Home Page of Dave and Helen Damouth

Chapter 13: Orlando to San Diego

November 30 - December 12, 1997

11/29     We're on the road again. Yesterday, we packed up and left Orlando in lowering clouds, underway by about 9:30 AM. It was soon raining, and the rain grew steadily heavier as we drove Northwest up Interstate 75. By the time we turned onto I-10, it was pouring steadily. Along I-10, we saw the results of three separate one-car accidents, all recent. In each case, it appeared that the car had skidded, and ended up in the ditch or the woods, pointing back the way it came. Visibility was poor, and we had to drive somewhat slower than usual. For a while, I was down to about 50 mph. We spent the night at Falling Waters State Recreation Area.

11/30      It's still overcast this morning, although rain has stopped for the moment. We hiked to the waterfall and sinkholes (a "State Natural Feature. There were many sinkholes along the trail, typically 20 feet deep, somewhat funnel-shaped, often with large trees growing in the bottom. The one that gives the park its name, however, is different. It is about 100 feet deep, cylindrical, and has vertical stone wall. A stream flowing down from the hills cascades over the lip of this hole, freefalls to the bottom, and disappears into cracks in the rock.

Sinkholes are indeed a natural feature of Florida. While we were in Orlando, a new sinkhole appeared in the middle of a state highway a couple of miles from our campground. A passing motorist reported a two-foot pothole, and within an hour, it was 20 feet across and sinking rapidly. When we left, several days later, they were still pouring fill and earth-stabilizing polymers into it, hoping it would stop sinking so they could repair the highway. This is not an unusual occurrence - houses get swallowed occasionally. Over the eons, acid rain seeping down through the underlying limestone has hollowed out huge caverns, some of which eventually collapse.

The day's driving, along I-10, was uneventful. By mid-day, the clouds had vanished. Helen has a cold and slept for much of the drive. At a stop for fuel, my usual walk around the trailer discovered that one wheel is dribbling grease out the dust cap - often a sign of overheating - and may be a little warmer than the others. I worried about it for the rest of the drive. We pulled into Pine Crest RV Park, in Slidell LA (chosen from Holli and Marci's earlier trip report - thanks), just before the 20 mile causeway to New Orleans, about 3 PM. I immediately removed the wheel and brake drum to look things over, but the bearings seemed ok. I cleaned and re-greased the bearings and put it back together.

12/1     After driving into New Orleans, we attended an IMAX movie (4 Million HouseGuests - the first we've seen in stereo, and very impressive), and spent most of the rest of our time in the Aquarium of the Americas. The Caribbean Reef was well done, and a collection of jellyfish was very interesting - a large variety and well-displayed). We had been looking forward to their Louisiana Swamp exhibit, but found it disappointing. Perhaps there just isn't much to say about a swamp. We walked the waterfront and a corner of the French Quarter, but Helen's cold leaves her with little energy and we aborted the rest of the planned day and headed home.

12/2    Another day in New Orleans. After some driving around, the first stop was the Art Museum. It's large, but uneven - with concentrations of art heavily influenced by donations of several major private collections - glassware, porcelain, and African art. The Hudson River school was represented by a single nice Asher Durand. American art in general was poorly represented, except for a large Louisiana collection. Helen did a docent tour of the whole place and spent several hours. Dave went through somewhat faster and found time for a nap. We then drove over the to the French Quarter, and were surprised to find convenient on-street parking (perfect season to be here - we were told that it is much less crowded than typical. We attended another IMAX feature (Whales) to get off our feet for a while, then started walking the French Quarter. Found a very good restaurant on a side street (The Gumbo Shop, 630 St. Peter St), and had a wonderful dinner in an inner courtyard - open sky, ancient brick walls with balconies, a tinkling fountain, tropical plants. The building is dated 1736 (and replaced an earlier building which burned). They had a special Christmas "Revillion" menu from which we selected turtle soup and chicken andouille gumbo, chicken stuffed with oyster/andouille dressing, turnip greens, spiced new potatoes, a fragrant, fruity, California chardonnay, chocolate cheese cake with raspberry sauce (very little sugar in either the sugar or the sauce - a wonderful bitter bite). The whole thing was excellent. We were so stuffed that Helen's pecan pie is still in a doggie bag, as yet untasted. It should make an interesting breakfast.

Afterwards, we walked the French Quarter. This is our first time in New Orleans. Bourbon Street had just the right crowd - enough to be lively, but not at all crowded. There's a different feel than other big-city tourist traps. The narrow streets and quirky buildings live up to the advertising. There are many natives mixed with the tourists. Everyone is cheerful - the beggars don't actually beg - just look hopeful. The street performers didn't seem to notice that few people were leaving money, the hawkers in front of the bars just smiled when we turned down their pitch and walked on, the tourists and wandering natives were all smiling and having a good time. Bourbon Street was closed to auto traffic, so the entire street was full of people milling around - some dancing to the music that drifted out of the bars. The only disappointment is that little of the music audible on the street was traditional jazz - a little contemporary jazz, a lot of rock. We walked by Preservation Hall but it was getting late and we didn't stop.

