Our plan has been to drive to LA with brief stops along the way to visit with people as we go.  We made a stop in Austin to have dinner with Leigh and Patrick, yummy meal at “Second” we highly recommend it.  we parked at the Austin Elks Lodge which is up on hill overlooking downtown.  Hard to beat the view.  Leigh and Pat came for happy hour and we shared the bottle of Champagne that Scott Deb had brought – sorry we couldn’t find a time to share it with them – it was a very nice NY  Champagne -and and then we went on to dinner.

The next morning, that would be Tuesday, we got on the road relatively early and stopped in Fredricksburg to shop at Rustlin Robbs purveyor of salsas jams etc. lots of etc.  We also made a stop at the cooks store where I found Costa Rican coffee, Carol found a new fry pan and we did some other financial damage.  We continued on along 290 eventually joining I 10 for the long pull to LA where it is known as THE 10.  We stopped at the Walmart in Fort Stockton, they moved it since we stopped there last, and bought a couple of things before settling in for the night.

By 8:30 AM we had cleaned up from breakfast and were ready to move on.  I started the engine and pulled in the living room slide with no problem.  I threw the switch to activate the bedroom slide and nothing happened.  I traced the power as far as I could, actually made sure all the fuses were good and put in a call to Coach-net, my road service company.  They contacted H & H Truck Service, just a half mile down the street, who sent over a technician.  He started tracing the power all the way back to the motor for the bedroom slide out.  This is located under the bed, under the the storage compartment under the bed.  There was power all the way to the motor.  He had no way to repair or replace the motor.  He cranked the slide in manually so we could head on down the road to our next stop, Las Cruces where we will be having dinner with Leora Zeitlin and Stewart Kelter in about an hour.  We will be here at least until Friday noon as the parts will not be shipped until tomorrow.  We were very pleased with H & H Truck Service and with the way coach-net took care of our needs including getting us an appointment with Sunland RV in Las Crucis where we are parked now.

While we are here, I ordered new batteries for the coach.  Our Trojan 105 6 volt batteries are over seven years old and are not as peppy after a night of heating and lights as they once were.  Since we will be out in the desert again soon I want dependable batteries.  They will be installed at the same time as the slide out motor on Friday.  That will leave us 4 days to get to LA.  Plenty of time.  I will try to post when we get underway again.