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Buckhorn

We did it. We left. Had a quiet restful night. Got up nice and early. Went birding with Dennis. Then got ready to leave. It’s funny how much longer it takes to leave after you’ve been there for a week than it does for an overnight stop. Judy got her hair washed, we got the barbeque put away, the bag of oranges in the cabinet, the chairs back in the bin, the boats back up on the car and tied down, the utilities all unhooked, the slides in, the jacks up, the suspension back up, and backed out. Judy stood outside and made sure I missed the car, the shelter, and the tree. Said goodbye to Rick and Angie. Then we drove a quarter mile to the dump station so we could start out empty. Then we drove a mile to the gas station so we could start out full. Then we drove twenty miles to the propane station so we could start out with that full too. Drove twenty miles to make one more stop. Then it was time for lunch. The first day out never covers much ground. And besides that, Judy is moody. She doesn’t like the trip back home as much as she likes the trip down. I sure don’t want to drive late today, until one of us gets tired and cranky. The propane tank still read half full, but we want to be sure to have enough heat for that Colorado snow. I was crawling around under the Freightliner a few days ago, and I noticed that there are no springs under there at all. There are air bags holding the whole thing up, but how can you do that with no metal at all? Leafs? Coils? Looks empty. The reason I was crawling around under there is a longer story. Maybe it won’t take longer to tell, but it has gone on for months. It has to do with fueling. There is a notice beside the fuel fill hole. It says “drain water from the water/fuel separator after each fill up. See owner’s manual” I’ve never had a diesel before. What does that mean? I could look it up, but I had an easier solution. I asked the guy I was buying it from what that meant. He said he didn’t know but he didn’t think it mattered. I thought it probably did matter, but if it hadn’t been done for two years anyway, it probably wasn’t urgent. I looked around for something that looked like a water/fuel separator, but couldn’t find anything. After a few weeks of keeping an eye out for it, I decided to make a careful search. Nothing. I was desperate, so I looked it up in the owner’s manual. It said: “drain water from the water/fuel separator after each fill up.” See operator’s manual.” That took care of that for a while. Next effort, I dug through all the paper we got with this thing and found the operators manual for the Freightliner. It said: “drain water from the water/fuel separator after each fill up.” It went on to describe the water/fuel separator as a doohickey that had a glass bowl on it with a screw fitting on the bottom. If there is water in the bowl, you open the fitting to drain the water out. It said they couldn’t tell me where it was because the final manufacturer, that would be Fleetwood, got to locate it wherever they wanted. I searched the vehicle again. Nothing. This trip, I decided to get serious. Judy called Fleetwood for me. They have incredible customer service. You call them and tell them your vehicle number. They call your vehicle up on the computer and tell you anything you want to know about your unit. We called. Roland answered. He looked us up. He said it was located under the vehicle. I looked under it. He said no. Way under. Attached to the frame. I crawled under. Cell phone in hand, I crawled while he described. It’s on the outside of the frame, passenger side, two feet behind the front wheel. It’s not there. No. Not the front wheel, the rear axle. Two feet behind the rear axle. It’s not there. What’s it look like? It’s a doohickey with a glass bowl. From under the motorhome, on my back, on the cell phone I asked him, “Are you sure I’m supposed to be on my back under the motorhome in the gas station every time I fill up to do this?” He mumbled. I never found it. I gave up. Again. Then I met the guy next to us at Goose Island, from Ohio, towing a travel trailer with a diesel pickup. We talked about lots of stuff. We talked about the separator. I described it to him. He said sure, it probably looked like that. But it could be inside a plastic housing. Judy looked in the engine compartment in the back and found something neither one of us recognized. He identified it as the separator. It doesn’t have a glass bowl showing. It doesn’t have a screw on the bottom. It is enclosed in a black plastic canister with a black lever on one side, and a short drain hose attached. He showed us how to use it. We don’t have to get under the motorhome to get at it. We don’t even have to lean over. A perfect solution, even if it did take a long time to get to. Now the Bounder has been properly burped. Wonder if I should call Fleetwood and tell them where it is? I was wrong. It did take longer to tell. Bill is about ready to leave on his Spring Training Trip. He’ll leave just before I get back from my trip. Let’s go for the record. How long can we keep at least one brother in the air at all times? Stopped for the night at a private RV park we like. If you’re ever passing through the Texas