Our Travel Blog

Woke up to a cooler, 13C, clear and calm day.

Lyn headed out to get a hair cut then we did the weekly shopping. After lunch it was crafts time for Lyn, and I played around with an astronomy programme on the phone  and tablet. After dinner when it was dark enough we took the phone outside to identify some of the stars and constellations. It’s quiet an amazing piece of software, you just hold the phone up in your field of view and it shows a labelled map of the sky that you are looking it. As you turn the display changes to show what you are viewing. It’s amazing what can be packed into a 5 x 2.5 x .5 inch box. It also makes phone calls!!

Lyn liked the laundry so much yesterday, she made a return visit today! My contribution this morning was to clean the stove.

After lunch we headed back to South Padre Island to visit the Sea Turtle Rescue Centre. The centre consisted of a number of above ground pools with rescued turtles in them. Some ot the turtles were just visitors waiting for injuries to heal before being returned to the water. Most injuries appeared to be the loss of all or part of a flipper(s). The most common causes of the injuries were shark attacks, boat propellers or fishing nets.

Others were there for the long haul as their injuries were too great to allow them to survive back in the ocean. There was one turtle there that had lost 3 of its flippers, which normally would be a death sentence, but this one was doing so well it was spared and is now being used to evaluate prosthetic flippers.

Turtle South Padre Island, Tx.

After we left the centre we moved on to a birding centre, although we didn’t see too much in the way of birds, a few pelicans and blue herons we did see an alligator sunning him/herself as we left.

Alligator South Padre Island, Tx.

Today was a stay at home day. It was 21C, grey, overcast and very windy (as opposed to windy). This morning Lyn went to visit her friend the laundry while I continued to do research for the trip. Turns out that the points I accumulated from the hotel stays in Vienna about a decade ago are still valid. That and a new MasterCard for $75 / year will get me 4 nights at a 4 star hotel in Seoul and one night in a 5 star in Sydney.

We normally make lunch and eat outside at the picnic bench, today we got outside and turned right back around as the wind was so strong it was blowing the plates of rolls off the table. At least it’s a warm wind. Lyn spent the afternoon at a crafts class and I managed to do nothing!

Below is a photo we took yesterday, but I forgot to add it in. These cactii are all over the place in rural areas down here.

Cactus in Hugh Ramsey Nature Park, Harlingen Tx.

Again a 20C calm and overcast wake-up.

Spent the morning researching accommodation in the Cook Islands, and helping Lyn with some graphics for a project she is doing.

After lunch we decided to head off to another wild life refuge just outside the town of Harlingen, about 10 miles away. This is a new refuge that is a work in progress. To date they have laid out a couple of walking loops, and made a few artificial ponds to attract birds. Unfortunately the birds don’t seem to have discovered the place yet as all we saw was a small hawk and a woodpecker. At least we got out for a walk!

On the way back the unheard of happened, it rained! Well there were about 20 drops of water that landed on the windshield over a 2 minute period, but it’s the thought that counts.

I’m sure I’ve used that title (or something very similar before), but I am running out of titles.

20C and calm at wake-up time.

We headed off to the west today to go to Donna for a large open air flee market that Lyn had read about. As it turned out it was a little further than anticipated, as on the way back home we passed the turn off for the bridge we used to go to Mexico earlier in the week.

To me this was just another flea market, I really can’t get too excited looking at stuff that’s been in someones basement for decades (don’t tell Lyn I said that).  What did surprise me though was the amount of French being spoken, Texas seems a haven for Quebecers.

Lyn bought a few things, but the highlight for me was finding a vendor selling fresh mini-doughnuts! I’d been doughnut-less for two weeks. The doughnuts were made on site by a small machine and tank of hot oil that always reminds me of visiting the ideal home exhibition in Earls Court (London) as a kid.

To offset the doughnuts we bought a fresh pineapple; after selecting the pineapple it was skinned and cored on a nifty foot powered machine, all we had to do was slice and eat. The slicing eating was done later at home!

