My goodness, we are becoming very social all of a sudden. Today we went to the  Jil and Tom’s, for happy hour which extended into dinner at Mi Casa, the most highly rated restaurant for miles around. I met Jil online in a forum on RVillage.com and extended the contact to FaceBook. She is from Florida, but we attended the same summer camp, Camp Cherokee, back in the 50’s. Given our ages we were there at the same time and she remembers many of the people I knew who went there. Her husband, Tom, is from Irondequoit just a few years younger than us. They are members of the Saguara SKP Coop where we like to stay. We can’t get in this year, oh well, we are a few miles away at Red Barn RV, a piece of desert with hookups, I 10 and the railroad for borders.

While here we contacted Ellie and Kelly from our SE Asia trip last year. they decided to drive down from north of Tucson on Saturday to visit us on GeeWhiz for lunch. And tomorrow we will drive to Sierra Vista, about 35 miles south of us to have lunch with Cindy and Mike. They were on the site next to us in Livingston and kept an eye on the coach while we were in Israel. We are also working on getting together with other people from Rochester while we are in the neighborhood.

If we have missed anyone in the Phoenix Tucson area and you would like to get together let us know!

I have not been completely social, for that matter I dealt with a very unsocial issue yesterday. I decided the time had come to find out what was wrong with the macerator pump which I had sort of abandoned when it suddenly stopped while pumping out the black tank. I had verified that the fuse had not blown which meant dismantling the pump head to see what had jammed it. I started by pulling off the hose which let me look into the throat of the pump after I flushed it with fresh water. There was a half circle of plastic wedged in the blade. It didn’t look right to me and I could only hope it was something extraneous that had come down from the tank. A pair of needle nose pliers provided the reach I needed and I extracted the plastic chip with ease. This freed the pump which now works just fine. I can only guess that the piece of plastic was construction debris which had fallen in the tank and rattled around in there for a couple of years before finding its way to the exit. The other possibility is too terrible to think about. What if something in the effluent tanks has broken and this is the debris from that failure. This is very unlikely so I will not think about it.

On to the social life.

From Marfa we pressed on directly to Las Cruces, Siesta RV Park, where we usually stay. It was an easy uneventful drive once we got clear of the rotten weather in the Marfa area. By the time we got to Van Horn we had our sunglasses on (that’s about 90 miles and where US 90 merges on to I 10).

We have been very busy here with Leora and Stuart and Marianne. Shabbat dinner, a Ukulele band concert (I kid you not) a movie “the Imitation Game” – why can’t Hollywood either do a straight story or just make a totally fictional story with no tie to reality? and a book group where Marianne Zeitlin was invited as the author of her latest novel “Motherless Child” followed by dinner at La Posta.

All of that in three days. We are resting today. Making plans for the coming months and, oh yes, I had a small repair job. One of our shades was not working well and the daytime privacy shade was not working at all. I had explored a bit and figured out that I needed to take down the entire valence to get at the rollers. Turns out it is held in place by four screws. Once I had it laid out on the bed it was easy to sort out how it was supposed to work and why it wasn’t. I realigned the rollers and with Carol supplying a third hand I was able to reinstall the valence with the rollers and I am so glad I didn’t pay a minimum  30 minute rate ($55) for the 10  minutes it took me.

I am facing another repair that I am not looking forward to. While pumping out the black tank in Marfa, the pump came to a sudden stop. I have verified that the fuse is not blown. I am convinced that something has lodged in the impeller blade. It should be a simple matter to dismantle the pump and clean it up, but it also has a “yuck” factor so I am putting it off. If I had been pumping grey water when it stopped I would be less hesitant 🙁 I’ll let you all know how it turns out and when it turns out. I expect I will not include a lot of detail.

We were in email contact with one of my Brown classmates, Lee Berk, who has settled in Phoenix. They live very near the Musical Instrument Museum about which I have written several times, hereafter MIM. Diane Schuur is performing there on March 6 and we now have tickets to be able to join them and hear her. As I was browsing the MIM Jazz concert schedule I spotted a concert later in March by Anat Cohen who we absolutely fell in love with at XRIJF last year so we know where we will be March 21. We have other friends in the area so March should be a fairly social month for us. Then on to LA and I guess we are inviting ourselves to Miriam and Yechiel’s for Sedar right here in this post. Now to contact Malibu Beach RV Resort for a spot.

Somehow I never got around to posting this last night as I finished writing. It is a good thing as I have now had a chance to clean up several typos in advance (hope I haven’t added any).