Hill Country and are looking for a full hookup private RV park convenient to the freeway, we recommend Buckhorn Lake Resort. Stream. Lake. Ponds. Swans. Stocked with fish. No fishing license required. Perfectly level, well separated sites. Very nice. It’s at exit 501 on Interstate 10. Oh no. I didn’t get to the showerhead, hot mirrors, Buddy at Tackle town, GPS rest stops, or the Lazy Daze. Ok, I’ll do the Lazy Daze. There’s a thirty-footer here. He was towing. I watched it from a distance and was struck by how small the wheels look. It’s hard to imagine those wheels supporting enough brakes to provide a lot of stopping power. Especially towing. They’re regular Class C size wheels. Class A wheels are a little larger. Diesel wheels are larger still. Guess they’re all proportional to the weight of the vehicle. I looked again. I think what else makes the wheels look small is that it was wearing fender skirts. I never noticed that before. The Lazy Daze has fender skirts. How about that? A flashback to the fifties. A 250 mile day.
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Goose Island

Wow! It was a long and loud night. Wind came up. And up. And up. By midnight, it was shaking the whole rig. There was lots of noise. It sounded like branches scraping the roof. We’re not parked next to a tree. Vents flapped. Awning straps slapped. The wind blew all the water out of the bay. By daylight it was calm. That’s no way to leave, after a rough night like that. We signed up for another day. New oyster beds to see. Birds discovering the uncovered oyster beds to watch. I dried my hair without any electrical incidents. I made sure there was no electric heater or coffee maker running at the time. Last night we watched a car drive through the moon. Late at night, eleven. The waxing moon set, through the binoculars, an orange crescent going silently flat on the bottom. Then, suddenly appearing again! It was setting directly behind the Copano Bay Bridge. Just then, a car drove past, clearly visible in the darkness, back lit entirely by the light of the moon. Wow. I wonder if the people in the car felt it? Decided we needed another Port Aransas day. Drove there. Crossed the ferry. Shopped. Did the bird lagoon. Had lunch on the beach next to the jetty. Checked out a few more things. Drove home. Got home just in time for another great sunset. It was a good moorhen day. Saw several. Saw a moorhen chase a coot. Saw another rail. Saw another ruby crowned kinglet. Tiny little thing. About the size of a hummingbird. Ducks, mergansers, loons, grebes. You know. Took a little side trip to a good ducking spot. Spotted a few. Then found Judy’s swan again. The swan that’s not supposed to be here. When I could finally get Judy’s attention diverted from the swan, we checked out some ducks I couldn’t recognize. They looked a lot like a duck we’ve never seen before: the American Black Duck. They’re not normally around here so there wasn’t much chance, but, That’s it! They match exactly. American Black Ducks. Gottum. Checked out a little park on the way back. It’s called Lighthouse Lakes Trails Park. Sounds good. It is a low-lying saltwater marsh, honeycombed by marked trails, with a lighthouse on the other side. The Lydia Ann. We always look for it. You can see the lighthouse off in the distance from the road. We’ve seen it from up close on the water in the sailboat one year when we sailed out to Port Aransas from Corpus Christie. You can put your kayak in the water at this park, and paddle all the way over to the Lydia Ann and back in sheltered water. That’s a good thing.. You don’t have to worry about the headwind coming up after you have crossed the bay. It will always be a reasonable paddle back in relatively calm water. We’ll have to remember that spot for next year. We’re not stopping in Glenwood Springs on the way home. The office picked up another out of town job while we’ve been gone. The new client in Glenwood Springs wants it done right away, so I tried to set it up for next Monday and Tuesday so we could catch it on the way home. They want it done soon, but not that soon. When we go home, we’ll just go home. The TV remote puzzles us. Not because we can’t program it. No surprise there. What puzzles us is that when you push the button to turn the television off, the television goes off. Then it blinks back on. You blink it off again. It goes off. But it blinks back on. Again. And again. Persistence always pays. It will turn off and stay off. Eventually. A trick TV remote? A party gag? I want to talk about the north star, and the ferry current, and two bathrooms, and the water/fuel separator, and full-timers, and kayaking in the wind, and going room-to-room, and the other kayak fisherman, and the two switches, and Cut and Shoot Texas, and Luling Texas, and traffic light triggers, and cold hands, and banking on the road, and the walk-in clinic, and gas pump shutoffs, and candy canes, and the retractable extra axle, and truck cabs. But I’m running out of time. Maybe while I’m driving home, nothing new will happen and I can write each evening about the rest of this stuff. Maybe. I know! Another trip. I can spend my time on the next trip asking the questions I didn’t get to on this trip. But then…. Oh well.

