I knew going into this sojourn that I wanted to explore this great country of ours. The simple truth is that you can't do that just from cruising the Interstates. Don't get me wrong: you can see some beautiful country on the Interstates. I-70 through Colorado and Utah shows you some beautiful country, as does I-5 through Oregon.
Also, the Interstates are great if you really need to cover some miles; in other words, they're great for the poor working schmucks who need to cram 500- or 600-mile days into a long weekend or short vacation. Retired people rarely need to cover those kinds of miles, so why hit the Interstates? Most full-time RVers try not to drive more than 250 or 300 miles in a day. Why should we?
Case in point: our recent drive from Tucson, AZ to Mercedes,TX. Google Maps shows that the quickest route is nearly all interstate: I-10 from Tucson to San Antonio and US-281/I-69C to McAllen. However, a little more investigation showed that the shortest route, albeit some 40 minutes longer, cuts off I-10 in Fort Stockton, TX and initially follows US 385 and US 90 into Del Rio, TX, and then following US 83 and/or a couple of state highways, finally connecting with US 281 about 100 miles north of McAllen. The whole route is some 1100+ miles; we spread it out over a four-day drive.
This was a great drive, through some starkly beautiful country. It was also largely deserted. We spent a night in Sanderson, TX and started the next morning for Del Rio, 120 miles distant. I had the cruise control set at 64, well under the speed limit of 75. In that roughly two-hour drive, a grand total of five vehicles passed us!
We've been fortunate to enjoy a number of similar drives. US-101 from San Francisco all the way up to central Washington is a good example. It sits some 50+ miles west of I-5; no one interested in making time would take 101; it's probably only capable of half the average speed of I-5, since it twists and winds its way along the coast, mostly on two-lane roads, passing through every little town along the way. Making up for the low speed, of course, is the unmatched beauty of the rugged coastline.
We also intentionally drove US 50, the so-called "Loneliest Road in America", from Fallon, NV to its junction with I-70 in Utah. We could go 15 or 20 minutes at a time without seeing another vehicle, in either direction.
It's interesting how different things are when you're not on an Interstate. In most cases, one ends up driving right through town. This really slows things down... but who cares? Instead of seeing the same old gas station/truck stop/fast food restaurant complex at every other exit, you tend to see old historic downtowns, sometimes vibrant and sometimes dieing on the vine.
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Musings on Mercedes
We’ve been ensconced in our second winter home in Mercedes, TX for a week and a half or so. Mercedes is in the Rio Grande valley, perhaps 20 miles inland from the river’s mouth in Brownsville.
We’ve never been in this part of Texas before. Driving in, we were surprised at how built up things were. I think we both expected the area to be just little farming villages. Not. McAllen, Brownsville and Harlingen are all good-sized cities. There’s a campus of the University of Texas (UT Rio Grande Valley) in Brownsville. Both Harlingen and McAllen have commercial airports.
The little town of Mercedes is a closer match to our pre-conceived notions. It’s a quiet little place, dotted with Mexican restaurants, tire dealers and auto repair shops. Like the rest of the area, the residents are largely Hispanic and, apparently, poor. Brownsville is reported to have one of the highest poverty rates in the nation.
The park we are staying in, Llano Grande Resort and Country Club, is very nice. It is composed of some 1000 spaces, roughly equally divided between mobil home and RV sites. Our friends Dennis and Leah, who have been here for a month or so, scored us side-by-side sites (how's that for an alliteration?) centrally located in the park.
The park is largely self-contained. It is fenced and gated. It has a golf course, restaurant and bar, a zillion pickleball courts, four pools, two exercise rooms, a dog park, and on and on. The south side of the park abuts a levee that protects against the flood plain of the Rio Grande; its main channel is a couple of miles further south. The levee runs for miles in either direction; to the immediate west is a very nice state park, with numerous hiking trails.
