Town Activities

The town is being spruced up this year.  The palm trees in the town square are decorated with strings of coloured lights.

The regional government has set up a program where a few bands travel to towns for free community entertainment.  Band night is Wednesday evening in Lo de Marcos.  The past Wednesday we had a 16 piece band play for 2 hours and lots of people danced to the music.

The taco stands set up around the town square on Wednesday evenings so you can enjoy an evening out of dinner and dancing very inexpensively!

Vic spent Wednesday morning setting up our Christmas decorations around our patio.  A nice site to come home to after an evening out.

our winter home in Mexico

The morning of Thursday December 3rd we met up with our travel buddies George and Carmen to drive to Lo de Marcos, Nayarit, Mexico.

It was our first time crossing at the Anzalduas International Bridge at Mission TX. This crossing is RV friendly.  No commercial traffic can cross at this bridge.  The lanes are wide and straight through.  The cost for us was $16.75 USD for our motorhome with tow car.  It was $9 for the truck with 5th wheel trailer that our friends were driving. You drive through the "Nothing to Declare" lanes and line up for an x-ray of the RV.  They take about 10 minutes to study the results of the x-ray. Then you are clear to purchase your tourist card (and vehicle permit if you didn't purchase it ahead of time over the internet).

We used toll roads where available on our route south.  The route took us through Monterrey, Saltillo, Zacatecas, Aguacalientes and Guadalajara.  The roads were excellent.  Much better than the route down 15D on the west coast.

The tolls were $90 more on this route but it is 608 miles shorter for us to travel to Mission TX and down this route than our route previous years of driving to Tucson AZ, crossing at Nogales and driving down the west coast of Mexico. We saved $1338 CAD on fuel and camping fees by taking this route from Mission .(The price of gas at PEMEX in Mexico is 13.57pesos/litre or $1.08 CAD which is more than the price in Toronto currently)

We spent 2 nights as PEMEX stations.  The first night in Concepion de Oro and the second night at Magdalena.  The PEMEX station in Magdalena is new and has a large compound for RVs and truckers to overnight.

We arrived at Savage RV Park in Lo de Marcos at 10:20 am on Saturday December 5th.  It is hot and humid here.  Day time highs are 30C to 33C with overnight lows of 22C.  The ocean is 29.2C (about 85F) so quite comfortable for swimming, floating or boogie boarding.

Saturday night is taco night in town so we headed out for an inexpensive dinner for our first night back in our winter home.

December 3rd

We are still at Lemon Tree RV Inn in Mission TX.  Since we arrived here on Nov 10th, the cost of regular unleaded gas has not gone above $1.86/gallon.  In fact, one lady went shopping about 30 minutes north of here on Black Friday and found that gas was only $1.68 at Murphys that day!  We topped our motorhome up on Nov 30th at $1.77/gallon.  Gas is certainly one item that is cheaper here than in Canada or Mexico!

Shortly after we arrived here, Vic had a toothache.  Luckily we are about a half hour drive to the international bridge to Nuevo Progresso which is a popular place for dental treatment.  We drove to Progresso TX, parked our car on the US side and paid 50 cents each to walk across the bridge into Mexico.  Vic had researched the various dentists and booked an appointment.  Once you cross the bridge there are 2 blocks containing nothing but dental clinics, pharmacies, and optometrists! Vic needed a root canal and crown.  Total cost $470 USD and he was pleased with the dentist's expertise.

Lemon Tree RV Inn is located next door to an orange grove.  The trees are loaded with oranges which are picked and sold in 10 lb bags for $5.

 Our park has many orange and lemon trees within it so we can freely pick oranges which are sweet to eat.

One Saturday we visited the DonWes Flea Market and purchased a 10 lb bag of red grapefruit for $3.  Smaller red grapefruit for juicing were 10 lbs for $2.

There are lots of little cottontail rabbits running around the park.  They are most apparent when we go for a walk in the evening. We saw about a dozen last night. They are busy nibbling on the grass and allow us to come within a few feet before they hop away.  There are enough around that we have to sweep the rabbit droppings off the shuffleboard court in the morning before we play!

