Tobacco Road

Six years ago, on our first circumnavigation of the United States, we economized on accommodations.  We stayed in cheap RV parks wherever possible, surrounded by broken down trailers and neighbors out of Deliverance.  Walmart parking lots were favorites, because they were free, if noisy and lacking in ambiance.  We saved some money.

But by this time we had come to the conclusion that life is too short to waste in lousy trailer parks.  After leaving Ben Lomond a month ago we've stayed in the finest parks available regardless of cost.  Money no object.

And for Christmas week it was doubly important (especially to Nancy) that we spend our days in a pretty RV park surrounded by happy people enjoying the holiday spirit.

But by the time we had solidified our plans - had been clear on which dates we would be in San Antonio and Austin - most of the parks were full, all the spaces reserved by folks visiting kin.  Finally Nancy located an RV park about twenty minutes outside Austin.  It was a new facility and had only one lukewarm review, but Nancy called and the owner was friendly and had space available.  Besides, we had no other options.

Here's where we stayed Christmas week:

We had wanted the Ritz and got Tobacco Road.  If you look carefully at the hand-lettered sign you may be able to make out that a small plant has been strategically placed over the price, which at $40 a night would have discouraged bargain seekers.  The "park" was grass and dirt with a bit of gravel and poorly defined RV spaces - but at least it did have all the necessary services - electricity, water, and sewer - and if it didn't rain we should be okay.

Christmas was saved by our visit with Nancy's cousin, Jeff Meisenhelder, and his family.  Delightful people, they welcomed us into their home near Wemberley, Texas, in the Texas hill country, for Christmas dinner.  While most of Texas is flat desert or pastureland, this part - to the west of Austin - has rolling hills covered with trees and is quite attractive.

Jeff is a retired petroleum engineer who lived with his wife Peggy most of his working life overseas in one exotic locale after another.  China, Australia, northern Africa, and so on.  They have a son and a daughter visiting for the holidays with their significant others.

Son Cole and his girlfriend are both physicists.  Daughter Kelsey is a geologist and her boyfriend is an IT engineer.  As Nancy's sister Julie said, this is obviously the brainy branch of the Meisenhelder tree.  They couldn't have been nicer and their hospitality was incredibly appreciated.

Back at our RV park outside Austin, the weather was cold and drizzly, and we never saw another soul at the facility except for the owner, Jose, who checked us in.  Just a depressing place all around, and its only saving grace was that it was good material for this blog.  Except that the Verizon signal in that hellhole was so faint that we couldn't get onto the internet to post a new chapter.

We did drive our Ford Ranger (the vehicle we tow behind our motorhome) into Austin one afternoon and planned to eat at the magnificent Driskill Hotel bar we enjoyed six years ago - but the dining room was closed and there was no room in the bar for happy hour.

We ended up wandering up and down the very lively First Street, one of the main venues for the Austin music festivals, and had a nice dinner at a small restaurant.  The next day, while Tammy Faye and Sophia were being professionally groomed in Austin, we learned about Texas history at a downtown museum.  So we did have a bit of fun in Austin, but admittedly our planning sucked.

Yesterday we left Dogpatch and are currently hunkered down in the wonderful hill country town of Fredericksburg.

River walking

The San Antonio KOA RV Park is a very nice one, with pleasant walks, helpful employees, nice grounds, and generously-sized spaces.  It's on a bus line that takes you downtown in twenty minutes or so.

San Antonio's River Walk is one of the great tourist destinations/restaurant rows/pedestrian streets in the world.  We love coming here and were anxious to revisit it.  We decided to take the bus from the RV park rather than brave the traffic ourselves.

We had seen the Alamo on a previous trip, so we skipped that and got off at the River Walk stop and followed the signs down to a branch of the San Antonio River, which is fifteen feet or so below the San Antonio streets.  It's a magical place.  The River Walk is spectacular all through the year, with strings of white lights along the banks of the river, but at Christmastime the huge trees that line the stream are laced with multicolored lights, and it's even more festive.

