On the move...

We've logged quite a few miles since I was last able to post to the blog.  

We left Brownsville on May 20th for Houston and a visit with Jim's Santa Cruz high school friend.  Once on the road we decided that was a bit too far to travel in one day and opted to stay just south of Houston in the small town of Columbus, Texas for the night.

The next day we set off for a nice campground about 20 miles north of Huntsville. Dennis, Jim's friend, is a professor of geology and geography at Sam Houston University in Huntsville, Texas and Jim and Dennis spent the afternoon swapping stories about their adventures as kids growing up in Santa Cruz.  I found out that they, and several other friends, were holy terrors as kids which doesn't surprise me in the least!

On the 22nd we left for Louisiana.  Our trip, so far, had been uneventful but that all changed after we crossed the border between Texas and Louisiana.  I noticed that the tire pressure monitors on the trailer tires was indicating one tire was losing air.  We pulled off I-10 to check it out and discovered that we were losing air from the valve stem... or thought we were.  

We found a tire repair shop and they replaced the valve stem.  That didn't work... still losing air.  They tried another one without any success.  That's when we realized that we had a cracked rim!  The same thing happened up in Oregon on our trip to Alaska. As luck would have it they had a used rim that fit and once they mounted the tire on it we were on our way.  We will be calling Keystone, the manufacturer of our trailer, to see if they will replace the two remaining original rims.  The original warranty is long over but we can only hope they will. If that doesn't work we will try our extended warranty company to see if the rims are covered.

We are now camped about 25 east of Baton Rouge for the next few days.  We hope to explore the area between here and New Orleans.  And we just need some R & R since we've been on the go ever since we left home. The campground here in Livingston, La. is the best one we've been in so far.  It's right on a lake but we probably won't be spending a lot of time here with all the sightseeing we've planned. The weather has been hot and HUMID ever since we entered Texas! San Diego's weather has spoiled me!

I just found out that our new solar system is energized and is sending power to the grid!   We should be banking a lot of credit since we're not using much power while we're gone.