We hear a flock of small green parrots fly over our campground almost every day.  Even though they are flying high you can hear them long before they pass above us.  They look similar in size to the Quaker Parrot that we used to have as a pet.

Lemon Tree RV Inn is close to the Anzalduas Park in Mission which has a large field for flying remote control model airplanes.  Vic brought 4 of his airplanes with him so he has been able to go out several mornings to fly them.  Unfortunately, Texas is known for being windy and he hasn't been able to go out to fly as often as he'd like.

We've been busy with social activities here, especially a wonderful American Thanksgiving dinner.  The owners of the park provided 9 turkeys and 22 pies for the celebration!  The residents contributed the stuffing, veggies and salads for the meal.  There are only 104 people in the park at the moment.  By January there will be about 300 people in residence. 

Black Friday we helped put up the Christmas tree and decorate the community center for Christmas.

Nov 30th Vic took our motorhome in for an oil change.  The charge was $115 at Lube Master Plus in Alamos which has tall bays for servicing motorhomes and trucks.

The weather has been cloudy and cool here for the past few days (about 16C in the daytime) so it is time to move further south. Our current plan is to cross the border into Mexico on Thursday December 3rd.

Nov 10th arrived in Mission TX

The weather was cloudy and cool when we left the Dallas area on Monday, November 9th at 8:45 am -- about 9C -- but by the time we reached Fentress, TX at 2:30 pm it was a sunny 22C.  So nice to be back into a t-shirt and shorts!

We were delayed about an hour on our trip down I-35 today first due to a long stretch of construction and then to volume of traffic going through Austin. Believe it or not the traffic through Austin was worse than Toronto!

 All along the route there is evidence of flooding from the storm that came through on Halloween.  The rivers are still running high and fast.   A good note:  we saw a flock of Sandhill Cranes flying south -- a beautiful sight! 

We camped at Leisure Resort in Fentress which is 45 miles north east of San Antonio. The interior roads of the campground were broken in places where the floodwaters damaged the pavement and deposited it elsewhere.  Their bathhouse/shower building is still not operational since the flood. 

our site at Leisure Resort

San Marcos river running through the campground

The campground staff told us the San Marcos River had crested at 42' on October 31st.  The second highest in 100 yrs!

Leisure Resort is a lovely little campground -- very quiet and peaceful nestled in the trees beside the San Marcos River. Visitors tube down the river in the summer time.  This is a Passport American campground so we got 50% off the regular rate.

We chose to stay in Fentress as it close to Black's Restaurant in the town of Lockhart which is known in this area for it's Barbecue food.  We ate there in the spring and especially loved their BBQ brisket and smoked sausages so decided to repeat the experience.

On Tuesday, November 10th the temperature was 19C when we left Fentress at 9:20 am.  The gas prices were even cheaper along Highway TX-80.  We stopped at Karnes City to fuel up at the Chevron for $1.74/gal.

We spotted 2 unusual birds on our travels toward Mission.  They are Crested Caracara and are about the size of a Falcon.

Crested Caracara

We arrived in Mission TX around 3:30 in the afternoon to temperature of 30C.  We checked out 2 campgrounds and chose Lemon Tree RV Inn.  A welcoming park.  The rate is $310 per month which includes WiFi at your site.  Electricity is extra (as is usual) at cost of 15 cents/kwh.  We will stay here until we cross the border into Mexico later in November or early Dec.  We have traveled 2,072 miles since Oct 31st.

we picked a site at Lemon Tree where the tree provides shade from the afternoon sun

Wed November 11th:  We are already involved in the park activities.  We attended the weekly residents meeting this morning, Bev played a couple of games of Shuffleboard while Vic was busy helping another couple set up their satellite dish. Tonight we will be attending the Veterans' Day dinner.

Thurs November 12th: We swam in the pool as the high yesterday was 33C (91F).  The weather has really cooled off today in is now currently overcast and 72F (22C). Vic was just about to start washing the motorhome and a crew of young Mexicans just showed up and offered to wash the rig for $37. What a deal! There will be a good tip for a job well done.

Enjoying being  Winter Texans even if only for part of the winter.

