I guess you don’t need the rest of the cliche`.

We landed back from our the trip to Israel with extended jet lag as expected and sort of idled around Livingston for several days not making much headway on much of anything. We kept going back over the trip and reliving it day to day in our minds and sometimes talking about it over the dinner table. Mostly we read, newspapers, mail and books. We listened to and watched the news with growing dismay at the direction the world is taking with regard to immigrants and environmental issues.

Finally on Saturday we broke through our lethargy and the rotten chilly wet weather to drive into Houston. We thought to go to the Menil Collection, but we arrived at 10 AM and it doesn’t open until 11. A quick check of Google showed us that the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, had a special exhibit of Monet and the Seine and was open at 10. Whew, that was totally fortuitous. The Monet exhibit is breath taking and it is wonderful to be able to see so many multiples of the same scenes on wall after wall. Unlike the Cathedral, the Water Lilies, and Haystacks these were mostly more modest in size and it was possible to get back and take them in together. We were interested to note that at least two of the grander pieces were on loan from Shelburne Museum, just down the road from my sister in Vermont.

We walked on through the surrealist and contemporary sections and finally admitted that over two hours was it. The legs were tired and the mind was overloaded with fine art, it was time for lunch. We had been looking forward to Kenny & Ziggy’s Deli for a couple of years and off we went to wait in line for New York Deli in Houston. It lived up to the reviews and memory. Excellent Deli food – open face brisket sandwich for me Potato Latke (1) and spinach knish (1) for Carol. We ate too much and were unable to think about another gallery so we found our way to Central Market where we spent too much time and too much money restocking the motorhome pantry. Then we settled in for the long drive back to Livingston and continued with the over long Romance novel we had been listening to since sometime last Fall. We did not finish it in the hour and 20 minutes drive.

The weather continued chilly and wet so we read and talked until it was time to  move on to Dallas. Just before that I noticed a ticking noise from the vicinity of the refrigerator and a quick look showed that the normally placid display was flashing between what appeared to be the interior temperature and an unreadable failure code. I switched the system from “Auto” which chooses electric when available to propane to “LP” and the clicking and flashing stopped. the temperature which had risen some slowly returned to normal levels. A call to the local mobile RV repair produced the promise of a 3 week wait!. I tracked down a mobile RV provider in Dallas who agreed to meet us at Sandy lake RV on Friday morning. The short story is a control box has failed in an “interesting” way and we are waiting for delivery of a new one on Monday. Interesting being a mode the tech, Robert from Blue Moon RV, had not seen. The refrigerator continues to work just fine on propane.