12/3    It's heavily overcast and raining. The forecast is for rain for at least another day. Most of the things we had planned to do here were outdoors. So after dithering for most of the morning, we decided to move on. We finally got on the road at noon, headed west on I-12 and then I-10. The road condition isn't any better westbound than it was eastbound. About the time we crossed into Texas, the clouds started to break. We had intended to stay on I-10, but at the last minute, we decided to detour up through Livingston to pick up our mail. So we turned north at Beaumont, then took the little country roads across to Livingston, arriving at Rainbow's End about 7 PM. We backed in among the trees in the dry camping area in the dark, and had a nice supper of leftovers and fresh green beans.

12/4    A lazy day of household chores, laundry, reading an accumulation of snail mail, reading and writing Email, etc. We need to go grocery shopping, but never got around to it - the truck is still hitched to the trailer, and it wasn't quite worth unhooking. Helen walked over to the clubhouse and found the same man sitting in the same chair in the library as when she was last here, several weeks ago.

12/5    Another day on the road. We moved on to Houston - only about an hour and a half of driving. We stopped in early afternoon at an RV Park in the north suburbs, and found it already full. Perhaps we'll have to start making reservations - the south seems to be filling up with snowbirds. From there, we called our next choice, South Main RV Park, and reserved a site. This turned out to be a very convenient location, just a few miles along Main Street from the church where we'll be attending a concert tonight. But otherwise, it feels a bit seedy, mostly filled with seasonal residents who presumably are there because of the low rent and the convenient access to jobs, not for the scenic beauty.

While at Rainbow's End, we had been listening to a Houston NPR station, and happened to hear an announcement that Anonymous Four would be performing in Houston this evening. So we called, were able to get tickets, and made the short drive to Houston rather than continuing west. The concert was sold out - good thing we'd called ahead for tickets. Palmer Memorial Church, across the street from Rice University, has wonderful acoustics for this kind of music. Chanticleer will also be performing here, later in the season. We had heard Anonymous Four several times on the radio. But this hadn't prepared us for the incredible virtuosity of this quartet of women. They specialize in music from the Medieval period, not our favorite genre. But they do it with such amazing precision, blend, and artistry that it almost doesn't matter just what they are performing. I suspect that they could recite the local phone book in Gregorian Chant and get rave reviews. I can sort of understand people who can do this on a recording, after 43 takes with the best parts spliced together. But these ladies do it live.

Next day, we spent several hours at Moody Gardens in Galveston. Their "tropical rain forest" greenhouse was one of the largest and most interesting we've seen - full of interesting birds and butterflies as well as tropical plants and trees. We also saw yet another IMAX 3-D movie, called L5 - all about the space colony that was founded in the late 21st century, most of it filmed there. Very well done. If you haven't seen an IMAX 3D film, I recommend that you do so at the next opportunity. Later, we drove around town, and along the seawall. Galveston has a very pleasant "feel". It seems smaller, lower key, and less "touristy" than most of the other major beach communities along the Gulf.

12/7    We moved on to San Antonio. Greentree Village North calls itself "The Southwest's finest travel trailer park". That's somewhat overstated, but it is indeed a nice place - neat, well-maintained, with attractive brick, stone, and tile buildings. The transient sites are mostly 30' x 90' pullthroughs. We're about 10 miles from downtown - convenient for doing the tourist things. The comparison with yesterday's park in Houston is interesting. Both are close to the center of a big tourist town. The Houston place was $.35 per day cheaper, and felt tacky - minimal maintenance, cheap building construction, no public shower/toilet facility at all, small sites.

12/8    San Antonio downtown is one of the nicest center city areas we've seen. A small river meanders through, with trees, walkways, pedestrian bridges, etc. A conglomeration of old and new buildings - office, shopping mall, hotel, convention center, historic buildings, etc, abut the river, which is a full level down from the street level, so the basements have all become restaurants and shops, except for the new buildings, where the river level is the lowest level of the mall or the reception area of the hotel or whatever. We walked it after dark. Boatloads of children were singing Christmas carols, and the huge old cypress trees were festooned with colored lights. Had dinner in a nice Mexican restaurant. Saw another IMAX movie - a reenactment of the battle of the Alamo (the Alamo is just down the street, but we skipped it).

12/9     We walked through the Botanical Gardens, and enjoyed it greatly. The conservatory was a series of four greenhouses, devoted respectively to palms, ferns, desert plants, and tropical plants. They also had several naturalized areas devoted to the native plants of each region of Texas, and several other impressively planted outside areas.