We stayed for a month in Tucson, and will be here about six weeks. Comparison between the two is inevitable. The two parks are roughly the same size and have very similar facilities and amenities. It's a toss-up as to which one is "nicer". Tucson as an area has a lot more to offer, in my opinion. There's much more to see and do, both within the city of Tucson and in the surrounding area. However, the Rio Grande Valley has somewhat warmer weather. That's not too surprising: this place is a lot farther south, and at a much lower elevation; we're at 50' altitude, while Tucson is at 2400'. While Tucson got nice warm sunny days, as soon as the sun went down, so did the temperature. We've had several days here already where we left the windows open all night, with overnight low temperatures only reaching 60° or so.
That's about it for now. We've got plans to visit South Padre Island, on the coast, and some other scenic attractions. We'll publish some stuff on that soon.
We’ve never been in this part of Texas before. Driving in, we were surprised at how built up things were. I think we both expected the area to be just little farming villages. Not. McAllen, Brownsville and Harlingen are all good-sized cities. There’s a campus of the University of Texas (UT Rio Grande Valley) in Brownsville. Both Harlingen and McAllen have commercial airports.
The little town of Mercedes is a closer match to our pre-conceived notions. It’s a quiet little place, dotted with Mexican restaurants, tire dealers and auto repair shops. Like the rest of the area, the residents are largely Hispanic and, apparently, poor. Brownsville is reported to have one of the highest poverty rates in the nation.
The park we are staying in, Llano Grande Resort and Country Club, is very nice. It is composed of some 1000 spaces, roughly equally divided between mobil home and RV sites. Our friends Dennis and Leah, who have been here for a month or so, scored us side-by-side sites (how's that for an alliteration?) centrally located in the park.
The park is largely self-contained. It is fenced and gated. It has a golf course, restaurant and bar, a zillion pickleball courts, four pools, two exercise rooms, a dog park, and on and on. The south side of the park abuts a levee that protects against the flood plain of the Rio Grande; its main channel is a couple of miles further south. The levee runs for miles in either direction; to the immediate west is a very nice state park, with numerous hiking trails.
We stayed for a month in Tucson, and will be here about six weeks. Comparison between the two is inevitable. The two parks are roughly the same size and have very similar facilities and amenities. It's a toss-up as to which one is "nicer". Tucson as an area has a lot more to offer, in my opinion. There's much more to see and do, both within the city of Tucson and in the surrounding area. However, the Rio Grande Valley has somewhat warmer weather. That's not too surprising: this place is a lot farther south, and at a much lower elevation; we're at 50' altitude, while Tucson is at 2400'. While Tucson got nice warm sunny days, as soon as the sun went down, so did the temperature. We've had several days here already where we left the windows open all night, with overnight low temperatures only reaching 60° or so.
That's about it for now. We've got plans to visit South Padre Island, on the coast, and some other scenic attractions. We'll publish some stuff on that soon.
Thursday, February 6, 2020
Farewell to Tucson
NOTE TO READERS: I was doing some maintenance work on the blog and found this draft that I apparently never published. Although it's a couple of months old I'm going to go ahead and publish it anyhow.
Here's the most important news first: Our trailer is road-ready! Nearly.
Our guy Ken Cameron was out here on Tuesday (2/4) afternoon, armed with a complete set of drive components provided by Heartland. He and his wife worked all afternoon, removing the damaged components, squaring the slideout room into its opening, installing the new components and getting everything adjusted.
I can't say enough good things about the work that they did. This slideout is a massive thing: it's roughly 11 feet wide and six feet tall. It contains a smaller slideout where our bed sits. They did all this work in the field, pretty much by themselves; Cathy and I fetched the occasional tool or lended a hand pushing things around.
Ken showed us how the original attachment failed; this corroborated what Heartland had told us, that they had already made manufacturing changes to fix an inadequate design. He also showed us how he strengthened all of the attachment points so that this thing will NEVER pull apart like it did.
So, right now, we've got our bedroom back. We had spent the last three weeks squeezing through a series of narrow openings to navigate through the hallway, bathroom and around the bed. We could access everything in the bedroom, but just barely.
I said "nearly". The slideout is completed. However, we are missing a couple of moldings that serve as weatherstripping around the sides. These were apparently removed and never reinstalled during an earlier repair; they didn't have the moldings on hand, but have some in their shop . Ken is coming back on Friday (2/7) to install them and finish things up.