 

Sat Nov 7th Dallas

We've traveled over 1,550 miles to date and are now at Traders Village RV Park in Grand Prairie, a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas.

The previous 2 days we traveled through periods of rain but the weather has been mild.  We stayed overnight at Walmarts at Sikeston, Missouri and New Boston, Texas.  Both offered free wifi that reached out to the edge of the parking lot which was something new this year.

On our way south from Sikeston we noticed many cotton fields had been harvested with the bales of cotton waiting to be picked up. Actually, they were big rolls just like you now see hay rolled up.

Friday night after arriving in New Boston we discovered that our rear panel window on the driver's side of our tow car (our Chevy HHR) had shattered in the last few hours of our trip.

Vic taped the window on the outside to hold it together until we could have it replaced.

 Luckily we found a place in Grand Prairie that was able to replace the window in about 30 minutes this afternoon. But another US$150 down the drain.

Gas has been getting cheaper as we drive south.  Our last fill-up at Sulphur Springs TX (about 80 miles east of Dallas) cost $1.84/gallon (about 65cents CAD per liter).

It is so nice to be back in an area where all the trees are leafy green and the grass is lush. We are sited under some kind of oak tree and we often get them pinging off our roof. Luckily, they usually come of during the day and we can sleep OK thru the night.

our site at Traders Village

Tomorrow we head for Lockhart Texas and their world famous BBQ dinner.

On the road Oct 31, 2015

We left a little earlier this year.  By 8 pm on Oct 31st we ran out of candy to hand out to the children for Halloween so we shut off the water, etc for the house and were on the road in our motorhome by 8:30 pm, after a ten minute delay due to basically destroying our motorized steps. We drove through patches of rain all the way to London.

Gas in our area was 101 per liter so we waited until we reached Ayr to fill up at the Flying J for 95/liter.

At 11 pm we reached our stop for the night at the Flying J in London to discover we were parked next to our friend John Butts from Penetanguishene!  There were fewer RVs stopped to overnight at the Flying J than previous years.  The temperature was about 7C overnight.

That night the gas was 92/liter at the London Flying J and with our discount we could have filled up for 91.  But in the morning the gas had jumped overnight by 11 cents to 103!  So we just topped up our propane and headed for the border.

After crossing into the US at Sarnia/Port Huron, we stopped for fuel at the Pilot Travel Center for $2.40/gallon.  Cheaper than the $2.76 we paid the previous year. We also fueled up with Cinnabon rolls. YUMMY!

We had rainy weather off and on that day and it was windy for our drive but at least it was mild weather.

Our first stop on our trip south most years is La Porte, Indiana to spend a few days with family and pick up a new set of motorized steps in Elkhart, IN. 

Here's a photo of our parking spot in La Porte:

The weather has been warm while we've been here in La Porte (about 20C each day) and will continue to be so for the next couple of days so there is no push for a long day of driving to get out of cold weather when we leave here.  We plan to head towards Memphis on Thursday, Nov 5th.

Map our our 2014/2015 route

A map of our trip last winter http://www.odysseyatlas.com/trip/yL7

Home again

Friday April 10th we left Quiet Oaks and drove north on Hwy 165 . The temperature was 75F and the air felt muggy.  Within 2 hours we went through a rain shower and temperature dropped 9F within minutes!  A bonus of driving through this area were road side stands selling jumbo shrimp for $5.99/lb!  Too bad that we stocked up in Mexico. We will just have to remember it next time. We drove through the states of Louisiana, Arkansas and into Mississippi that day.  We crossed over to Hwy I55 and headed to Batesville  intending to spend the night at the Walmart.  Unfortunately it was too noisy so we moved about a block down the road to the Batesville Civic Center. We boondocked on their parking lot as we had moved after dark.  In the morning we discovered they have 20 RV sites with full services that must be reserved in advance over the internet. Turns out they charge $30 a night so we will stay boondocking.

