. Oh-oh, someone is in spot 7! After much humming and hawing, the manager put us in spot 6. We think we lucked out being there early because as we were setting up, several other parties arrived and it looked like the manager had to shuffle them about as well... but we were in! Apparently, according to the manager, the people in spot 7 were supposed to have been gone but they were still there Friday morning so it looks like some screw up somewhere. After getting set up we headed for downtown Austin, wandered around one of our favorite areas before a thunderstorm hit making us head for a Starbucks for a couple of iced lattes while we waited out the storm. Didn't last long. After, we stopped at Central Market for some pre-made dinner fixings and back to the RV park. By this time new neighbours had arrived. Apparently there is a huge antique (pre 1963) car show just up the road this coming weekend. Our neighbour's car...
Anyway, the temp in Austin hit more than 30C so we think it is time to ditch the long jeans and break out the skinny white flamingo legs...
Friday we headed south on US-183 to Lockhart for a stop at Smitty's Market (BBQ) for lunch. Lockhart is the BBQ Capital of Texas with 4 great "joints" in a small town of 13,000 people. Smitty's is probably our favorite...
After a great lunch we continued on to Columbus our stop for the weekend. We arrived at the Columbus RV Park and were set up by about 1:30 PM so headed into Houston (about an hour away) to a Nissan dealer to see about the car.
Well, have you ever been gobsmacked? We now officially have been! We go into the service department and explain to buddy that we had previously had an issue with an oxygen sensor (resolved) but now believe we have a resultant issue with our catalytic converter. Buddy asks one question.... "how many miles on the car?" We say about 300,000 kms and he says "that's probably more than 200,000". We say, slightly less but close to which he says, with the dumbest look on his face, "We won't look at your car... dealer policy... we won't service a car with more than 200,000 miles". Our jaws dropped! We explained that we are tourists from afar and need help... to which he basically says "too bad". We ask to see the Service Manager and he goes and gets a business card which shows he is a Service Manager... "too bad". So we ask if he can point us to a reasonable dealer. He takes back his card because no sense wasting that and writes the name of another dealer on a piece of scrap paper. Now, isn't that smart business... send customers to your competitor! Anyway off we go to the other dealer and are immediately greeted with the more familiar Nissan helpful service greeting. He listens to what we have to say, agrees that it is probably the catalytic converter but can't get us in this afternoon but will see us first thing Monday morning.
So, as it sits Friday afternoon, never visit MOSSY NISSAN in Houston as apparently their techs are too incompetent to work on anything other than brand new cars. We will go and see how we make out at AUTO NATION NISSAN on Monday.
Bit of a depressing hour plus drive back to Columbus in heavy commuter traffic not to mention that a rather huge thunderstorm rolled in so it was pouring when we get back to the trailer. We opt for a pizza and a couple of glasses of wine at Cantu's, a dive of a place not far from the RV park.
Saturday we got together with our friends James and Melissa and his family who live in Columbus. Very nice visit. In the afternoon, James and Melissa take us out to a local winery, Weimary, a few miles down the highway in Weimar, for some munchies and wine tasting...
Nice afternoon. For dinner, James' Mom, Barbara cooked a wonderful chicken dinner for us all and we sat around, chatted and watched the Houston Rockets win the first game of their series against the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA playoffs.
Considering the car situation, a reasonably good end to the week.
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