No outside parties here.

Still iced in. Not quite as cold, but ice is everywhere. We only got the tip of the storm.Midlands and Odessa really got hit...Plus they have the weather people telling them how bad it is. Our lights have flickered but so far we still have power. We have been working on a jigsaw puzzle.

All New Years Eve festivities have been cancelled in the area.

A Little Ice... I think not.

As most of you know our favorite place to camp is in Fort Davis, Texas. There is absolutely nothing there except quiet, good smelling air, no radio station, no TV station.I don't even know if they have a a police department or fire station. So when you are cut off from the world you can't worry about things over which you have no control.

We drove in on a beautiful day. We set up , no problems and waited til the next day to go looking around. We drove to Alpine and to Marfa.

In Marfa we decided to have lunch. We drove around that 3 block town for about 4 circles before we finally spotted a diner/cafe. In we go.The menu was very limited....organic beef meatloaf, grilled chicken and vegetables of the day. The servers say they start serving at 11 and when it's gone it's gone and they run out every day.

As we were leaving the wind got colder and the sun started disappearing.
No fools..we hotfooted it home.
The next morning we thought we had turned left into the Arctic Circle. I don't think I have ever been soooooo cold.There was ice everywhere. Our steps were frozen, the poor trees were bent down from the weight. But ya know we did not have some ditzy weather woman showing us what ice looked like or telling us to stay off the roads while she drove all over the county. Nice.

Straight down the road

For most of this trip we have been on I-10. The speed limit is 80 and we are going 65. So everything is passing us. But we get to see  and take pictures. Plus we have seen many cars stopped by the Texas Hiway Patrol

. Guess 80 is just not fast enough on this long straight road. We also passed this huge wind farm, Desert Sky Wind Farm. I think the website said it had 160 units.

Highways

We traveled from Seguin to Ozona. What a small town! It is right off I-10. We had stopped here once before, but this time we stayed for the night. That was quite long enough. On the road again.

Seguin Part 2

We found all kinds of fun things to look at. Of course, my love of animals and Mr. Fixit's patience led to this:

Seguin

We stayed in Seguin one more day than we had anticipated. We always get our medicines on the road from Walmart. But for some reason they were out of both our medicines. We had to wait for them to restock. Even then, they didn't have what we needed and we had to go elsewhere and have prescriptions transferred. What a mess.

But being the seasoned travelers that we are, and being very flexible, we made the best of it.
Seguin is a small town whose only claim to fame that we can fine is that Juan Sequin was born here and is buried here. Juan was the messenger sent by Col Travis from the Alamo to Sam Houson to request more troops. He was not at the slaughter at the Alamo, but came back to bury the bodies and help those that did survive to escape. He laster became Mayor of San Antonio.

And then there was Fountain

Our second stop is in a small, little,tiny town called Fountain, FL. Mr. Fix It decided to be Mr. Cheap and booked us into this campground in the middle of nowhere for a minimum dollar amount. For it to be in No-where-ville, it is big. We stayed in the front part but there was at least an acre behind us with electricity and water sites and no one there. I don't know how he did it but we certainly did not pay the rates listed on their website.

The sites were average size and level, but the town only has a Dollar General Store and a Piggly Wiggly Express ( one half step up from a convenience store). We did a lot of five minute chores, read, and tried to get interested in Babylon 5.

We had to go to Panama City for his eye appointment. All went well and we travelled on.

Big Adventure

Today was the day! We have waited since the middle of November to start the Big Adventure. Each week something came up that delayed our trip. But finally we are out of Charleston.

We had to leave about two hours later than we had planned. We had a slight problem with the hitch...it didn't.

 So the whole camper landed its front weight on the tailgate of

Lt. Rosie (our Chevrolet 2500 pull mobile.)Thank God for Mr. FixIt! With a little physics and physical manpower we were able to lift the trailer and re-hitch. We did lose the tailgate,

but that is ok...We are on the road.