12/10    On the road by 9 AM, headed west. The weather forecast is ominous - much colder, rain, perhaps snow. As we drove, the scenery changed dramatically. Just past San Antonio, as we entered the "hill country", the green ground covers changed to brown, and the forest thinned out to scattered live oaks and shrubby cedars. Later, these trees disappeared and we started seeing several kinds of cactus, low shrubs we couldn't identify, and bare gravelly soil. The temperature dropped steadily as we drove, and dark clouds gathered ahead of us. The hills gradually flattened out into desert. Later, we began to see mountains on the distant south and west horizon. As we approached Van Horn, it started to snow - just flurries that quickly passed by, but enough to make us nervous. We stopped in Van Horn, TX, at Eagles Nest RV Park - chosen from a "modem friendly" list we found on the Internet. They have phones available by the night at some campsites. Unfortunately, none of those sites were available. But they set me up in the office with a phone connection, table, and chair - still fairly convenient. The campground is a patch of gravel, within sight of the expressway. But they try hard - it is very neat, with shrubs planted at each site. All the sites are pull-throughs with full hookups, just barely long enough for our 55-foot rig, with a small concrete patio. With campground registration, we were entitled to free golfing at the municipal course, and a 3-cent per gallon discount at the gas station next door. With the Good Sam discount, it cost $14.85/night.

Hooking up the utilities was a finger-numbing process, with a strong north wind and a temperature hovering near freezing. As it turned out, I shouldn't have bothered hooking up. In the middle of the night, I got up briefly and discovered we had no water pressure. I bundled up and ventured out to look around, and found the water hose frozen solid. I coiled it up loosely, tossed it in the shower to thaw, and went back to bed.

During the evening, I decided that I'd procrastinated long enough, and got out the tools and materials to hook up the new catalytic propane heater. The process took longer than I expected (it always does), but otherwise went smoothly. We now have three different ways of keeping warm: the built-in ducted furnace works much like a home furnace. It has a power-hungry circulating fan (6.5 amps at 12 v.), and a relatively inefficient heat exchanger using outside combustion air. It's self-igniting and convenient - just set the thermostat and forget it. It has a 30,000 BTU/hr rating - almost as much as some home furnaces - so it heats the trailer rapidly and would probably keep us warm in zero-degree weather, as long as we were able to go buy a tank of propane every few days. We also have a little 1500-watt electric cube heater. When we have electricity available, it's the most convenient and cheapest way to get a little extra heat (although some campgrounds will charge $1 to $2 extra for using an electric heater). It, plus our body heat, will keep the central part of the trailer up to 24 degrees warmer than the outside. The catalytic propane heater gives yet another option, particularly when we don't have electricity available. It converts propane directly to carbon dioxide and water, with no flame (and no carbon monoxide - it's safe indoors) - just a mesh of catalyst glowing dull red. It does need a little ventilation, to replenish the oxygen it uses. We have the medium-sized model, rated at 5800 Btu/hr. This evening, we ran both the propane and electric heaters on high to get the place warmed up, then turned the propane heater down to its low position for the night.

12/11    Winter has arrived! We felt the wind rocking the trailer during the night, and awoke to a white scene - enough snow to lightly cover everything, and still snowing. The temperature is 31 F., not as cold as predicted (although our thermometer may be slightly protected. ) We're cozy inside, although the windows are all covered with condensed moisture. We have no storm windows, and the propane heater puts some extra moisture into the air. It's quite dark, and visibility is poor - we can rarely see the mountains. We packed up rather slowly and weren't on the road until mid-morning, which, it turns out, was a good thing. The trucker's CB channel was reporting a flurry of accidents earlier in the morning - a tractor-trailer had jackknifed violently, within a mile of our campground, ripping the cab off the truck. At another place, perhaps 50 miles from us, seven 18-wheelers had had been tipped over by high winds. There were other isolated reports of accidents on icy patches on the Interstate.

Half an hour after we started driving, the weather closed in on us and we found ourselves in a blizzard - heavy snow, poor visibility, high wind. But the temperature had warmed up enough so that the snow wasn't accumulating on the road, and it wasn't particularly slippery. The trailer handled well in the winds - we heard truckers commenting that they were having trouble with the wind, but we felt stable, although going a little slower than usual because of the reduced visibility. The snow didn't last long, and for the rest of the day we were often in brilliant sunshine, watching localized snow squalls blow across the mountains on both sides of us. A couple of the higher mountains already have snow-covered peaks.

This was a three-state day. We started in Texas, drove west to the Mexican border, then turned north, paralleling the Rio Grande up through El Paso to Las Cruces, New Mexico, before turning west again on Interstate 10 all the way across New Mexico, crossing into Arizona in mid-afternoon.

There were no dramatic changes in the desert during the day, except that soil turned from light tan in Texas to reddish in New Mexico, and we started seeing isolated craggy little hills sticking up. As we moved west, these gradually became real mountains, and by the time we stopped in Arizona, some of the nearby mountains were 7000 feet high, had coalesced into continuous ranges, and had snow on top. The New Mexico Tourist Information Area is delightfully landscaped with beautiful desert plantings

12/12     We stopped last night at Grande Vista RV Park in Willcox, AZ at 5:30, just in time to watch a beautiful sunset. Actually, we're not sure what time it is. The above times are Central Time, and we might have crossed into Mountain Time somewhere yesterday. The sun didn't come up until 8:10 this morning, so I suspect we should have set our watches back an hour. Another cold night - 25 degrees when we awoke. We didn't hook up the outside water at all, until after sunup. The park water outlets were recessed in the ground and covered, and didn't freeze, so we were able to hook up, shower, and fill our internal tank before leaving. We drove the short distance to Tucson (less than 2 hours), and stopped at Mission View RV Park.