Bill and Cathy McArthur on the Road 2004: 18

On Wednesday, April 7, we left Colorado after a three week stay. We had some housekeeping chores to do for the rental house and then got on the road by 8:30 AM. We had a good day for driving and arrived at the Hampton Inn in Amarillo by 4:00 PM. This time, we were able to use the wireless network in the hotel. We ate at the same Mexican restaurant as the last time we stayed in this hotel. We were both tired and retired early.

Cathy had a great idea to stay in San Antonio for two nights as we passed through. So, on Thursday, we drove to a Hampton Inn in San Antonio’s downtown area. The hotel is two blocks from the Alamo. After we checked-in, we headed for the River Walk and walked the whole thing. We ate dinner in a Landry’s Seafood at a table on the walk. We enjoyed a good seafood dinner. San Antonio has a good thing going for it with their River Walk. Bill was here in January 1970 at a mathematics convention. He remembers enjoying Happy Hour at a bar on the Walk which is now a Starbucks (which doesn’t have Happy Hours). It was a balmy night and very relaxing and enjoyable.  

Friday was a beautiful day in San Antonio with blue sky and temperature around 80 degrees. We took a trolley tour which led us to the Mission of San Jose outside of the city. We watched a film which gave the history of the missions along the San Antonio River (including the Alamo, which was one of the missions). Our next stop was the marketplace back in the city. We ate a light lunch at the restaurant, Mi Tierra, which has been open 24/7 since 1941. We found the restaurant loud and pricey, but that’s to be expected at such a tourist trap. We walked around the stores in the market and bought Erin a Mexican doll similar to the one we were looking at in San Cristobal when we couldn’t get anyone to wait on us. We took the trolley back to the Cathedral of San Fernando and went inside to see the entombed remains of the heroes of the Alamo, whose bodies were burned after the battle. We walked back to tour the Alamo. We watched a film from the History Channel and walked around the grounds. Later, we attended an IMAX presentation of the battle. We felt ready to put a “Hook ‘em Horns” bumper sticker on our car by the time the afternoon was done. We walked around the River Center Mall and the River Walk and then ate dinner in Joe’s Crab Shack, where we ate in Corpus Christi back in January. We returned to the room as tired tourists.

On Saturday, we left San Antonio at 7:45 AM and headed south. If we had put a bumper sticker on, we would have ripped it off after a Texas Ranger stopped us for speeding. He claimed that we were going 80 mph. Our speedometer (and odometer) is low, but that lone ranger was exaggerating. We arrived at Texas Trails by 11:30 AM and went right to the muddy camper. We scrubbed all of the dirt and mud off and made it shine. We took time off for lunch at McDonald’s after washing the camper. We decided not to pop the camper, but to hitch up and head toward New Orleans instead. We were on the road at 2:00 PM. We made it as far as El Campo, between Corpus Christi and Houston and quit when we could see a squall line heading our way. We checked in to a Best Western Motel and got to the room just before the rain started. We were thankful that we didn’t keep going to Houston, because the thunderstorms were severe there and there were tornadoes on the ground. We ordered takeout pizza from Pizza Hut and were grateful to be dry. We watched the weather channel showing the severe storms in our area. At about 2:00 AM, we heard hail coming down, but it was pea sized and not the grapefruit sized hail that fell in some areas around Houston overnight. We heard a few rumbles of thunder throughout the night.

Easter Sunday morning brought rain and some thunder as we breakfasted and hit the road. We had light traffic and heavy rain as we worked our way around Houston to Beaumont. We decided not to push into Louisiana because we would be moving back into the worst of the storm. We checked into a Hampton Inn at 11:30 AM. We walked to a nearby Cracker Barrel for our version of Easter Brunch: eggs for Cathy and grits for Bill, both accompanied by biscuits (no gravy). After breakfast we did some shopping at a truck stop and stopped in at a theater to see “The Passion of the Christ” with our groceries in hand. We both felt that the movie was an accurate portrayal of the events described in the Bible. Cathy did some laundry later in the afternoon while Bill surfed the channels in our room. We went to dinner at Joe’s Crab Shack. The temperature was in the 50s and felt chilly compared to the 88 degrees in Pharr a couple of days earlier.

We left Beaumont on a drizzly Monday morning and headed toward New Orleans. We sighed with relief when we finally left Texas and entered Louisiana. We arrived at our KOA campground around 1:30 PM and had no problems getting into our campsite. We found some mildew on the curtains and vinyl inside and had to work with a sponge and washing machine to get rid of the mold. Bill signed up for a wireless service so that he could get onto the Internet from the camper for the week. Receiving emails worked fine, but sending didn’t work. As a workaround, Bill began to use his Yahoo! account to send emails. We met a couple from Toms River who have a BT-Cruiser class C RV made by Gulfstream. We were really impressed with their rig and its features. We went to dinner at Harbor Fishermen’s Cove Seafood restaurant and had a great meal while sitting at the bar. Afterward, we went shopping at Winn Dixie as the rain began to fall. The rain continued after we returned to camp.

Bill and Cathy