Saturday we drove through Memphis and headed north to Effingham IL. The weather was a pleasant 65F. Sad to say there were no longer wildflowers at the side of the road or flowering trees and bushes. Texas was so beautiful with their roadside flowers. We traveled through 5 states: Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois.  Our overnight stop in Effingham was the Walmart.  This place encourages overnight campers with signs directing you to Truck Parking.  There were 14 trucks and 6 motorhomes parked for the night.  We were within walking distance of 6 restaurants and lots of shopping. We took advantage of the location and went out to dinner.

Sunday we left Effingham IL to travel to La Porte IN.  Leaving the city we saw a large roadside sign indicating the home office of our favourite pancake mix, Hodgson Mills. Too late to stop so we will have to stock up in La Porte. We had crossed the Mississippi River 3 times on this trip home:

an early crossing of the Mississippi River

approaching a bridge across the Mississippi (please excuse the bug smear on the windshield!)

the suspension bridge up close

a view of the Mississippi as we cross the bridge

 On our trip up Hwy 421 to La Porte we noticed the Whistle Stop Restaurant with a collection of train cars, railway memorabilia and a museum at Monon. It would be a wonderful place to take our grandchildren! A week after we got home we learned that Monon is the home of our famous Whirley popcorn maker and we could have stopped in and got new replacement gears.

The following photos are of the equipment located on the grounds surrounding the Whistle Stop restaurant:

A real steam driven crane

Checking out the heavy crane

A trailer to a jigger used by rail service crews

Four old dumping cars probably used in mining

Handle used for track switching

An old baggage cart

Wow! I remember the wood stoves when I was a kid

The interior is quite splendid..all wood

Entering the restaurant:

Inside the restaurant, there were 4 tracks of model trains circling the ceiling. There was also a museum of memorabilia but we did not take it in.

Chugga chugga woo woo!

Once we arrived in La Porte, we spent 3 days visiting with family and shopping for some RV supplies. 

We left La Porte Wednesday, April 15th. After crossing the border at Port Huron/Sarnia we stopped in Sarnia for dinner with family then headed to the PILOT/Flying J Travel Plaza in London to stay overnight.  With our PILOT credit card we a get 5 cents/gallon discount on our purchase of gasoline in the USA and 1 cent per litre discount in Canada.  The Travel Plaza is a popular place to stop for RVers on our way home as we can dump our black and gray tanks. 



We arrived home Thursday April 16th before noon.  The weather was lovely and warm -- perfect to unload our motorhome.

Our route home this year was 3,043 miles -- 664 miles shorter than last year when we traveled up the west coast of Mexico to Nogales, Tucson and then across Arizona and New Mexico.

In all,  our total miles traveled since we left home in November was 6,589.

Lake Charles area of Louisiana

Our final night at Hidden Valley was warm 80F at 9 pm!  With high humidity, we turned on the AC for a comfortable sleep.

We left San Antonio about 9:30 am on Tuesday, April 7^th  to drive straight across I10 to the Lake Charles area of Louisiana.

We passed through Houston around noon.  Here are a couple of shots of the downtown skyline.

It was a good day to travel.  Skies were overcast the first part of the day but warm weather. We are happy to still be wearing shorts, t-shirts and sandals.

By the time we reached Lake Charles, the sky had a few blue spots.  Here are a couple of photos taken as we crossed the bridge over Lake Charles:

We arrived in the late afternoon at Quiet Oaks RV Park north of Fenton LA which is northeast of Lake Charles.  It is a lovely campground under shady trees and 10 miles away from the noise of the I10 highway. 

On Wednesday April 8^th we drove back to the Lake Charles area to spend some time touring

around the Creole Nature Trail.  There are viewing areas along the route, with an informative visitor center and a boardwalk for bird watching and viewing alligators.  Unfortunately at this time of year, many of the birds have started their journey north.

a young alligator beside the boardwalk at the Visitor Center in the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge

Walking the Pintail Boardwalk at the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge

a Snowy Egret

the Snowy Egret in flight

a Black-necked Still in flight

a Black-necked Still hunting for food

a Laughing Gull

alligators in the waterway beside the road

this black King snake was hidden in the grass where we first stepped onto the boardwalk!

 We had planned to stay at Quiert Oaks 2 nights but the severe weather warnings for our route north have delayed our trip to Memphis another day.