The canal was crowded with boats carrying sightseers up and down, the walkways full of families and couples enjoying the mild Texas evening.  There are no guardrails along the narrow, winding pathways to keep people from falling into the drink, and I've often wondered if such an attraction could exist in litigious California.  It seems that drunks (and there are a lot of margaritas served there), boisterous children, unsteady seniors, and horseplaying kids of all ages must fall in from time to time.  But a Wikipedia search tells me that the depth of the canal is only about three feet along the River Walk, so drownings are presumably rare.

We found a fine restaurant along the walk.  The Fig Tree had a quail appetizer with pate and apples - sensational and our favorite dish.  Nice wine list with more California wines than anything else.  I asked the waitress how her Texas wines were, and she was honest enough to advise us to stick with the California product.

We're  supposed to have Christmas dinner with some relatives of Nancy's who live between San Antonio and Austin.  She threatened me with bodily harm if I didn't get my hair cut and present a less hayseed appearance.  So we drove downtown and I dropped into the Matador Hair Salon for Men.  Got right in, which was surprising until I learned that a haircut would cost $35 plus tip.  Ouch.  More than double what I've been paying Mister D in Scotts Valley forever.  But it was a pleasant experience and I'm in solid with Nancy now.

Stranded in a Texas backwater

As Nancy was driving back on Sunday after dropping me off at a sports bar in Del Rio, Texas to watch the exciting new 49ers led by quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, liquid and steam started draining from beneath the hood of the Ford Ranger pickup truck we tow behind our motorhome.   She reached the RV park, parked the vehicle, and called a local repair shop.

Without a working vehicle, how was I to get home?  It was too far to walk.  I doubted they have taxis or Uber.  Nancy couldn't drive the motorhome.  Would I have to sleep in the alley behind the bar?  Luckily, one of the other RV park residents offered to drive Nancy to the sports bar to pick me up after the game.

The repair shop towed our truck and began working on it.  Diagnosis - exploded water pump and associated damage.  It's now been two days since the breakdown and finally the work is completed.  We will have spent at least four days rather than the two scheduled for Del Rio, which is a nondescript town almost on the Mexican border without much in its favor except for the friendliness and warmth of its citizens.  Interestingly, we learned that locals routinely go across the border for medical and especially dental care, where prices are a fraction of what they are on this side.  Medications are also much cheaper over there.

Lacking the ability to drive to a grocery store until now, our meals were confined to what we could find in our fridge and cabinets.  Nancy was able to cobble together nice lunches and dinners but the larder is getting bare.  And our days consisted of television, Kindle books, dog walks, meals, snacks, and conversation, mostly confined to the restricted living space within a recreational vehicle.  Now that we having a working pickup truck, our horizons are expanded. but Del Rio seems to be strictly a strip malll town, so there's not much of interest to be explored.

This incident brings home the fact that the vehicle we tow behind the motorhome is critical to our comfort and allows us to shop and enjoy the surrounding area.  If we had been told that the pickup truck couldn't be repaired, we'd have had to buy another tow vehicle before moving on - and the list of vehicles that can be towed without a trailer is rather limited.  Alternatives would be bicycles (probably not age-appropriate as the sole means of transportation beyond the motorhome), Vespa scooters, or motorcycles.  Let's face it: A couple of senior citizens on scooters would be seen as comical by some.

Alpine, Texas

The town of Alpine, Texas is a reminder that this country will surprise us from time to time.  Nancy and I tend to have a stereotypically negative opinion of Texans - loud, full of themselves, love the Dallas Cowboys and hate Californians.  And there's not much to recommend the state to us outside a few of its cities.  The chance we'd seriously consider living there was close to zero.

Then Nancy saw the real estate prices.  "Maybe we shouldn't totally rule Alpine out," she said.  "Here's a property with 9000 square feet of attractive living space for a fraction of what it would cost in California."

"But we don't actually want a big house, right?"

"Yes, absolutely, but this is an amazing bargain."

