Onward to Texas!

 

After a most pleasurable three night stay in Pendleton Bend, AR we're back to getting some miles in heading west.  We're entering Texas and we have an extensive list of things to do over 19 nights.  Our normal day's driving distance has brought us to Texarkana and the Sunrise RV Park.

Sunrise was a big, flat, gravel roads and RV pads.  Getting parked and level was a breeze but there is a noticeable rise in temperature from our previous days.  We took both vehicles into town and found fuel at very attractive prices.  Both gasoline and diesel under $3/gal.

Next stop, The Trails at Lavender Road, Tyler, TX.  Staying two nights here to visit with a friend from high school.  The park and our friend's property are north of Tyler, just on the north side of I-20.  Again we are in a dirt and gravel park.  Hoping it doesn't rain while we are here, looks like things could get real muddy in a hurry.

Tyler, for it's metropolitan size of 110,000, has an impressive amount of services.  It's more like a city of 250,000.  We didn't want for choices in dining or shopping.  The time with our friend was a hoot.  He had just returned from attending my class's 50th reunion and we had lots of people to talk about.  Plus, his property is on some acreage and he has built himself a car guy's dream shop and spends copious amounts of time building some great rat-rods.  He also has a nice gun range and I took advantage of having access to it to sight in a .22 rifle that I bought more than a year ago.  The sights were so far off that we couldn't even tell where the bullets were going.  The dirt berm backstop had enough grass on it to keep from kicking up only the smallest puff of dirt.  But we figured it out and in about 20 shots had it about as accurate as my abilities are worth.

Not bad.  Standing to shoot, arms propped on a trailer.
Elevation dead on, windage variability was me wobbling.

Fuel prices got even better in Tyler.  I got diesel for $2.75/gal and gasoline for $2.37/gal!  If only these prices would stay like this across Arizona, Nevada and into California.  Yeah, I know, dream on.

Next up, Argyle, TX, Lantana RV Village.  This is the campground we found that was reasonably close to my brother's place in Coppell and had availability.  The campground of preference when we are in for a visit is a Corps of Engineers campground on Lewisville Lake.  But severe spring flooding damaged that campground and many, many more.  Lantana RV Village had availability for the four nights we wanted but at 300% the rate.  But it's "apples and oranges".  Lantana is a high-end property.  It has a superb pool, exercise room, paved roads, concrete pads, BBQ pavilion, and covered pads for long term guests.  None of which we had time to use.

The sites at Lantana were nicely appointed.  Concrete pad, 
concrete patio, decorative gravel "yard".

This place picks up your garbage at your site and will 
pick up and fill your propane tanks.

Getting to Lantana RV Village was an exercise in avoidance of being routed right through the heart of Dallas.  We've done that and we don't ever want to do it again.  So we manually mapped out a course that took us northwest out of Tyler on State Highways and Farm to Market roads until we got to McKinney.  From there we got on I-30 and then turned south just shy of Denton onto Highway 130.  That's when things went from great to awful.  130 was unbelievably rough and much of it backed up due to construction.  The 130 portion of the drive should have taken 30 minutes but instead it took almost two hours.  When we finally reached our destination I got out of the truck to register at the campground and immediately noticed that the bed of the truck on the driver's side had completely collapsed and was just an 1/8th of an inch from rubbing the outer tire of the duals.  My heart sank, I thought the rough road had ruptured one or both of the airbags on that side.  We got checked in, dropped anchor (it was wicked hot while hooking up utilities), and started crawling under the truck to assess the damage.

Much to my relief the airbags were intact.  What happened though was that the linkage that operates the self-leveling actuator had been stripped out of its mount and allowed the air springs to completely deflate.

