Steve and Judy's Travels!

    Lake Sandpipers in the rain.   No cause for alarm; just a brief shower.   Jay has four pumps going.  The county has two larger pumps going.  The water is receding.  

    Our own tadpole pond.   Warm and sunny.  The water is going down a little.  There is no longer standing water on the little patio out back. The flagstones in the grass are still submerged though.   But the cavalry has arrived.  The county has pumped out the drainage ditches along the road to the south of us.  (Of course, one has to wonder if they are drainage ditches, why don’t they drain, why do they have to be pumped out.)  Anyway, pumping out the drainage ditches outside our park didn’t make our water level go down, so they’ve finally agreed to pump our water into the newly emptied drainage ditches.  I think they’re going to pump around the clock for three days, so that should make a difference.  A difference until the next storm anyway.  Someone still has to figure out where all this water is coming from when it rains.  It doesn’t all come from just rain that fell on us.  

  That’s all we needed.  That’s what we kept telling ourselves when we were packing for our trip in the motorhome.  One day to San Antonio.  One day home and we’re done.  Now we’ve been wearing the same clothes for a week, except when we take them off and wash them at night, so we can wear them again the next day.   Enough of that.  We drove home.  We arrived just after dark to eight inches of water in our driveway, a billion mosquitos, and frogs singing their little hearts out in the lake out front.  No problem.  Inside our house, the electricity is still on, the air conditioning is still running, and we’re comfortable.  Other houses in the park, not so lucky.  They’re a little lower so rooms and sheds are flooded and air conditioners are submerged (so not working).  There aren’t a lot of people that spend the summer here, but our sense is that about half of them have evacuated.   We left the motorhome up by San Antonio and came home in the Jeep.  We’ll pick up clothes, medicines, and a few other things.  Judy has a doctor’s appointment Thursday morning we don’t want to miss.  Then we’ll drive back to San Antonio to rejoin the bus as a planned trip this time, until the flood waters go down here.    

  After days of rain, the weather let up today.  The rain didn’t go all the way away, it only rained off and on, so we had a driveabout.  The three of us drove forty miles up the interstate to South Llano River State Park for some walking and birding.  Usually I send out pictures of what it looks like when we’re camping there.  Here is what it looks like when we’re just walking around:    

  You get tired of people driving over your landscaping, so you put a big boulder in the way.  Now everyone will have to drive around it.   It looks like putting a nice boulder there only kind of worked.   Of course, everyone ought to be able to stay on the road and drive around a boulder, but can you imagine the thousands of dollars of damage that rock did to someone’s RV just to keep them from driving over the gravel?