Almost Captive!

18 May 2010-So we FINALLY got to leave San Antonio this morning, although not as early in the morning as we had planned. So this is what happened:

This past Wednesday we had 4 new tires put on the back of the RV. (Seeing as we are going to be in a lot of mountainous places this summer, we wanted to make sure we have a good grip on the road. haha) We had all 4 filled to 120 PSI, the same as our 2 front tires, because we didn't really know what air pressure they were supposed to be filled to. We knew we had to weigh the RV, front and back separately, because we had seen this info on-line. Once you know your weights, Michelin has a chart which helps you determine what PSI you should fill your tires to.


After much research and helpful hints from people at escapees.com, we decided that our front 2 tires needed to stay at 120 PSI, but our back 4 had to be lowered to 95 PSI each. So after we had everything packed up this morning, out we went to let air out of the tires. No problem with 3 of them, but then we realized that the last tire only had 40 PSI to begin with! This meant that either the tire man forgot to fill this tire almost a week ago, or we had a serious leak.


We have a built-in air compressor at the front of the RV, so we filled the tire, and then went to the tire place to see what the deal was. After checking it out, they determined that we had a leak at the valve stem extension, so they replaced it and off we went...almost 2 hours later than we had planned.


Now this may have been a long story over nothing to most of you, but to Cathy and me it was very stressful, and threw us for a loop! haha

We drove just short of 6 hours today, a total of 320 miles, to Ft Stockton, TX. We are just staying here overnight, and thank God about that. When we got here at almost 5PM it was 103 degrees. Incredibly hot! Ft Stockton is in very far West Texas, which is much prettier than East Texas. At least you have something to look at when driving.








We passed quite a few of these deer blinds. For those of yo who don't know, a deer blind is where hunters hide, they climb inside and peek out of what looks like white eyes here, to kill the deer who pass their way during hunting season. It has never seemed really a fair fight to me, but not being a hunter, what do I know?

If Texans aren't going for the oil, they are now going big into wind farms. I kept looking for T. Boone Pickens, but he was a no-show! The wind turbines aren't very pretty, but I guess we have to get our energy somewhere.

Our friend, Barb, called us and told us to look out for these fake cowboys as we came into Ft Stockton. They have these cut-outs as you come in, and I guess as you go out of town, they have a bunch of Indians on the other end.

Tomorrow we are headed for 2 days in Roswell, NM, where the aliens supposedly landed, and the from there we are going for a few days to Santa FE, NM. After that we are spending about 3 1/2 weeks in Colorado, followed by a week in Rapid City, SD, and then a glorious month right outside the east gate of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. That brings us to the 1st of August, where we expect to spend 5-6 weeks in Utah, a few weeks in Arizona, and then thru New Mexico back to San Antonio around December.

I'll be posting on the blog all along, so talk to you soon!