Spring in Texas

 

The Flying Scotsman is on the roll again and southward at the moment.

 

Texas in the spring can equal the driving distraction of today's electronic stuff and the intensity of the wild flowers almost hurts the eyes. This year we have had a lot of rain and the roadsides are like huge flower gardens.

 

 

We unhooked from Sandy Lake in Carrollton and rolled the 180 miles down the road to the Bryan area again to see Mom and Rich and Kerry. While there we did a brunch with Rich and Kerry at Martha's Bloomers near Navasota about 15 miles south of Bryan.

This is a neat garden shop and nursery that has a formal tea room attached ... picture that. Actually a neat idea to have tea in the garden setting and some really great food. Martha and the Bloomer were the resident cats names from years ago but I don't think they are still around. There are cats, but not the original restaurant seat buddies of some time ago.

We had some really great food including Jo-Anne's serving here of a chicken salad croissant with a nice Malbec wine. I first had a great potato soup followed by a Mediterranean turkey baguette.

After brunch we toured the town of Navasota and couldn't resist stopping to gawk at this ancient live oak tree that has a wingspan of more than 150 feet and must be close to 200 years old.

Back in my brother's yard we ran across some monarch caterpillars that were stocking up on some needed food to get them into the next stage of their lives.

Lastly there is a bear somewhere here in the cloud formation which later could produce some rain and hail as the weather system moves through here.

Gotta love Texas in the spring!! From here we are moving south toward San Antonio for a couple of weeks and it should be fun.

Time for new rubber

 

After the last state inspection the tech said that one of the tires had a pretty good gash in it ... no reflection on the driver, eh.

 

And with 50,000 miles on the current Flying Scotsman, some new rubber below seemed to be a good idea. But let's slow down a bit. There are 6 tires on this thing. And right now the going price per tire is a wonderful $678 plus $70 installation ... serious math time ... probably not all 6 today. After two weeks of searching I came up with a place that promised they could do $556 per tire plus $30 to put em on. OK let's do two now.

 

Last Saturday we motored over to the east side of Fort Worth to the "garage." This is Ace tire and while they do have a small auto garage, what you see here is the normal work area. Beautiful 70 degree day and the gravel lot was easy to get into. Again all I had to do was push the button to raise the Scotsman to its fullest height (Indianapolis style) and the tire guy could do his business.

 

Obviously if we needed tires anywhere, including on the Interstate, they could help us ... all the tools compressors, lube stuff, balancing stuff, are in the back of the pickup ... who really needs a garage as we have the built in jacks.

 

Here's Robert, the assistant manager, with his mega-impact wrench making quick work of the many lug nuts and fake chrome things.

And after about an hour the finished product. We took the bad tire off the right rear and put two new ones on the fronts so we are ready to roll again. Maybe we can get two more for the rears before the run to the north but well see.

While in the 1950's vintage auto shop waiting room the water stain on the paneling began to grow on us ...

Armadillo? ... rat? ... don't know ... yup old people with way too much time on their hands!! Can't say enough about the Ace tire folks and their timely and price-right service exactly as they promised ... we'll be back for sure.

Spring in Texas

 

Besides enjoying the beautiful 70 degree weather it means getting the Flying Scotsman ready for the summer run with more updates and repair. The flowering trees though are really nice this year!

 

 

A little bit ago I went to pull out the tray that holds the four house batteries just to service them and add some water. As I did so the drawer slides which were rusted through collapsed ... oops. With four batteries in this tray it is about 130 pounds so pretty ugly and not moveable.

Time for help. My friend Barry from the Dancing Bear RV shop came over to help out (hah, that means I stood back and watched him work).  Here's his professional operating theater.

After he got the four top batteries out (yes, there are two more down below that need attention later) he cleaned and scrubbed the opening with baking soda to get rid of the rust and acid.

Then he installed the new rails and then the new tray and wired up the four house batteries just like new. This was about a two hour job but a lot of work and some nasty stuff in the back of the bus, but totally essential to our happily motoring down the road.

Of course this had to be celebrated by some first class wine. A bit of humor below as this is some of the wine known as "Two Buck Chuck" to the really serious wine consumers.

When we first started the RV travel this stuff was known by that name as it was exactly two bucks a bottle from Trader Joe's. As there were no TJs here in Texas, on our first run to Arizona we picked up numerous cases of the stuff to bring back here ... $24 a case.

Now there is a new Trader Joe's here in Dallas and we had to seek out and get a bottle (now $2.99) for nostalgia reasons and hey, the stuff is not really that bad ... we have thrown out much more expensive wine.