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Austin

9/1/2022

We had a smooth drive from Houston to Austin, and on the way arranged to meet our friends at the Salt Lick Barbeque in Driftwood, Texas, which is southwest of Austin in the hill country. John was a high school friend who we reconnected with a few years ago - and not through Facebook. He was living in Georgia, and was the photographer at my Georgia sister-in-law’s brother’s wedding, and somebody made the connection that he and my brother came from the same town in NJ, and Pete realized he was in our class and gave him our contact information in Belize. We’ve stayed in touch the past few years, so we decided to visit on our swing through Austin.

After genuine delicious Texas barbeque, we went back to their house in Buda, which is an Austin suburb. We spent two nights parked on their side street in a very quiet neighborhood while John and Dawn Marie introduced us to their family and gave us the ten cent Austin tour. Austin is the capital of Texas, so we were able to check our first state capital off our list of capitals and National Parks. Austin is a beautiful bustling city, and we visited some of the city parks along the river as well as the capitol itself. We grabbed dinner at Whole Foods and ate in their wine bar, which probably isn’t a big deal to US residents, but after 15 years in Belize it was the height of luxury to us.

We don’t think anyone in John’s neighborhood even realized we were sleeping in the camper.

Austin is a beautiful city with lots of activity on the river.

We checked off our first state capital!

The next day we left around lunch time and drove to North Austin to meet our friend Becky. Becky is born and bred in Texas and took us to Jack Allen’s Kitchen, which is apparently an Austin institution, but was delicious whether it’s an institution or not. We took advantage of the relatively quiet Sunday to spend a few hours catching up. Becky is an archeologist, and we met her in Belize shortly after we arrived there but haven’t seen her since she was last in Belize 9 years ago, so we had lots of catching up to do on both sides. Becky asked us where we were going after Austin, and when we told her we were heading towards Dallas to visit friends but weren’t looking forward to the Texas interstate traffic, she suggested an alternate route through hill country that avoided the major highways until we were almost in Dallas. And, she recommended a brewery that’s on Harvest Hosts for a night’s stop, as well as a visit to the Dinosaur Valley State Park which was so cool it’s going to get its own blog post.

We said goodbye to Becky and headed for the Jester King Brewery. That Sunday night was the first night we didn’t have a planned stop, so we had just joined Harvest Hosts that morning. After Becky gave Jester King two thumbs up, we made reservations and headed that way on the back roads, which took a little over an hour. We arrived at the brewery, found out where to park, settled the dogs, and headed into the open pole barn where we enjoyed a couple of flights of sample beers, and a good 3-person bluegrass group. We spent a delightfully quiet night in their back parking lot, and in the morning took advantage of their nature trails to walk the dogs. They’re way out in the country, so we actually saw nature on our walk - lots of birds, bugs, squirrels, and even a snake.

Our parking spot for the night. We were the only campers.

We packed up and headed north on the route Becky had outlined towards Dinosaur Valley State Park.

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South Padre Island to Austin

8/27/2022

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We spent a second quiet night on South Padre Island before packing up to head towards Houston. Siri told us Houston was a little over 5 hours driving for a normal car, and we didn’t want to spend that much time on the road, so we decided to veer off at Corpus Christi and spend a night on Padre Island at the Padre Island National Seashore.

When we were researching this trip and decided to try to hit National Parks and state capitals, we didn’t realize how many small National Parks are in the US. It wasn’t until we were looking online for places to camp that we even realized that Padre Island is a National Seashore, which is not quite a National Park because it’s not big enough, but it’s still managed by the National Park Service. This was great news to us, and is, for us, the unofficial start of our adventure in the US because this is where we bought our annual National Park pass, which we can now use in all National Parks for the next year.

Tom is getting our National Parks pass and getting information about camping on the beach.

We hit a speed bump too hard on the way to the park office and flipped the air ride sensor again. This time, knowing what he was doing, Tom had it fixed in about 15 minutes.