After a couple of hours at the place we headed back to the trailer. Rather than take the freeways we zig-zagged around the back roads. One thing that has surprised me in the rural parts is the mixture of housing. There doesn’t seem to be areas of poor living accommodation, there will be a wooden shack right next to a large brick built bungalow, then maybe a small ranch house then a trailer etc. What most houses do have is a fence, big and small expensive and cheap, the mast majority are fenced, even in the middle of no where.

On the way home we stopped for lunch and risked some Mexican food, coincidentally Lyn’s stomach has been making orchestral sounds ever since.

21C and calm when we woke up. We had planned to go to the organised breakfast today, but neglected to set the alarm and missed it!

I spent a bit of time sorting out seats on all the flights we had booked yesterday and managed to get what we wanted. The trip will involve our longest flight yet at 13hours 40 minutes from Seoul to Chicago.

Next came some work on the truck. I have wanted to replace the wiper blades for sometime, and finally got around to it. I hate wiper blades!! Took me about 15 minutes to get the first one off and 15 seconds for the second one. It then took another 15 minutes to put the first one on and 15 seconds for the second. Tomorrow I could replace both of them in a minute, next year will take 30 minutes again!

The truck also got a good vacuum and the rubber mats were washed, then Lyn cleaned all the trim and glass inside. Poor truck doesn’t know what’s happening, a wash last week and a clean-up today!

This afternoon we went off to a wildlife refuge at Laguna Atascosa, a large (dried-up) wetlands area about 20 miles from here. The refuge has a few claims to fame, it is the home of the majority of ocelots in the US. The ocelot is a member of the cat family and looks like a scaled down jaguar (not the 4 wheeled variety). It also at the cross-roads of a number of bird migratory routes and over 450 different species have been recorded here. Among a few we saw yesterday were cardinals, green jays, blue heron, egrets and hawks. There was also an alligator that had adopted an old concrete tank which staff now keep filled with water.

There was a 15 mile loop you could drive around, unfortunately there wasn’t too much to be seen. We did see some coyotes walking along the road and a deer down by the shore

Deer in Laguna Atascosta Refuge

At one of the lookouts we also saw some graffiti, Texas style.

Texas Style Graffiti

About 90% of the area that should have been under water had dried up due to the prolonged drought conditions down here, and this limited the number of animals we saw.

Woke up to 21C and the ever-present wind!

For some time now we have been working on a way to burn up my Air Canada points before they all expire. We both wanted to go to New Zealand, so that was the initial goal. Well, if you’re going to New Zealand, you may as well stop off for a few days in the South Pacific, right? It’s a long way to New Zealand so you don’t really want to come back the same route do you?

The last part was our downfall. We explored return routes via Singapore, Beijing, Peking, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Johannesburg. There was always a problem with booking (did I mention a prerequisite to the trip was that we went in style … Business Class), only 1 seat available, only economy available,no seats available, the distance is too far etc etc.

Finally this morning I got on the phone hoping that a miracle might occur. It did, they picked up on the first ring! The guy seemed really friendly and helpful so we ran through a whole load of routings….. nothing! Tried another hopeful route and got cut off in the middle!

Luckily I managed to get hold of the same guy again, but that routing would’t fly (pun intended) either. At his suggestion we tried a routing I hadn’t even considered.. Bingo, it worked!

All this took 4 hours on the phone, but in the end it was worth it. We are now the proud owners of a trip that goes:

Ottawa, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cook Islands, Auckland, Sydney, Seoul, Chicago, Ottawa

We’ll spend 5 days in the Cook Islands, a month in NZ and 4 days in Seoul.

After all that work my brain and cell phone need a rest!

Cloudy and warm today with a perfectly calm morning. As the day progressed the winds returned. No chance of flying the helicopter at this place, but we did bring the kites so we will try flying those next time we go to the beach.

Thursday means grocery shopping day so off we went to the local supermarket, nothing exciting there! This afternoon Lyn went off to her crochet lesson and for once there was not DIY work for me.

A restful day!!

Only reached about 16C today with grey skies.