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Goose Island

Time to leave. No way! It’s way too nice to leave. Let me drive home on a rainy day. We’re staying. It was a busy morning too. It started with the osprey. Osprey out the front window and coffee. He circled, circled, circled, forty feet high, then dove for the kill. He didn’t crash headlong into the water like the tern. He crashed talons first into the water. A respectable splash, he’s a big bird. A brief struggle to get airborne, and the fish dropped off just above the surface. It was a big fish. A big fish with an osprey story to tell now, supported by the badge of courage on his flanks. We got twenty minutes of osprey fishing. Meanwhile, those goldeneyes drifted by again. Fishing. But wait! One of them doesn’t look right. Out come the binocs again. He’s not a cormorant, Not a loon. The loon is drifting way out at the edge of our binocular range, but you can just see the flashes of white from his throat. Yesterday, while on the kayak, he called to me. Or at me. When I spotted him from the boat, he wasn’t very far away. I paddled his direction. I waited for him to dive, then paddled right over to where he had gone under and coasted, waiting to see where he came back up. He rose about fifty feet away, called once and dove again. He came up a lot farther away the next time. So back to our duck that wasn’t exactly a duck. He was not a cormorant, not a loon, not a grebe. It was a merganser. We’re used to seeing mergansers once in a while. They have a distinctive head, different from a duck, but this one didn’t look quite like the common mergansers we normally see. This was a red breasted merganser. Not a new bird for us, but an unusual one. Common mergansers don’t like to winter in salt water. Red breasted do. To identify birds, we usually start with what he looks like. More and more now, though, we find we hear a bird, then go look for him. The sound he makes at least tells us which direction to look. Sometimes the sound tells you what type of bird you’re looking for, so you have a better idea where to look. Sometimes you know exactly which bird you’re looking for because you recognize the sound exactly. Yesterday, I passed the marsh habitat where the clapper rails are. We’ve seen several there. It took me a long time to spot the rail that was calling. I didn’t have any binoculars with me because I wasn’t birding, I was running. The sound was check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. Without interruption. Finally I spotted the bird. It looked just like a clapper rail. But it wasn’t. It was a King Rail. The first we have seen this trip. They look just the same, the only way you can tell them apart is by the call. Anyway, we’re watching the osprey, the goldeneyes, the merganser, and the dolphin. What is a dolphin doing in this water? We paddled all over the bay yesterday, and kept bumping into the bottom. Our kayaks draw three inches of water. Once we even had to get out and walk the boats back off the oyster bed and into water deep enough to float them again. There must be channels two or three feet deep out there, and he was better at finding them than we were. We’d see the baitfish start flying all over the place, and look through our field glasses for the disturbance in the water where the dolphin was. He’d get into a pack of them and thrash about, causing quite a commotion, and probably getting lots to eat. I love the baitfish. They’re shaped kind of like trout, but a little rounder at the head. Every kayak trip is escorted by leaping baitfish ten or twelve inches long, splashing all over the place. Fish we’d love to catch from the river at home. So there is no way we could have left today, anyway, what with all the birds and dolphins, and excitement out the window. We found a roadside fruit market that is keeping us stocked with goodies. Today we wanted some fresh meat, so we located the meat market. That provided an opportunity for some Texas humor. We got to discussing different cuts of meat, with the butcher, and he recommended the porterhouse steaks. They looked like big T-bones to me, and I wondered how they were different, so I asked, and he answered with a long explanation of loins and shanks and brisket and which