This is also where we had our first boondocking on the beach experience, which made us a little tense but turned out to be fantastic. At the National Park booth, Tom asked about camping. The Padre Island National Seashore has two established campgrounds, Malaquite Beach and Bird Island, but if you drive onto the beach after the road ends, you can park anywhere, and unlike the established campgrounds, it’s absolutely free once you’ve paid to enter the park. After the road ends, the Park Service maintains about 5 miles of beach road and keeps them passable for 2WD vehicles, and after that there are another 55 miles of unmaintained beach, some of which is passable with 4WD, and some of which isn’t. Our truck is 4WD, but it weighs 8 tons, and having never done this before we only ventured about a half a mile down the beach before we decided we’d gone far enough. We seem to have hit the sweet spot in timing, after many kids have gone back to school and before the snowbirds arrive, and we didn’t even see any other campers on the beach in sight of where we decided to park. We did see some people fishing, and some just sitting in lawn chairs near their vehicles enjoying the surf and the quiet. We’d read stories about people parking for the night and waking up stuck in the sand because the tide had come up in the night, so even though it was a new moon and we didn’t think there would be much time, Tom walked a little way down the beach to ask some people if we were safe and out of the way where we were parked. They told us it was fine to park right next to the “road” and that people would just go around us, and that the spot next to the road was safely above the tide, so we turned around so we were facing the way we’d come in, and moved just a little bit away from the surf.

We had a perfectly lovely evening, and a great night’s sleep. All of the fishermen and surf watchers left around dark, and there were no other people or vehicles in sight. In the morning, we got up and walked two miles down the beach, where we saw on guy camped in a van, one other camper trailer, and one camper trailer being pulled out past us. We decided to get our motos out of the truck and go further down the beach to see what we could see, but when we did that after breakfast it was just more of the same - surf and dunes and birds. We went a mile or so past the 5 mile point to where the sand road started getting soft, and turned around and rode back. It wasn’t the most adventurous ride, but it was fun to get the bikes out and use them.

We parked next to the dunes and wined and wordled on the beach with the dogs.

…so you can see the dunes and the sea.

While walking the dogs in the morning, we saw more turtle nests marked.

After a quick lunch, we packed up and headed towards Houston to visit with Kathy, Kismet’s rescue angel. The drive was a mix of open sunny roads, and white knuckle misery because we got caught in a couple of what I suspect were microbursts with fierce wind and blinding sideways rain, on a busy highway with semis flying past. As we came into Houston the weather cleared which made the driving better, although we’re still getting used to cars going between 75 and 85 miles an hour and blowing past our 60mph cumbersome rig.

Kathy met us at a gas station right off the highway to guide us to her house. We never realized how beautiful the city of Houston is, with huge live oaks lining the streets. It still made us a little tense after the Merida tree debacle, but Kathy assured us that big moving trucks go through all the time, and we had no trouble at all either in or out.

Kathy, of course, let us keep the dogs in the house, which is where Kismet lived for a few months before we picked her up in Houston 10 years ago. She seemed to remember Kathy and a couple of Kathy’s dogs who were there when she was, and immediately made herself at home, which of course made Ty and Princh figure they could make themselves at home too. We went out for a fabulous Italian dinner, and in the morning after a walk through the beautiful streets with the dogs, Kathy took me to Central Market, which is the HEB version of Whole Foods.

We’d done a quick shop at the Walmart when pulled into Brownsville, but this was the first time I’ve been in a real upscale US supermarket in four years. I was in heaven! In Belize, we can always get what we need, but choices are limited and there are times when some items just aren’t available. Mexico has more choices, but there were some things I just couldn’t find in Mexico. For example, none of the stores have plain black tea. They have every herbal flavor you can imagine, and I finally found a small box of Twinings English Breakfast Tea to get us to the US, but no plain black tea. I also couldn’t find plain panko bread crumbs. They have other kinds of bread crumbs which I can’t use because many have milk that Tom can’t eat, and all sorts of flavored and seasoned breadcrumbs, but no plain panko crumbs. Central Market has everything, and it’s all gorgeous. I got produce, and bagels, and different cheeses, as well as having choices for all the normal stuff like tea and breadcrumbs. I think Kathy may have thought I was a little nuts because I was so happy, but she understood because she checked to make sure there were Central Markets Austin and Dallas so I can visit again before we leave Texas.

