Gosh – time certainly passes quickly and it has been awhile since we have updated our diary. It was certainly wonderful to point the front of the bus south towards warmer weather.
We had quite an interesting situation one morning shortly after we left our overnight stop at a campground in South Haven, Kansas. Jane was driving in the rain (it rained all that day as it turned out) and all of a sudden her large windshield wiper sweeps to the left and remains there! Fortunately it was only a moderate rainfall rate so she could see well enough and drove to a nearby truck stop. While we fueled up with the “black gold”, John examined the now-useless wiper and found the nut that holds the wiper arm to the shaft was loose. He checked the other one and sure enough it was loose as well. Out comes the ratchet and socket and the problem was quickly resolved. What apparently happened was the Winnebago factory technicians that replaced our cracked windshield had to remove the wiper arms to remove some trim; they must have left on a coffee break before adequately tightening the nuts. John emailed his friend at Winnebago and suggested the windshield crew be provided some additional training. This was a fairly anxious moment when Jane couldn’t see the road very well for a few minutes and we sincerely hope this doesn’t happen to anybody else.
We then stopped by Amarillo to visit with some long-time family friends, then stopped by Littlefield, TX (Jane’s home town) so she could do some more visiting. John was feeling miserable with allergies and if that wasn’t enough, he bit his tongue in two different places and that made eating difficult with the resulting ulcers (which is NOT necessarily a bad thing!) After some power-visiting by Jane, we again point the bus south headed for Kerrville. It was a nice drive on nice rural highways with little traffic.
We arrived at the Buckhorn RV Resort and checked in and for only the SECOND time in our many months of being on the road, the term “resort” actually was well deserved and appropriate. This facility is completely paved, the parking pads are all concrete, there is an exercise room and the
grounds are well cared for. The Datastorm Rally was in a nice meeting and banquet hall but we were a little cramped for space. The rally was extremely well organized and managed and it was fun just being a participant and not one of the workers (we have worked other events so we appreciate the labors of somebody else.) John won the silent auction for an automatic TV dish and installed it on top of the coach after the rally was over. Our coach now looks like an emergency command post with the black TV dome in the front, the very large Internet satellite dish in the middle, and now a smaller open dish at the rear. We also have a CB antenna and three black “rubber ducky” antennas for the radios. (Just yesterday somebody asked what all of the dishes were for.) Since John is a long-time Amateur Radio Operator, he is well accustomed to antennas sticking out all over the place and notices them when we drive.
You might find this part of our diary surprising, but John felt an urge (perhaps a nudge from the Lord??) that the Kerrville area, the Texas Hill Country, might be a good place to start looking for a place to buy. We have always intended to be on the lookout as we travel for potential areas to home-base again so here is where we started. We never intended to travel and live in our coach for years, we intended to do that until we
decided to do something different. Even when we buy something, we still intend to travel in the coach for two or three months here and there. Anyway, John likes land and plenty of it so we found a Realtor in Kerrville and told her we wanted at least ten acres with a small house. We looked at several properties and liked one of them well enough to make an offer. The house is a little too small at 1250 sq. ft., but that can be fixed in the future with an addition. There are 30 acres of land with good topsoil, not too many rocks (a big problem in the Hill Country) and a nice mix of oak trees and open pasture. There is a paved, county maintained road right to the property which is also difficult to find in our price range. We’ll have to see if the Lord opens or closes the door for this property. We’ll keep y’all posted (that’s Texan for we will let you know the status as this develops.)