As it turned out, the residents of Alpine are sweet, friendly, helpful, and well, likable.  And the town is actually pretty nice, with an excellent grocery, interesting shops, some good neighborhoods, a university, and scenery that is much less ugly than most of what we'd been driving through.

We toured an excellent Museum of the Big Bend on the grounds of Sul Ross University and learned a lot about the history of the area, which adjoins Big Bend National Park, including Indian wars, the battles against Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, stories of the Buffalo Soldiers (consisting of proud black cavalry fighters led by white officers), and cowboy life on the range.  There was also a wonderful display of the works of Charles Russell, who painted vivid scenes of the old American west.

A few words about our life on the road.  The first part of the trip is through territory that we are frankly unlikely to like enough to move to.  We want to live around trees and lush landscapes, and to this point we've driven through desert scenery almost exclusively.  At least the land around Alpine, Texas has grasslands (not just scrub brush) and hills close by - but it's still far from beautiful (to us).

So we're moving much faster through the southwest than we will when we cross the Mississippi River.  Mostly only one or two days per RV park and longer drives when we do change location.

But we're having fun and it's not boring.  Much of our spare time initially has been spent getting the motorhome shipshape and ready for a year's voyage.  In Las Cruces, New Mexico, our previous stop, we hired a superb mobile repairman to replace our water pump so we'd have running water on the road when we aren't connected to park facilities.  He also got our dash air conditioning and heating fans working properly by repairing some vacuum lines that had been chewed by Ben Lomond rodents without permission.

We bought a new phone for Nancy, a great touchscreen laptop (highly recommended), a small wireless printer, and a hotspot wifi router, which will allow a number of devices to connect to the internet seamlessly.  We signed up for a Verizon unlimited data plan, which for the first time will let us stream video from Netflix, Amazon, and others.

There is a satellite dish on the roof of the motorhome which automatically aligns itself to the DirecTV satellites at each location.  It's been flawless in the past, but on this trip it only brings in a bit more than half the channels, even after extensive conversations with tech support people at both DirecTV and Winegard, the manufacturer of the rooftop satellite dish.  Luckily, the local sports channel is among those that come in fine, so I can still receive the Warriors and Sharks games.  Otherwise I would be inconsolable.  But we have an appointment Tuesday in San Antonio with a shop that should be able to get that fixed.

We eat well on the road.  We do periodically go out to interesting local restaurants, but some of the best meals on this trip have been those prepared by the onboard staff.  One night we had amazing grilled lamb chops served with Nancy's killer caramelized onions.  Another time we enjoyed excellent six hour slow-cooked short ribs in red wine sauce.  But our best meal was when we grilled dry-aged rib eye steaks bought at Whole Foods.  Sinfully rich and fattening but oh, my.

Tonight after dark we drove about twenty miles to a chilly view spot near Marfa, Texas to look for the mysterious lights - unexplained by science - which have been observed and talked about for hundreds of years.  We joined several other couples, one of whom sadly had been flooded from their home in Houston and had not been able to return.  After our eyes had adapted to the darkness, Nancy and I thought we saw the lights in question.  And the sky at this location, far from town lights, presented us with the most amazing view of the universe we could remember.  This is the kind of transformative adventure you, too, could experience if you committed to staying in trailer parks for a while.

We break bad

Albuquerque has a rebate program to encourage the filming and production of movies and television shows there through which studios are reimbursed 25% (movies) or 30% (TV) of production costs spent in Albuquerque if they hire at least 40% local.  Thus movies such as No Country for Old Men, The Lone Ranger, and Natural Born Killers were filmed there.  But Albuquerque's greatest claims to fame were the television series Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul, which were set in Albuquerque.  Nancy and I were passionate, die-hard fans of Breaking Bad, so you can imagine our feverish excitement when we learned that there was a semi-official tour of the iconic sites displayed in the program at only $75 per person.