We visited a little more with Kathy, and headed for Austin in the early afternoon. After getting out of the Houston traffic, it was a fairly easy drive, and we met NJ/high school friends at the Salt Lick Barbeque in Driftwood for some real Texas food. We’re now parked on the side street by their house, and will be here a couple of days before heading north. John is a professional photographer, so some good photos will follow.

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Random Thoughts So Far

8/23/2022

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We spent about a month on the road in Mexico before coming into the US a couple of days ago. After lots of hours riding in the truck and talking, Tom and I have a list of things we’ve been talking and thinking about that never made the blog. This is more for our future reference than because we think anybody else might be interested, but read on if you care. Just so you know, there aren’t any pictures.

The Camper

We are about 95% super pleased with our camper build, but we are keeping a list of “if we do this again” ideas. We probably won’t do it again, but here goes:

We’d sacrifice the space and make it a foot shorter. If it had been a foot shorter, we wouldn’t have hit the tree in Merida. We really like the inside height because it makes the living space feel very spacious, and with two people, three dogs, and a cat, that matters. We’d also lose some valuable storage space if it was shorter. However, now that we know that not all cities follow the 4 meter clearance rule, losing some space would probably be a worthwhile exchange for less anxiety while driving around. We think we’ll be fine in the US and Canada, but we may do a trade in for something smaller and more agile when we head for Central America.

The sliding bathroom door is nothing but trouble, and any fixes are temporary since the wheels bend and it goes off the track. This isn’t due to lack of quality in building it, it’s just the nature of sliding doors. We aren’t sure what we would do instead since there is absolutely no room for a swinging door, but we’re thinking about it.

We’d import tires, rather than settling for the best Belize had to offer. The Sailun tires were completely inadequate, even though they were specced for our weight, but they couldn’t handle the weight and the higher speeds once we were off Belize roads and on real highways. There’s no way Reimers would have known this when they sold them to us, since pretty much everyone who buys them there uses them only in Belize, but in hindsight it would have been well worth it to us to ship in tires from the US.

Traveling With Pets

Now that we’re in the US, I can admit that I was pretty stressed out about getting our Belize dogs across the border with the CDC Belize dog ban. We had all sorts of plans of how we would handle it if we had any problems which, fortunately, we didn’t. In the end, the US officials just welcomed us, made some nice general chit chat about the dogs, and didn’t even ask for vaccination papers. Even when Tom started a sentence, “In Belize, we call them potlickers…” the officials didn’t turn a hair.

Traveling through Mexico with the dogs had its ups and downs. All three of the dogs are very good travelers. Even Princha, who has a history of getting car sick, seemed to realize from the very beginning that she was in it for the long haul, and she hasn’t vomited AT ALL. I’ve been hesitating to say this for fear of jinxing her, but now that we’re out of Mexico and the roads are better, I’d be surprised if she suddenly resumed being carsick at this point.

We generally drive with Ty and Princh in the front seat with us, and Kismet gets the run of the camper. This works pretty well, except when we’re going slow and maneuvering to find directions or turn, when Ty and Princha, who generally just sleep on the seat, spring up to see what’s going on and block the mirrors and knock the phone with the navigation software out of my hands. They’re getting better, but if we know we’re going to be in a complicated situation, we sometimes put them in the back with Kismet.

We also had a little trouble finding good places to walk the dogs in Mexico. Mexico has A LOT of street dogs. One or two street dogs aren’t generally a problem, but when there is a pack of six or eight or more, we go the other way and put the dogs in the camper. We found some good places to walk, but sometimes we headed for one of Merida’s pet friendly malls and walked the dogs in the mall, even though it took a lot of laps to get three or four miles walked.