We drove to Jacksonville, flinching each time the hitch made a sound. We were afraid it would unhitch again although we knew it was well connected..I had visions of it passing us on I-10 but it didn't.

For a while we had been talking about staying in FamCamps, campgrounds sponsored by the military for retired military, military,  and DoD retirees. since Mr. Fixit at one time held a security clearance higher than most, we were pretty sure we could get on base with his ID but ya never know.We enjoyed our stay, got to play golf and go to St. Augustine.

The view from my front door:

 Cute little cars in St. Augustine to tour the city.

 Brother-in-law this is for you!

 Shady Campground. See Lt.Rosie?

Fun Day Part 2

What the %$#@ ?

This is called a work around. I cannot get to a second page or the rest of the page I was on.  It just stops. Blogspot what are you doing?

Anyway... my question to all you artsy people is how did they paint this pumpkin?

And this little guy

 After the garden railroad display for him, we went to

 I cannot describe how beautiful this Basilica is. It is breathtaking.

 It was also rather odd to see students praying in the church. Amazing. We were there at confession time and all the booths were filled. I quit trying to take pictures and just listened to our guide talk.

Fun day

Happy Hollow-ween!

After all the repairs, cleaning, rearranging, and housekeeping chores we have done this week it was time to look around and see what is here. We have done the sights in Goshen,shopped in Shipshewana and played with our friends here in the campground. So a trip through the Indiana tourism book was in order.

We chose Valparaiso, IN for our day trip. The Taltree Arboretum has a model train layout that is advertised as something we don't want to miss. Bless you Google Maps! We would have never found this place on our own.It is a rather small arboretum with only 4 trails but the model train  area took about 3 hours of our life. I am sure the guy at the top of the page felt the same way.

The engineer figured out that there were about 5 closed loops for the G-scale trains to run on. The designers included every kind of bridge that a train would go over.

I'll bet this was a shock:

The display had a coal mine and train, a sawmill and train, a dock and train,and an armed train to fight a battle in the Civil War. It also included a small field hospital for the wounded..

Fixin to......

We are back in Goshen for the Montana Rally. We love Goshen. It has become our second home. We have talked and talked about why we like it and have to come to several conclusions.

1. We are usually here for rallies which means we see friends from all over the country.
2. It is rural and rather slow paced. We drive around and look at the farms, the animals, and the gardens.
3. It is clean.
4. We have good memories.
5. We get the camper's problems fixed. Everywhere you look  there are RV salvage stores and parts stores.

The Montana factory is here. When we have a rally here the factory reps come and talk to all of the owners about the problems they are having. Either the reps sign you up for a repair at the factory or they make arrangements with your local camping store to have things repaired.

So far, each time we have had to stay here and get repairs done. Once it was a weld break. Once it was a big leak in the bedroom area and now it is a small leak in the living area and something wonky with the slide. The leak in the living area is growing beautiful mold..........yuk!

More repairs are being done. I am finally getting a new faucet . The one I have is supposed to swivel but it hasn't for years.

Right now there seems to be a problem removing the old one and installing the new. Reinforcements may be needed. 

Then there was the broken window blind.That, too, has been repaired. There is a guy here who gives classes on how to fix these day-night shades. Done!

That just leaves the water heater...(Have you ever noticed how many people say "hot water heater"? Why would I need to heat hot water?) It works then it doesn't. That seems to be a real problem.

Each trip we go on we have to designate some time for repairs. If you think of how many moving parts are in this thing and how many bumps, dips, and potholes we hit as we travel you can see why there has to be a make-and-mend day.

Back to why we love Goshen. Maybe it is the fairgrounds we like. It is very nice campground with full hookups and level sites. It is run by the 4H club of Elkhart County. The members are forever planting, grooming, mowing,etc.

Hmmmm this is a new sign. NOT good!

But the rest is still nice.

 Red begonia slippers.

 Got an old handbag you just don't want to throw out?

See, it is pretty and fixin' to get prettier...............