Here's Nancy posing with the motorhome (same make and model, at least) in which Walter White cooked his meth and once eliminated his tormentors by locking them inside and producing poison gas:

We joined fifteen or so other equally demented fans of the show for a drive from one exciting location to another - the motorhome graveyard, the laundry-fronted manufacturing lab, the carwash bought by the Whites, the Mexican restaurant at which Mike got Tuco arrested, and so on.

During our travels a TV set in front played some of our favorite moments from the program.  What excitement!

A high point of the tour was a visit to Los Pollos Hermanos, the fast food restaurant where Gus Fring money-laundered his ill-gotten gains from drug sales.  Today it is part of the Twister chain, and we were served almost edible meat-free burritos as part of the tour experience.

This is Walter and Skyler's house.

In one episode Walter had brought a pizza but Skyler (with good reason) wouldn't let him through the front door, and Walter flipped the pizza onto the roof of the garage.  Since then it's been a cult thing for fans to repeat the act, and when the actual owners of the house got tired of climbing ladders to remove pizzas, they installed the metal fence shown, and posted notices.  On the day we visited, a young couple were in the street, a pizza box under the arm of the guy.  They were still there when we drove away, so I can't tell you what mischief transpired later.

After four happy and slightly sappy hours on the tour, we were returned to Albuquerque's Old Town, filled with never-to-be-forgotten memories.

Harry from the Santa Cruz Dinner Club has told us that he always wanted to live in Santa Fe, and it's only 60 miles or so from Albuquerque, so we checked it out today.  It's at 7300 feet elevation, and most of the homes, public buildings, and shops are built in the adobe, pueblo style.  The downtown is indeed charming, and we found there one of the greatest sculpture galleries ever.  Here's an amazing leather sculpture by a Taiwanese artist:

We were charmed by Santa Fe and liked Albuquerque, but desert scenery isn't our favorite, and the weather there borders on brutal.  We need woodsy landscapes to stir our souls, so the search continues.

Flagstaff to Albuquerque

The motorhome was rocking all night, and not from bedroom activity.  Fierce wind gusts periodically woke all of us up, scared the dogs, and made the humans wonder if it was going to be safe driving to Albuquerque.  Not only that, but there was no water that morning for showers or flushes.  The water supply was frozen.  I began to think that this cold weather experience was not going to be as much fun as I had thought.

A few days earlier we had bought a heated water hose from Camping World at $104.  (Ouch!)  And in fact, plugged in to electricity, it worked great the first two days and was still keeping its water contents liquid on our last morning in Flagstaff.  But when the temperature dropped to 15 degrees that night, it was the RV park's water supply that was overwhelmed and froze up.  You don't realize how much you count on working spigots until they run dry.

In spite of the frigid temperatures, we liked Flagstaff, but it didn't make us want to live there.  Incidentally, we had made a side trip to Sedona the day before.  Only an hour away, but at a much lower elevation, Sedona had delightful weather that day.  It is a beautiful little town, known for the magnificent sandstone formations scattered throughout.  I thought we should consider moving there and suggested that we visit a realtor.  Nancy said, "Not interested.  This is strictly a tourist town.  Why, there isn't even a college here!"

But I did an internet search, and there indeed is a University of Sedona.  It is a college of metaphysics - extra sensory perception, psychic research, spiritualism, UFO studies, past lives therapy, and new age mysticism.  I told Nancy about this fine institution, but she wouldn't budge.

One of the highlights of our time in Flagstaff was dinner at the Black Bart Steakhouse, which is associated with the Black Bart RV Park we were staying in.  The food was mediocre, but the singing waiters were fun.  Periodically the entire corps would break into Broadway show tunes.  Surprisingly, some of the singers were quite talented.  Don't miss it the next time you're in the area.

And even though those winds continued through most of the day, the long drive to Albuquerque was relatively easy.  Not much traffic (mostly long distance trucks) and good freeways all the way to the American RV Resort.  Albuquerque is slightly lower (5300 feet) and slightly warmer than Flagstaff, and it will be fun exploring this interesting high desert city.