Traveling with a cat has added a few complications, although it’s manageable. Our general setup is that Feetz’s food and litter box are in the “garage” and the cat door by the washer is normally open so she can come and go and the dogs can’t get to her food or the litter box. We had one incident where we had all three dogs in the camper, and when we stopped and I went to check on them, Princha was missing. The bathroom door had slid shut (back when it still had wheels) and Princha had apparently gone in there and jumped up on the washer to get the cat food. She was looking terrified and shaking, and I immediately scooped her up and hugged her, thinking she was scared because she’d been riding on top of the washer. But no - she was scared that she was in trouble for going after the cat food, which she knows she’s not supposed to do.

The cat also causes a little anxiety because I’m scared she will get out of the camper and we’ll lose her. She always travels in her crate so as we’re taking the dogs in and out at rest stops we don’t have to worry about her sneaking out. The problem with this is that when she sees us getting ready to go, she disappears into the garage to avoid the crate, which means we can’t open the back doors because she could run out and get lost. We also have to remind each other to shut her into the front of the camper when we want to open the back doors, but we’re now used to that. The upside is she loves hanging out with us and the dogs, all one big happy tri-species pack.

Traveling In Mexico

Besides the tree incident in Merida, we have been pleasantly surprised and how easy our travels have been. We’ve driven in and through Mexico a number of times before, and always ran into some minor complication. Sometimes it was getting lost because roads weren’t clearly marked and didn’t match the map, sometimes we were hassled for no good reason by the military or police, sometimes there was security at state lines where we had to stop and be searched, sometimes the fuel stations tried to rip us off, and sometimes it was just crazy drivers who didn’t seem to have any concept of lanes or directions.

This trip, none of this happened. We haven’t done the drive since the beginning of 2016, and in this time the road conditions have improved tremendously, and the mapping apps seem to have caught up with the actual roads. The pump operators at the gas stations were honest and efficient, and we seem to have come out of Mexico without any issues with bad fuel. While we ran into lots of fast drivers, and people who passed unsafely, overall the drivers seemed to be observing the normal rules of the road…and people in a hurry are everywhere.

The police were, without exception, polite and helpful. If we were parking for the night in a public spot, we would always try to find the police to make sure we were allowed to park. The first few times we approached them expecting a hassle, but instead they always went out of their way to assure us that we were in a safe spot and they would keep an eye on us, just in case we had a problem. They weren’t fishing for a bribe, but were just trying to be friendly and helpful. And, we didn’t lose any sleep over security issues anywhere. Sometimes we didn’t get the best night’s sleep because it was loud - Mexico in general is very loud with music and cars and firecrackers and dogs and, as the Grinch says, noise, noise, noise, noise - but we never lost sleep worrying about safety or security.

We also expected to be regularly questioned and searched at state lines, because we always have been in the past. For our last couple of trips through, we were driving a regular passenger car and were stopped and searched regularly. We figured that driving a truck that looks like a box truck would make us a huge target. But, we crossed 12 state lines and while they’d ask us what we were transporting, when Tom told them it was our house, they’d wave us through. We were well into Tamaulipas, our last state and the state bordering Texas, before we were even questioned and asked to open the truck. And, even then, Tom opened the back, the officer looked, and that was that. He told us for the remainder of the drive we should follow the big trucks through the gamma ray stations at the weigh stations, but at that point there were only a couple of weigh stations, and nobody even looked at us. We can’t figure out if there are fewer checkpoints because traffic is down with covid, or if the Federales have been redeployed to the border because of the cartel issues, or if it’s because we’re driving a camper with Belize plates, or if it’s just because we’re now considered viejitos, but whatever it is, we’ll take it.

For what it’s worth, here are the states we drove through with absolutely no problems on our way from Belize to Texas: Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Campeche, Tabasco, Veracruz, Puebla, Mexico, Hidalgo, Queretaro, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, and Tamaulipas.

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Queretaro to…Texas!

8/23/2022

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We left Queretaro late Saturday afternoon with the plan to drive to San Luis Potosí for Saturday night, then Cuidad Victoria, then the border at Matamoros/Brownsville the following day. However, the roads north of Queretaro were a dramatic improvement over the roads we had been traveling, and we made it from Danny and Alan’s house to our intended stopover for the night without any delays, and in not much more time than the GPS software had said.