Barring any last-minute glitches, we're planning on hitting the road on Saturday 2/8. We're meeting our friends Dennis and Leah in Texas; we'll be staying in an RV park in Mercedes Texas, which is on the Rio Grande just east of Brownsville, which is where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
Texas is an enormous state. Although El Paso, which is on the border with New Mexico, is only 300 miles from here, Brownsville is 1100 miles away. We're planning on taking it easy; we're in no hurry. If we get out of here Saturday on schedule, we'll take three nights and four days on the road to get there, arriving next Tuesday.
We've enjoyed our stay here in Tucson, although we haven't done a lot of touristy stuff. I guess we saw most everything we wanted to see last year when we spent 2+ months here. We've enjoyed long walks in the desert with the dogs, and have spent a couple of days in the National Park, hiking amongst the saguaro. We did do a quick weekend trip to LA to see the grandkids, too.
One thing that we did do that's noteworthy and recommended: a visit to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. This place is located west of Tucson, literally across the street from the western district of Saguaro National Park. It encompasses a wide variety of plant and animal life, all well-curated and displayed. One thing we particularly enjoyed was a display and flight demonstration of a number of raptors found in the Sonoran desert. They've got these birds trained well; they fly around the audience, just a couple of feet over our heads. Impressive!
They have a world-class cactus and succulents garden. I took dozens of pictures of the cacti, but I won't bore you with more than a couple,
Our guy Ken Cameron was out here on Tuesday (2/4) afternoon, armed with a complete set of drive components provided by Heartland. He and his wife worked all afternoon, removing the damaged components, squaring the slideout room into its opening, installing the new components and getting everything adjusted.
I can't say enough good things about the work that they did. This slideout is a massive thing: it's roughly 11 feet wide and six feet tall. It contains a smaller slideout where our bed sits. They did all this work in the field, pretty much by themselves; Cathy and I fetched the occasional tool or lended a hand pushing things around.
Ken showed us how the original attachment failed; this corroborated what Heartland had told us, that they had already made manufacturing changes to fix an inadequate design. He also showed us how he strengthened all of the attachment points so that this thing will NEVER pull apart like it did.
So, right now, we've got our bedroom back. We had spent the last three weeks squeezing through a series of narrow openings to navigate through the hallway, bathroom and around the bed. We could access everything in the bedroom, but just barely.
I said "nearly". The slideout is completed. However, we are missing a couple of moldings that serve as weatherstripping around the sides. These were apparently removed and never reinstalled during an earlier repair; they didn't have the moldings on hand, but have some in their shop . Ken is coming back on Friday (2/7) to install them and finish things up.
Barring any last-minute glitches, we're planning on hitting the road on Saturday 2/8. We're meeting our friends Dennis and Leah in Texas; we'll be staying in an RV park in Mercedes Texas, which is on the Rio Grande just east of Brownsville, which is where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
Texas is an enormous state. Although El Paso, which is on the border with New Mexico, is only 300 miles from here, Brownsville is 1100 miles away. We're planning on taking it easy; we're in no hurry. If we get out of here Saturday on schedule, we'll take three nights and four days on the road to get there, arriving next Tuesday.
We've enjoyed our stay here in Tucson, although we haven't done a lot of touristy stuff. I guess we saw most everything we wanted to see last year when we spent 2+ months here. We've enjoyed long walks in the desert with the dogs, and have spent a couple of days in the National Park, hiking amongst the saguaro. We did do a quick weekend trip to LA to see the grandkids, too.
One thing that we did do that's noteworthy and recommended: a visit to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. This place is located west of Tucson, literally across the street from the western district of Saguaro National Park. It encompasses a wide variety of plant and animal life, all well-curated and displayed. One thing we particularly enjoyed was a display and flight demonstration of a number of raptors found in the Sonoran desert. They've got these birds trained well; they fly around the audience, just a couple of feet over our heads. Impressive!
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| This is a barn owl. |
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| These guys on the left are golden saguaro; they are much more attractive than the regular ones. |
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| I don't remember what these beauties are called. |
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