Our RV Adventures

Recapping yesterday’s trip, we were hooked up and on our way by
9:50am. We made our first stop at the Luling Buc-ee’s for diesel, $1.79, the cheapest we’ve seen in the area.

And we’ve never seen Buc-ee’s this busy. It took a while to thread our way through the cars to get around to the larger pumps in the back. But we were able to pull right up to a end pump and fill up. Then it was another obstacle course to get out, but we were in and out in about 25 minutes, so it wasn’t too bad.

Then it was another 120 miles, and about 2 and a half hours to Medina Lake, the time mostly due the hilly, curvy road from Boerne to the park.

We got in to the park about 4pm and headed in to find a spot. We knew our friends, Dave and Lynn Cross, were back in the ‘F’ section so we headed that way. And then as we were meandering around, looking for a site, who popped out to flag us down, but Dave,who directed us to a 50 amp site two away from he and Lynn.

And as I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, Lynn Cross had prepared us a delicious spaghetti dinner and we spent several hours talking, having a great time.

When we got back to the rig, I tried to get the satellite system up and running, but without any luck. Our site is pretty heavily treed so I knew it was going to take some fiddling. But the first problem I had was getting power to the dome. I have about 75 feet of coax that lets me move the dome out into the open, but I only have 50 feet of 12 volt power cable.

The 12 volts is only needed to power the motors that aim the dome. Once that’s done, the 12 volts can be disconnected. But now I needed to get power to the dome, so since I didn’t have a 12 volt extension cable, I decided to take the power supply to the dome.

So I used my 12 volt power supply on an extension cord to power the dome

I’d modified it to add a 12 volt socket just for needs like this.

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But it still didn’t work. Although my voltmeter showed the power supply was putting out 12 volts, it wasn’t getting to the dome for some reason. But by this this time it was dark, so I called it a night, and we just watched stuff we’d recorded earlier.

Then this morning, I went down to the guard shack to let them know what site we were in and pay for our 50 amp electric. Or at least I tried.

When I tried to start the truck, I found the battery dead. I had left a accessory switch on, and had run it down. So I dug out my battery charger to fix the problem. But then I ran into another problem.

The charger I have does auto 6 volt/12volt selection, and since the battery was down to about 5 volts, the charger kept treating it as 6 volt battery. Not good.

So now what to do? I have 2 sets of  battery cables that I can chain together to let me charge the truck from the rig batteries when it’s hitched up, but that’s still not long enough. I could take the battery out of the truck and take it back to the rig batteries, or take out a rig battery and use that to start the truck.

But that seemed like too much work. There’s got to be a simpler kludge.

And then I realized I already had the solution at hand – the 12 volt power supply that I had tried to use for the satellite. It puts out a current-limited 6 amps steady, 8 amps surge. So I used it to charge the battery up to about 9 volts, and then let the big charger take over. It’s 3/5/20/75 amp model, so at 20 amps, it didn’t take long to top off the battery. So about 30 minutes later I was on my way to the gate.

And while I was there, I also wanted to get my driver’s license back. They recently started holding your Thousand Trails membership card until you come back and settle up.

But I no longer have a TT membership card, since the last place that held my card, the Bend/Sunriver TT in Bend, OR, lost my card and couldn’t give it back to me. And since I know my membership number by heart, I never needed it again.

Until today. So instead, they held my driver’s license.

i guess this will finally get me to call TT and get another one.

This morning our friend’s Brett and Frankie got in touch to tell us that they were also here at Medina Lake and wanted to get together. But it had to be today, since they’re leaving for Conroe tomorrow.

So, about 3:30, Brett showed up at our rig in his golf cart to Uber us back over to their rig. Frankie had coffee and cake waiting for us, and we had a great time talking over their recent travels all the way down to Key West and back to Texas.

Too bad they’re leaving tomorrow, since we would have liked to spend more time with them. But I’m sure we’ll catch up with them down the road.

Getting back to the rig, I got back on my satellite problem. And when I hooked up the power this afternoon, suddenly the dome was getting power and scanning for the satellites. Not sure why it suddenly started working, but gift horses, and all that.

But it took trying 3 different locations to find one that worked. And unfortunately, the one that works is on the picnic table of the site next to ours, about 60 feet away..

But this is a 30 amp site, and since the temps are edging in the 90’s now, and there are a lot of empty sites, hopefully we want have a problem.

Hopefully.

Thought for the Day:

Physics is what humans call the part of the God code that we can understand.

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Our morning started out way too early this morning, since we have a 290 mile trip today, instead of our usual 120.

But we couldn’t start our trip without our usual Cracker Barrel breakfast. We just had to get there earlier. We both got our usual, mine being the Sunrise Sampler, with two eggs, a sampling of bacon, patty sausage, and ham, grits, fried apples, and hash browns.

And this leads to my question of the day.

What happened to hash browns, and when did they change?

When I was growing up in Alabama in the 50’s and 60’s, we would often stop at a Toddle House when we traveled. If you’ve seen a Waffle House, you know what a Toddle House looked like. In fact Waffle House was indirectly spun off Toddle House, when a TH regional manager left to start his own chain of restaurants.

And like Waffle House today, you could watch the cook prepare your food behind the counter. And they made Hash Browns by squirting a little oil in a hot skittet, dumping in a serving of diced potatoes and frying them up. The cook would sprinkle a little paparika on them, and as they cooked on one side, he would flip the whole loose mass up in the air, catching them back in the pan just as it ended up back on the stove burner. And although the cook never seem to lose any potatoes, some of the oil would splash out into the burner flame and flare up with a big sizzle.

By ‘diced’ potatoes, I mean potatoes cut up into roughly 1/2” cubes, and not the shredded ‘riced’ potatoes we get now. In fact if you Google ‘Riced potato hash browns’, they will show you recipes for making the hash browns you get at most restaurants today.

And just to clarify, I’m also not taking about Cottage Fries. Those are usually much larger, and not really cubes, but have rounded edges.

But this is what the hash browns of my youth looked like.

Maybe it’s a regional thing. Nick’s Miss Terry said that to her, hash browns have always been the shredded ones.

So, you out in the audience, what’s your kind of hash browns?

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Since I got on a hash brown rant and it’s late and I’m tired, I’ll flesh out the rest of today’s journey in tomorrow’s blog and skip right to the good stuff.

As in a really, really good spaghetti dinner, serviced up by long-time friend’s Lynn and Dave Cross. They’re parked two spaces over from us, and Lynn told us a couple of days ago she’d have dinner ready for us when we got here.

And boy, did she. Lynn really knows her way around a spaghetti recipe.

Thanks, Lynn and Dave for the great welcome.

1. It was started in the early 30’s by James Smith, father of Fred Smith. Fred went on to start his own company in 1971. It’s called FedEx.
2. During the segegation era, the comany had a parallel chain for African-Americans called Harlem House.

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