It seems I have not sat down to write in a week and what a week. We stopped at Terlingua Ranch Lodge RV Park, 16 miles off route 118 which heads down from Alpine to the Study Butte (both “U’s” sound the same) entrance to Big  Bend and eventually to Presideo TX. The last three miles in to the Lodge are on dirt. We set up on site 19 (to remind us where we want to be the next time) with mountain views in all directions. Terlingua is back out the 16 miles and then 20 miles to the south. That is the nearest town. The lodge has a cafe with local music and we ate there once. From there we drove to Terlingua Ghost Town where we saw the sites and had lunch at the El Dorado Hotel.

and here is a 180 degree panorama taken in the basin:

It seems that Falcon State Park is one of the primary birding areas we go to many years. See Carol’s post Message in a Minute for her tale of a day of birding. We are not avid birders, I am a bit more interested than Carol, but I have never gone 50 miles out of my way because there was a special bird I just had to see. Well, not quite, before we found out where to see them easily, we chased the migratory Sandhill Cranes from a playa in Arizona to the middle of New Mexico, but we were going that way anyhow. We have also seen them in Alaska, but we were there anyhow. I have never counted up how many birds are on my Life List, but I can tell you when I see one to add. I don’t keep day lists or year lists and I cannot imagine going for a “Big year.” But I do love to see a broad variety of birds and be able to identify them. I think I will have to take our grandson Alex along birding, where there are no chickens to distract him. While in Israel with us, he picked up a local bird list and proceeded to memorize it and begin to identify every bird he saw. It made me jealous. Maybe I will invite him to share a “Big Year” with me, but no there are too many places Carol and I still want to go that are not birding places, not that there are places with no birds,  but there is so much else to see.

We stopped for the night in San Pedro Flats in Amistad NPS. We have driven by here many times usually after a night in the Wal Mart parking lot in Del Rio, a couple of miles east. After looking in Days End Directory I saw this NPS campground that charges $4/night, 50% discount for holders of the Senior Pass. Services are none, but the place is beautiful and quiet (or will be once I shut down my generator). And who can pass up a campsite for $2? We are trying to see different parts of south Texas as we make our crossing even though the highway is the same. We plan to stop in Terlingua outside the west entrance to Big Bend, I may have mentioned this in a prior post and then decided we wouldn’t because of the weather and now, I guess it just seems right. We have driven through but never stopped. We will see what we can find.

Even when we are in Rochester, where we lived most of our lives, we will put on our “this is a new place” hats and find things to see and do that we had not known about or had forgotten about. On the road we pick up brochures and we pick the brains of locals. We will go into the Chamber of Commerce or the Visitor’s Bureau and make friends with the person whose job it is to be friendly to find the good stuff. Sometimes it is just a matter of asking the campers in the next site what they have done/seen that was interesting. A glass of wine does wonders for opening the conversation.

We are in wander mode. We know where we will be in a week and in three weeks. Timing is forcing us to actually make plans so we can stay where we want to be. that means “schedule” which is an 8 letter word that is is almost as bad as 4 letter words in our life, like “work”.

The Cardinal I mentioned in the last post is still here. He (definitely male) has established a routine going from the awning arm by the window to the driver side mirror to the Jeep spare tire, hurling himself at his reflection in each location.

As has happened in the past, once we get into Falcon State Park we have a hard time leaving. Our scheduled departure was Thursday the 29th. This morning, the 28th, Carol went off to take a Spanish lesson at the Rec Lodge. I hung around the coach doing some cleaning chores that I have put off for months. I cleaned the shiny, beautiful aluminum wheels and washed down the tires. I washed the windows (yes, I do windows, but only on GeeWhiz) and I did some refurbishment on our towbar. I know I did other chores too that I find “entertaining” when working on GeeWhiz that I might find mere drudgery under other circumstance. See Carol’s blog at Message in a Minute for her side of the story. I was looking at the weather in Big Bend and Marfa and Davis Mountain, all places we enjoy, and found it too cold and too wet to be pleasant.  Why not stay another week in Falcon, where the weather, while not perfect certainly is forecast to be better than those places? There is no one waiting for us next week anyhow. Las Cruces is three days, four at most from where we are so here we stay.

This Northern Cardinal will be happy we aren’t taking away his play place, the driver side mirror, and yes that is our park permit reflected in the mirror.

We left Dallas determined to avoid big cities for a while. Next stop, Fredericksburg TX. We go there most years to stock up on salsa at Rustlin’ Robs and other goodies at the Kuchin Laden and stops at other stores on the street to see if we can find some other way to improve their economy. On our way there this time we made an overnight stop in Luckenbach TX just outside Fredericksburg. Luckinbach is noted for music every night and chickens. We parked the motorhome in the overflow parking lot way in the back to make room for the crowds that never did show up that Tuesday night. We walked down the hill to the dance hall which was not yet open and found the singer set up in the open near the bar,

it was a fine evening with temperatures in the 70’s until the sun began to set. The chickens were everywhere and the roosters were determined to drown out the singer until the sun got low in the sky and they retreated into the trees. After an hour or so of good bluegrass and folk we drifted up to the coach to have dinner thinking we would go back for more music. We never made it back instead we listened to the State of the Union.