A lazy morning until I went out to see what size pipe I would need to replace the water filter I wanted to take out of the system. The current water filter is one of those under the sink type that you replace the filter every so often. Unfortunately it is located in a hard to reach area under the trailer, so we use an outdoor filter that connects directly to the supply tap. In playing around with the water I managed to get the outside shower tap to explode and spray water everywhere. If you recall in one of the earlier posts I said that there was an issue with the outside shower due to freezing, well I finally found out what the damage was. There is a plastic, threaded retainer ring that holds the valve in place; this had a hairline fracture in it allowing it to “pop” off if it felt that way inclined!

With no running water it was easier to have lunch out on the way to the shops! Lyn had her shopping agenda and I had mine, amazingly there was at least one common store, HobbyLobby.

I wasn’t able to get a replacement part for the tap, so rather than fork out for a new one I decided that there must be a cheaper solution, more to follow. While we were at the RV store I also got a vent hood for the roof. In the bedroom and bathroom are two vents that open up for ventilation. With all the strong winds around here the the vent door tends to flap around in the wind, which is a) noisy and b) opens up the opportunity for the door to break off. The cover goes over the vent and still provides circulation, but protects it from direct wind. It also means we can keep the vent open when it rains!

Once we got back from shopping I attacked the taps, and the problem was easily solved by putting a tie wrap around the cracked ring. The filter came out OK and the new pipe fitted perfectly, so a good days work!

The “goodness ” continued into the evening as the planning for a trip to New Zealand later this year made some progress, hopefully we can get all that confirmed soon.

Below is a picture of the finger painted spoon, taken without flash on my new smartphone which it transpires has an 8Mp camera with auto focus. Still haven’t tried it out as a phone yet! The picture resolution has been reduced to save on bandwidth.

Finger Painted Spoon

Wake up temperature was around 20C and windy. The forecast high for the day was 30C+!

We decided we’d take a day trip to Mexico. The border is probably 10 miles away at the closest point, we decided to go to Progreso, about  25 miles away as there was a parking lot  at the border point and a bridge we could walk across.

I had heard some time ago that the US were going to fence along the whole of the US / Mexico border to clamp down on illegal immigration. We got to see the fence first hand as we drove to Progreso. The border is formed by the Rio Grande, and the road follows the river fairly closely in places. The US side of the river has an earth bank built up along it with about a five foot concrete wall topped with about 10 ft of wooden fencing.

US Border Fence

Entry into Mexico was easy, pay 25c to cross the bridge and that was it. No passport, no border agent, nothing. The US town was Progreso and the Mexican one was Nuevo Progreso. Having been to Tijuana a couple of times, Nuevo Progreso was no different. There was a main street lined with stores and street vendors. What was different was the types of stores along the street, nearly half of them were dentists offices or pharmacies.

Compared with Canada the dental prices were ridiculous. Fillings (white not silver) were $110, about 25% of the cost in Canada. A root canal and ceramic cap would be upwards of $2500 in Canada was less than $300 here (sorry Anne, may have to change dentists). A little more worrying was the price of extractions, $15…

The pharmacies were selling “prescription” drugs over the counter e.g. prozac together with “male enhancement” tablets topping the list in many stores!

The rest of the stores were the usual souvenir shops all selling the same stuff. We didn’t escape unscathed, we bought some pottery and a couple of bottles of vanilla extract. We also bought a painted spoon; there was a guy sitting at a small table painting scenes onto the bowl of a desert spoon. What was interesting was that he was finger painting. We have seen this before, no brushes are used, the paint is applied only by finger. The one we bought was a forest scene with a waterfall in the background, I’ll see if I can get a photo of it and put it in the blog.

We stopped for a 3 course lunch for the grand price of $8.45, and very good it was.

As the temperatures were rising, and there is only so much souvenir shopping you can do, we headed back to the truck.

Main Street - Nuevo Progreso

Notice absence of white fluffy stuff in photo!

Crossing back into the US was not as bad as I expected. Just showed the guy the passport, he scanned it and off we went. No interest at all in what was in the shopping bags. Out of interest I asked him how much booze we could bring back after a day trip; 4 litres per person! Although you would have to pay tax of $3.75 per litre!