Day 254 - White Sands, New Mexico

 We said our goodbyes to our friends and headed for White Sands National Park (formerly National Monument, the newest National Park).

Just like Tahoe in the winter!

It was really cool. The sand is really soft and cool, and we enjoyed the hike with our shoes off in the sand.

There was a good boardwalk hike that I was able to manage and a great loop drive that gave us a good view of the inner dunes. The children attempted to slide down the dunes on our boogie boards, but found that just rolling down them was a lot more fun (and effective).

We are spending the night at a BLM site, Valley of Fires. We love BLM sites and glad to be back where they can be found, There was a great sunset just as we arrived, having decided that enough driving had been done for the day and not relishing another hour before getting to the mix reviews campsite that we had called to determining that they had space, but didn't have a paid reservation.  

Day 253 - El Paso

 Had a very productive day at work, boys played video games, we had a lovely diner with friends with a great view of of the city outside. The weather was great. See yesterday.

We took advantage of the back patio to get a full, uninterrupted day of work accomplished. The kids did mostly as well, but I think Tyler got more video gaming done....

Day 252 El Paso

Now it is time to visit one of Stephanie's business school friends, so after a stop to provision and gas at Costco, we are met by her friend and follow him to his 5 acre ranch in east El Paso. 

Trains on the way to El Paso. Two engines in front, two in the middle.

We have an awesome visit, enjoy two nice restaurants and Tyler and our friend's son hit it off and request an extra night to play video games together. So we stayed an extra night and had great conversations. The children had a great time too.

Day 251 - More West Texas

We decided that since we had good internet, and needed to wait for the tyre people to come and fix the flat, we would stay at Hilltop another day, get work done, and get the flat fixed.

As you can see below, it was quite flat. Managed not to damage the outer tyre much. Whew.  I have ordered a mount and a cover for a spare. Given that we are two tyres down already, I think we should have one....

I had a great conversation with a family from Virginia who were on a similar trip, and talked to them by the pool about work/travel/school balance on the road.  At sunset I talked to three cousins (two retired air traffic controllers - one worked in Atlanta the other at the Memphis FexEx hub) and an Air Force widow) who were in the Class A next to us. They were on a three month post retirement trip. One of them had moved into the RV as "home", the others were along for the ride as long as they could stand each other.

Day 250 West Texas

 We left the RV park and headed into serious west Texas. It got drier, we started seeing more oil wells and a set of mountains that I didn't realize were there. In the later afternoon we stopped at Dairy Queen, my first time since high school.

Classic west Texas town

It had rained, there were a lot of wildflowers.

Dusty sunset

 After we had settled in to Hilltop RV park, and went out to look at the sheep and the sunset we discovered that we had blown the inner passenger rear tyre. We had heard a bang about 50 miles earlier, but after pulling over and inspecting the RV, we could not see anything wrong. oops. Calling Good Sam...  

Day 249 - Austin, horses

Maggie had some more quality time with the horses. We had fun conversations, and at last packed up the RV and crossed our fingers that the slide would come back in.

It is really raining. 

The slide came back in. We said goodbye, and headed off.

Not much further excitement. It was raining. We headed out of town. 

But first as stop at Ikea's as we needed to replace a chair that we left on a beach, and get a few storage unit supplies. Oh and we needed dinner. And some Swedish meatballs. 

Then we needed gas, and a quick trip to HEB for groceries.

Then our short one and a half hours to Brooks Hills RV park. Mostly to get a bit of distance in and make sure we actually got out of Austin. The rain let up as we drove around looking for our spot. It returned with a vengeance when we got out to hook up the water and electricity, At least the electricity got hooked up before the air turned liquid.

Day 248 Still in Austin

 It has been raining on Stephanie and Maggie most of the time since they left Florida and today was not different.  Everyone was busy at work which the rain encouraged. There some stress in the morning as we tried to sort out the warranty before the repair people showed up.

After lunch, we got a call and the Saturday repair guy said that he couldn't come Saturday (what was dispatch thinking) but would come in the evening. Dispatch noted that they couldn't promise they would have parts etc. but would do what they could.

At 3.00 the "late next week" place called to day they had a cancelation and could be by at 3.30, (and they had promised parts in stock). So we said sure!!

Three and a half hours later, the persistent, stalwart, problem solving, heroic repair men had replaced the burned out motor, discovered that the whole slide out had been racked and out of alignment probably for a year and we suspect made the warranty company very unhappy with their report (there were a lot of pictures spent and quite some time on the phone).

This is not making us feel warm and fuzzy about the dealer who sold us the RV with the arbitrarily large number of inspection points. No doubt more on that later. We will be scheduling what will probably be a multi-month repair in June...

Had a lovely dinner with our hosts, who continue to be awesomely generous and nice given that we managed to break down on their lawn and invited ourselves to a more extended stay than planned.

It continues to rain buckets.