Flagstaff shivers

From Paso Robles we drove through Bakersfield, where the air is thick brownish-gray and you can barely make out the mountains in the distance.  I've read that Bakersfield is currently the smog capital of the US due to its San Joaquin Valley topography.  Couldn't live there.

Stayed overnight at Barstow, California.  Couldn't live there.  Next night at Kingman, Arizona.  Couldn't live there.

We don't know for sure where we'll end up, but we do know some places we won't.  No disrespect to the folks who have made those garden spots home, but southeastern California and the desert southwestern US don't appeal to us.

Currently we're staying in an RV park in Flagstaff, Arizona.  Flagstaff is at nearly 7000 feet elevation, and it's surrounded by rolling hills with lots of pine trees.  At last some beautiful scenery, and the air is so pristine that the leaves on the trees seem to be at higher resolution than before.

Upon arrival at the RV park, the check-in lady said that we should disconnect the water supply line before going to bed because otherwise the hose would freeze solid when the temperature dropped to 24 degrees in the night.  Tammy Faye, we're not in Ben Lomond any more.

Flagstaff has the physical beauty that's important to us, so we decided to try to find out if we could indeed live here, and began by consulting an agent at the local Sotheby's real estate office.  We gave her our list of needs and wishes: small home with character in a neighborhood with character.  And after 40 years of country living, we wanted something a bit more urban, ideally offering walking distance to shopping and restaurants.  She gave us a list of currently available homes in neighborhoods that she thought fit the bill, and we drove to several.

Our impressions:  The downtown historic district is nice but doesn't have the magic of some towns and cities.  Restaurants here don't seem as exciting as we'd like.  People are friendly and unpretentious.  Housing prices are reasonable, but we didn't find a neighborhood that sang to us.  Traffic is light to moderate and infinitely better than Santa Cruz.  Northern Arizona University is here.  Nancy and I tolerate cold weather better than most people our age but when the temperature is in the thirties and that cold wind blows, we're not sure this town is made for old bones.  The verdict: Unlikely to be our final resting place.

Finally, the Wilsons are rolling again.

The little chateau on Alba Road was sold to a new owner a few weeks ago, rendering the Wilsons homeless.

And so the mission for them over the next year is to find a new place to live comfortable, satisfying lives. Their search will take them all across the United States and will consist of finding towns, cities, and countrysides of which they can say, “We could actually live here!”

In future episodes of this blog, we – the Wilsons - will tell you of our travels in the motorhome we purchased six years ago. There undoubtedly will be episodes of mechanical trouble, silly mistakes, and missed opportunities – but also interesting trailer park acquaintances, beautiful landscapes, and charming potential landing spots.

For each living area we consider for future residence, we will evaluate it for weather, humidity, bugs, traffic, political compatibility, entertainment and cultural opportunities, housing costs, physical beauty, friendliness of the locals, and general feel.

We believe that the most likely outcome of this exhaustive search will be that we return to the West Coast, possibly even to the Santa Cruz area that we have grown to love. But we want to give other parts of the country a fair opportunity to acquire a couple of fine old white people. And because of the lateness of the season, we plan to start our journey by traveling across the southern United States to Florida, then turning north along the east coast up into New England, then across the northern states, possibly veering into Canadian provinces, over to Washington and back down to California, with a side trip to Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah at some point.

We are currently at the Paso Robles RV Ranch, at which we spent a few days getting organized. We drove to nearby San Luis Obispo, which is a town we will seriously consider, with its charming downtown, excellent restaurants, wineries, and university, wonderful weather, and nice mix of ages. Of course it shares with Santa Cruz – and other cool California towns we love (Napa, Yountville, Healdsburg, and so on) - the disadvantage of ridiculous real estate prices.

Tomorrow we will begin our journey to the first major stop, Flagstaff, Arizona, where we will stay several days.

We would appreciate feedback, including suggestions as to desirable spots to settle and fascinating places to visit, We hope you enjoy the trip with us, and let us know if you're going to physically be in he general area we're passing through, so we can get together.