came ahead of the other. I stared blankly. He stared back. I told him I was wondering which part of the cow they came from, if you could imagine a cow standing right there. Was it an arm or a leg, or what? He volunteered: “Boy. You need a lesson in Cow 101.” That was the funny part, but you have to read it in a South Texas drawl. Lucky for me, he had the lesson right there on his wall. He directed me to a picture of a cow hangingl, showing where all the different cuts of meat came from. It helped. I’ve now been exposed to Cow 101. We had an electrical mystery today. I decided to try again to look my best, and got the hair dryer out. If I don’t use the hair dryer, my hair looks like I’ve been on the beach. So I fired up the hair dryer. Judy had the coffee maker on. Everything stopped. It’s not really much of a problem. We have ground fault interruption outlets, one on either side of the motorhome. They control all the 120 volt outlets. Half each. You press the reset button, and everything works again. I checked the one for the left side. It reset. I checked the one for the right side. It wouldn’t reset. We flipped all the breaker switches in the bedroom. Nothing helped. I must have fried the outlet, and now nothing on that side of the motorhome would work until I replaced it. Is there very much connected through that side of the motorhome? Let’s see: the satellite dish, the television, the coffee maker, the washing machine, the microwave, the bedroom fan, and the hair dryer. We decided it was worth fixing. A call to an RV repair guy, a trip to the hardware store, a purchase of multiple outlets to make sure we got the right one, and the trip back to the motorhome. As I was messing with the new outlet in the store, I realized the new outlet was acting just like the old one that was supposed to be burned out. It wouldn’t work properly until it had power supplied to it. When we got back I explored the motorhome for more switches. I found one in the left rear outside corner of the coach that looked promising. I threw the switch, but it didn’t help. In fact, by this time, I had thrown so many switches, nothing would help. Everything was screwed up. So I disconnected the shore power entirely, let everything reset, and started over. Everything worked! Nothing needed replacing! That last switch did it. Hey, this electricity stuff isn’t that hard at all.
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Goose Island

This is it. Last day out. Time to start the trip home tomorrow. Woke up to a beautiful blue-sky morning. Wow! Could it get any better than this? Sat in our picture window sipping coffee, watching the terns fishing in front of us. Bright white terns, flying twenty thirty forty feet high, focused on the water below. They spot a meal, and crash unmercifully into the surface after it. It looks like a devastating crash, but they gulp, and pop right back up into the air to do it again. Kamikaze feeders. Did my morning ramble. The cardinals and mockingbirds are in full voice. The sea is glass. We put the boats in the water. We paddled for hours. Headed around the other campground peninsula, back in the slough, tucked into a canal neighborhood, cruised the canals and visited with a few of the residents, turned down more than one offer of a can of beer to go, ducked under the bridge to the boat launch area, past the pelicans, around the oyster beds, under the fishing pier, and back around our campground peninsula, to our start. We circled the entire goose of Goose Island. Came home and put some sunscreen on. I need somebody to invent after-the-fact-sunscreen. I like all the fishing piers here. Some fishing piers are built on purpose. Great long wooden piers stretching way out into the bay. Some fishing piers were already there, under a different use. We’re into at least the second generation of bridges. That means the old bridge outlives its useful life, so they build a new, higher bridge next to it, rearrange the road to hit the new bridge, cut a piece out of the middle of the old bridge for boats to go through, and call the old bridge a fishing pier. Two fishing piers, in fact. There are many fishing piers all along the coast, and new ones popping up every year. Experienced a sunset to match the morning.