Our Travel Blog

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!

Another quiet relaxing day in the heat and the wind. Reached about 26C today, but the winds were the strongest yet. Even  the picnic table benches couldn’t remain upright. I did some pottering around with odd jobs on the trailer (this beast is more work intensive than the house). Lyn had a cleaning and laundry day, so the place is spic and span inside and out!

I’ve finally come to grips with my new so called “smart” phone, at least it doesn’t keep making noises every 10 minutes, I’d call that progress! Now if only I could find out how to get it to dial someone without me having to use the dial pad.

Tomorrow we’re off to Mexico 🙂

Woke up to an overcast and cool morning (5C), but no wind!

We headed out to South Padre Island which is about 25 miles east of here. About 7 miles east we passed through the town of Los Fresnos. The trip into and out of Los Fresnos reminded me a lot of the trip from the airport to just about any Mexican resort. Many houses were the same style, and there were a number of houses selling fruit veg etc in their front yards.

The whole area is totally flat and I am sure they don’t know how to put bends in roads! There seem to be two types of roads around here, gravel tracks or 4-lane roads.

The next town was Port Isabel, on the east side of the town was a causeway and a bridge that led to South Padre Island. When you come off the bridge there is another town which is home to a number of holiday condos, hotels and “souvenir” shops by the dozen. Going north from the bridge the island quickly narrowed until it was no more than a road on a sand dune!

The island is home to a sea turtle rescue centre (to be visited at a later date) and a number of nature/birding trails. We drove north a few miles until the road was blocked by a barrier, beyond the barrier there were work crews clearing sand off the road. I am not sure whether the road is public or private beyond this point. We pulled off the road and went for a walk along the beach, which was covered with shells.

Shells at South Padre Island

Heading back south we pulled off onto a beach access road, and actually took the truck onto the beach. As it was cool and grey there were very few people about, however there were a couple of people preparing a small para-sail that was connected to a small 3-wheel buggy. We later saw them riding around the beach courtesy of wind power.

A little further south we stopped off at one of the nature trails and walked along a boardwalk out to a bird watching area where we could see blue herons, pelicans, a variety of ducks etc.

We’ll be going back to the island a few more times to see the rest of it as well as to the kite festival in a couple of weeks

Title applies to Canadians only.

Went to bed last night with the trailer shaking in the wind from the north, woke up this morning to more of the same. Had a quick look around to see what had moved or blown over outside, all was well until I saw that the satellite dish had taken a nose dive 🙁 This was a little surprising as it was staked into the ground with 1 foot stakes. Luckily the only damage was a connector pulled off one of the cables, so replace connector, hammer in stakes, screw in large screwable stake and tie the whole contraption down, re-align the dish (not easy in a 30 knot wind) and all is well until next time.

Thursday is grocery shopping day so off we trekked to the local HEB store (what a boring name compared to the Piggly-Wiggly chain in Alabama). The number of unknown items in the store was amazing, being this close to the Mexican border there was a lot of Mexican fruit, Veg and packaged goods that we had never heard of before. There were peppers there that just looked like they would burn as soon as you touched them.

The weather was overcast and cooler, around 12C, tonight is forecast to go down to 1C thanks to the north winds.

Lyn went off to her crochet class, which interestingly is run by a deaf and dumb woman (hope the previous words are reasonably PC, can’t keep up with all this changing PC mumbo-jumbo). She seems to be getting the message across though as Lyn has almost finished her first project.

Weather permitting we will go off exploring tomorrow.

Today was one of those days where I just couldn’t get started! Not sure if it was due to getting up early (8:15 instead of 8:30) to get some propane from the travelling propane truck, or whether it was the the realisation that we were finally here and all the issues had been sorted.

The good news for me was that the Android phone  (I know, yet another toy, but surely the purpose of retirement is to allow more time to play with toys?)  I bought off e-bay arrived. The good news for Lyn was she got to go and play with the washers and dryers in the laundry. Pretty fair I’d say!

Even the truck had a good day, it got treated to a “laser wash” at the local gas station. Much to my disappointment the machine used soap and water to wash the truck and not laser beams 🙁

Getting to know more of the neighbours, the couple next door come from Barrie Ontario. This campground probably has the friendliest group of residents of all the ones we have stayed at.

After getting most of the problems sorted out yesterday it was time for a new one. As I switched on the microwave to defrost a bagel, all the power went out in the trailer. No blown circuit breakers inside or out, and no voltage at the plugin stand 🙁  Moving the campground breaker around gave intermittent hydro together with the sound of arcing from within the electricity supply box, not good! Maintenance turned up to replace the breaker, and all is now good.

It was now time for me to set up my toys and do a couple of repairs. I now have the ham radio antenna setup, and will hopefully get the radio setup tomorrow. Went through the once a trip battle with the BBQ igniter and won.

The campsite WiFi proved to be very iffy, and it was impossible to do a video Skype yesterday with Noah, so Lyn was missing out on Granny time! We topped up our data stick and now have reasonable phone and skype access.

Weather still windy but pleasantly warm at 20C.

Woke up to the glorious prospect of no long distance driving! Most of the water problems have been solved. I thought I had done a reasonable job of  winterising the trailer prior to sub-zero temperatures setting in ……. WRONG! Actually all the major piping had been drained or filled with antifreeze and there was no damage there, what I had missed was a couple of hoses, one connecting the outside shower head to the taps and the other in the pull-out head on the kitchen sink. The outside shower blew the valve out of one of the taps, which was fixed after an hour or so groping around in the dark of the trailer storage area. No cost and no permanent damage. The indoor leak in the kitchen wasn’t spotted immediately as the leak was inside one of the cabinets, however once water was seen spilling out from the cabinet we had a good clue that something was wrong. Again a fitting had been blown apart by the pressure of the ice, now I understand what the anomalous expansion of water refers to from way back in physics lessons 🙁 Unfortunately the kitchen saga didn’t finish there (what a surprise) the spray head discharged water from points that were not meant to discharge water, turns out the plastic pipe inside the head had fractured. Phoned the manufacturers to see if i could just buy a replacement head and 5 minutes later the order had been placed for the grand total of zero dollars.

The temperature was up around 27C again, with strong winds. In fact even now at 10:30 in the evening the trailer is still being buffeted quite a bit.

This has to be the friendliest place we have stayed at to date, people have been very helpful in giving us info about the area and the campsite. Lyn spent the afternoon at the weekly quilting meeting, so she was a happy camper. We headed into Brownsville to convert the IOU I gave Lyn as part of her Christmas present, into a NOOK e-reader. We also finished off the grocery shopping  while we were there.

I put up the WiFi antenna hoping that it would improve the internet so that we could use it for the home phone and Skype videos, but although the signal was stronger, there doesn’t seem to be the bandwidth available for reliable voice and video. Have to do some research on that !!

The rest of the day was spent recovering from truck lag