The above picture shows the black collar on the suspension stabilizer rod.  The linkage is screwed into the collar (circled in red).  This screw had been ripped right out of the plastic collar and the linkage was just dangling.  Luckily all parts were present and I used Loctite to "glue" the screw into the collar so that the air springs would inflate.  It was mid-afternoon on a Friday and I got to searching for a shop that specialized in Kelderman (manufacturer of my air suspension) installations in the hope that they would have replacement parts.  I found a shop but they kept no parts, only kits.  But the guy I talked to understood my predicament and he jumped on calling Kelderman in Iowa and having them overnight parts for a Saturday morning delivery.  I was to wait for a call telling me the parts had arrived and then hightail it to the shop for the fix.

Everybody held up their end of the bargain.  By 10:00 AM Saturday I was in the shop and ten minutes later I was getting my truck back.  Now that's what I call service!  I think it is worth mentioning that the replacement parts were machined billet aluminum as apposed to the plastic OEM part.  Something tells me I'm not the only one that's had this problem.

Problem solved.  Now  it was time to get down to some serious family time.  We were with my brother, sister-in-law and youngest niece, a newly minted college graduate.  They had plans of going to a wine festival, a concert and more.  But we had to be a bit of a wet blanket.  Both of us were just coming out of COVID and we were dealing with some serious fatigue.  We pretty much held it to going to one or the others place, visiting and for Cyndee and I getting caught up on our Texas BBQ and TexMex.  Our biggest and latest night out was going to supper at Marty B's.  This place is incredible.  It's an outdoor concert venue where all the seating is for dining and then there is an indoor restaurant and all this is under one giant roof that makes it look like a rodeo arena.

At Marty's you can get BBQ or TexMex or a fusion of the two.  There is also a corral adjacent to the parking lot where you can leave your horse should that be your transportation.  We waited over an hour for a table at the indoor restaurant.  There was a popular local band playing and they had really drawn in a crowd.  There was no less than a 1,000 people on the night we were there.

No matter your mode of transportation, Marty B's has parking 
for it.

We have definitely left the cooler weather of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Even at 10 o'clock at night here in Argyle the temperature is still at 95 degrees (in mid-September).  All summer in Asheville it would cool at night and our A/Cs would shut off.  Not so now, they are running all night long.

Four days went by in a flash.  It was hard saying goodbye but it was time for an appointment to do a major upgrade on the 5th wheel's battery system.  We're set up with a RV shop in Georgetown, TX that does a lot of these battery upgrades.  All parts were acquired in advance of our arrival and the plan is to gut the old battery system and install the new one in a single day.  Being fulltimers we don't have the luxury of leaving our rig with somebody for days or weeks.  Having somebody that will do the work in a single day is a huge deal.

But again, good to their word, Auers RV pulled it off and we're back in business for sustaining all our electrical needs when not hooked up or power grid failures.  Power grid failures have been frequent, sometimes lasting for days the last few years.  The old lead/acid batteries just weren't cutting it anymore.  They had gotten so week that instead of lasting days they were only lasting minutes.

Out with the old 6V AGM batteries weighing 500 lbs.

In with the new 12V lithium.  163 lbs and twice
the usable amp hours

The new battery technology required new charger/inverter technology.  My twelve year old charger/inverter didn't have computer chips that could be programmed to a profile that the lithium batteries required.

The remote control and programmer looks
exactly like the original.  All the changes
 are in computer chips.

Same for the charger/inverter.  It's the
exact same box, just all new electronic guts.

So by three o'clock we're headed back to the campground and getting plugged in to bring the new batteries to a full charge.  It will take six to eight hours for that.  We have this night and one more so that we can be near the shop that did the work while we stress test the system.

The next day we have some time to kill so we did a little shopping in Georgetown (there is so much shopping it is mind boggling) and hit a favorite lunch spot we know about in Hutto, The Texan Cafe and Pie Shop.

As I posted in Facebook, the chocolate covered cherry pie was excellent.  Cyndee had the same thing and we both floated out of there on a sugar high.

The batteries and new electronics are performing flawlessly so we're prepping for travel.  Next stop, Ozona, TX.