We stopped at a rest stop that offered a fenced parking area for semis and campers. It was a little loud with trucks going in and out all night, but very safe.

It wasn’t the prettiest place we’ve ever stayed, but we were treated to a beautiful sunset.

Because we’d made such good time, we took another look at the map and decided to try to drive from San Luis Potosí to Matamoros the next day, with the caveat that if we got to Ciudad Victoria too late in the day to make it to the border before dark, we would revert to our original plan. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the roads were even better than we’d seen before, and while there were a few rough spots and a fairly stiff wind, we hit Ciudad Victoria around 1:30. We stopped for fuel and asked how long it would take to drive to the border, and were told that it was under 3 hours for a normal car. We knew we would take longer, but even double that time would put us there before dark.

We literally drove through mountains as we headed towards the coast. We started at about 2100 meters in altitude, and ended up on the coast at less than 10 meters.

The Tropic of Cancer is marked along all roads in Mexico. I have to admit I felt a little anxious at leaving the tropics; my blood is quite thin!

The roads closer to the border weren’t as well maintained as the roads just north of Mexico City, and it was very windy which is tough when driving a large square box down the road, but we still made it to Matamoros around 5:30. We didn’t realize that we had a choice of crossings, and followed Siri’s instructions. That was sort of a mistake, but probably one that worked in our favor in the end, since it took us to the small bridge where most people walk back and forth between Mexico and the US, rather than to the longer bridge where most of the commercial traffic goes.

Siri’s instructions took us right to the toll booth to pay for the bridge crossing. However, we had to check ourselves out of Mexico and check the truck and the two motos out of Mexico so we could get the TIP we’d paid in Chetumal back on the two motos. We pulled over, and Tom got out to see what had to be done, and found that the small booth we had just passed was the cashier who handled vehicles. The lane that passed the booth was made for cars and was too small for our truck, but the official told us to just pull over a little more where we were, and he would take care of us. The only problem was that he had to take photos of the motos’ VINs, and because he didn’t want to climb into the tightly packed moto garage, we had to unload my scooter so he could get that number, and to give him space so he could go in and take a photo of Tom’s bike’s VIN. This whole process only took about 15 minutes of the official’s time, but it took us another half hour to get the scooter loaded and secured, which turned out to be most of the time we spent on the Mexico side. We both walked into the immigration hall to get ourselves stamped out of Mexico, which took about 10 minutes, and we were on our way across the bridge less than an hour after stopping.

We had never crossed this bridge before, and we were both surprised both by how small it was - obviously made for normal cars and pedestrians - and how short the bridge was at this point. When we had crossed before, we had unknowingly gone over the commercial bridge, which is much longer and busier. We pulled up and paid the $80p toll for the bridge, and were surprised to find that we were only about 5 cars back from the US immigration booth on the short bridge. We had a brief moment of panic because the immigration booth is down a little hill from the bridge, and before we realized the little hill was there, we were thinking we were going to have to back up because we were too tall. But, despite everything at the crossing being obviously made for cars, we fit both between the rails and under the awning, and pulled up at the booth. We had noticed a bit of scurrying around on the part of the officials when they saw us, and by the time we got there, they had a whole team ready to process us.

The first man in the booth scanned our passport cards and had us follow another official, who walked in front of us and watched our roof and sides to make sure we didn’t bump anything. She had us pull up next to the building rather than in the area where the regular cars were being searched, and instructed us to get out, open the camper, get the dogs out, and unlock the travel locks on all the cabinets. Then two more men joined her and they did a thorough search of the camper. They were apologetic that they had to seize some frozen chicken and sweet peppers, and were more interested in asking questions about the camper than actually doing a search. One of the men came out to talk to me about the dogs…but, to my surprise, rather than demanding paperwork or giving us a hard time about bringing them in from Belize, he just wanted to know where we got Kismet because he really liked her. I was honestly able to answer that we got her in Houston, and told him to contact Shaggy Dog Rescue if he wanted a dog like her. They told us that if we did the crossing again in the camper, we should probably go to the commercial crossing where they have the gamma ray scanners and it’s built for commercial sized vehicles, but when we told them we only went where Siri told us to go and that we didn’t even realize there were two crossings, they just laughed and said it was no big deal, and that they enjoyed seeing the camper. We were through the gate and into Brownsville and the US in just about 45 minutes, and we were delighted and surprised at how friendly and helpful everyone had been.

We drove immediately to a Walmart and asked and were granted permission to park for the night. We picked up a few groceries and spent our first night back in the US in the Walmart parking lot, just like we spent our first night almost 16 years ago when we sold our house and started driving towards Belize with a pickup and travel trailer. We ate dinner and went to bed, after a very long and stressful day.

The next day we got up and walked the dogs in the neighborhood behind the Walmart. We felt a bit like we may have been in enemy territory since some of the cars in the neighborhood had F*ck Biden bumper stickers, but everyone we met was pleasant, and it was nice to walk the dogs without having to worry about packs of street dogs. After returning to the camper, we had a good shop in the Walmart and got a bunch of things we had been delaying purchasing until we got to the US - things like outdoor folding chairs that are ridiculously expensive in Belize and not much better in Mexico, but which are reasonable in the US, and we actually had choices.

That done, we decided that we’d been off line long enough since our Mexico phone cards hadn’t worked since we’d crossed the border the night before, so we went back to an AT&T store that we’d seen on our walk to see what plans they had. Our plan was for one of us to get an AT&T plan, and the other to get a Verizon plan, so we’d have decent coverage throughout the US even if one of our phones didn’t work. We got info from AT&T, then found a Verizon store. We decided there that I’d get the Verizon plan, and Tom would go back and get the AT&T plan. The process of signing up for these two plans took all afternoon, in part because the last time we had US phone plans, cell phones were a very new thing, and both the AT&T and Verizon reps had to explain a number of basic things to the two old people who were obviously technologically inept.

We got done with the phone stuff right around 6PM, and headed towards South Padre Island, which is less than an hour from Brownsville. It was a straight and easy drive, and we found a place to park at a county park just before the park closed at 7PM. We suffered a bit of sticker shock at the parking fee after spending a month in Mexico where all parking was free to cheap, but we’re on a flat spot just on the other side of the dunes from the Gulf of Mexico. It was dark and quiet in the night, and we took the dogs on a long walk on the beach this morning. We’re planning to spend tonight here and hopefully finish a bunch of paperwork and planning before heading towards Houston tomorrow.

As we crossed the bridge to South Padre Island, I was surprised to realize that it’s a real city, since I’d only ever seen photos of the beach. We were happy to find a camping spot that wasn’t in the middle of the city.

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Queretaro

8/20/2022

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We left Teotihuacan and drove to Queretaro to spend a couple of days with our friends Danny and Alan. We’ve had a wonderful time being wined and dined, touring Queretaro and the surrounding area, and meeting Danny’s family.

The first morning we were in Queretaro we took the dogs for a walk in the city. It has been a relief to be able to walk the dogs on the streets without having to worry about packs of street dogs wandering loose. Plus, this is a beautiful city. This is the aquaduct, also known as the Arcos, which runs across the city.

After a delicious breakfast of Mexican eggs cooked by Danny, we headed for the nearby wine country for a tour. We had no idea wine was made in this area of Mexico, but it’s actually pretty good.

We even bought a couple of bottles of wine!

We then went for lunch in this nearby charming town. Danny made us all speak Spanish, which was pretty easy for Tom but harder for Alan and me. But we managed to order and eat a delicious lunch of Enmoladas de Pollo.

After lunch, we walked around the town square which is, of course, dominated by a church.

Last night, we had the pleasure of meeting most of Danny’s family who lives locally. They had a family cooking fiesta which resulted in a delicious dinner of carne asada, grilled nopales, rice, beans, guacamole, and lots of other delicious food. The nieces and nephew who also visited are not in the picture, but they were the most helpful with teaching me Spanish.

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