In the morning we packed up the little we had set up and drove 10 miles to Fredericksburg RV Park, wondering why we had never stayed there before. It is very convenient. If the weather had been just a bit warmer we would have walked to the shopping. But it was threatening rain and the salsa we were likely to buy would be heavy. We shopped and made some purchases in town and then drove out to Mendelbaum’s Winery on 290 where we tasted some very nice Israeli (!) wines and bought some as well as a couple of bottles of local wine. The Israeli wines are not from the Golan where we tasted wines just three weeks ago. It is interesting that they are labeled “Holy Land” wines. After that, back to the coach for a rest before going to dinner at Cabernet Grill.Tthis lovely place was highly recommended by Deb and Scott and deserved its recommendation. Carol asked if they had vegetarian alternatives and they had a lovely eggplant dish which really pleased her. I had a steak that was nicely seasoned and the sides were also very nice. The desert was over the top, deep fried Pecan pie and Jack Daniels choclate ice cream, if we are going to hell might as well do it in style.

Our plan was to head for Terlingua, just by the west entrance to Big Bend National Park. Checking the weather it appeared we would be better off going to Falcon State Park on Falcon Lake only a 5 or 6 hour drive mostly in the rain. So off we went using lesser roads and driving an extra 50 miles or so to stay well west of San Antonio. For those who have followed us over the years Falcon State Park ought to be familiar. We found this park in 2004 and have been back many times since. I just counted, this is our 7th time in this park. We don’t plan to do much here this time. Take a few walks and bird watch. Chat with neighbors, Maybe take a long day trip to the Lower Rio Grande Valley just because.

Someplace in all of this we booked a trip for August to Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia & Herzagovina, and Slovenia. We are starting with four days in Tiranna, Albania. We haven’t booked flights yet and we are debating whether to go to Spain or Greece either before or after the tour. The tour is August 4 to 24. We are open to suggestions.

Here we are in Dallas for the second time. We had a delightful time with Deb and Scott at their home. Deb made dinner which we really enjoyed and the wine went very well with it, both the fine California wine with the difficult to remove wax capsule and more local Texas Tempranillo which was a bit thinner and just perfect with the meal.

 Finding our way in Dallas is interesting because the construction project on I 635 impacts travel no matter where one is and ramps that the GPS expects to find open are closed (and vice versa). We found our way “home” easily, just not the way we expected to go.

Sunday we decided to go back in time to our senior year in college, Fall 1963, November 22 to be more precise. A day that found me in the John Hay Library getting in some last minute reading before preparing to go home for Thanksgiving. The word that John F. Kennedy had been shot passed through the reading room, whispered from person to person, each then leaving, leaving books on the table, to go out on College Green to try to understand how our world was being jolted. Classes did not resume and we all left for home early. As I drove with my usual car full west on the NY Thruway  we were stunned to hear on the radio the gunshot that killed Oswald. Almost every car on the road pulled to a stop on the shoulder to try to absorb yet another body blow.

In all the years since then we have never gone to Dealey Plaza to see the Texas Schoolbook Depository, what need? It happened and our visiting the place would not make it “unhappen.” Today we decided it was time to see the very place that our beloved president, the first president we had come to know as adults, was brought down. We waited in line for tickets and picked up our audio guides and rode the elevator to the 6th floor where we joined a throng of visitors going from site to site following the story from JFK’s time in the Senate through his election and the events of the first three years of his presidency. Then we came to the corner where Lee Harvey Oswald set up his shooting nest, it is boxed off now with clear plastic and the boxes of books are arranged as they might have been then. No one recorded their exact position before the investigating officers tore through the place looking for the assassin. Having absorbed the locale we went down to Elm Street and walked to the “grassy knoll” and past the X in the middle of Elm Street where the car was when the fatal bullet struck. Enough! It is history, history we lived through, but it is past and we must continue to go forward into the future.

Our next stop, after lunch in the cafe, was Dallas Contemporary where the exhibit is “Unplayed Notes Museum” Loris Greaud is the installation artist. This is one each person must see for them self. He has filled the entire huge gallery, five large rooms, with the work. I will leave it at that. Here is one shot of one of the galleries:

We finished our touring at the Dallas Museum of Art where I found a curbside parking space and we walked the park which covers the I 35 highway for several blocks in front of the gallery. We could not bring ourselves to go indoors and leave the 70 degree sunshine and thousands of people to look at more art. We walked the park and we sat in the sun before heading to do a little shopping for clothes for Carol and then back to the coach for dinner and quiet time.

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.

I started a post on the plane to Israel. At the rate I’m going I will finish this on the plane back to the USA.  Our flight over was  uneventful and we arrived to be greeted by Laura Nelson-Levy,  our guide for the duration.  We immediately boarded our van,  helpfully labeled “Hawaii Tours” with Shlomo in the drivers seat.  First stop Tel Aviv, Dan Intercontinental.  It is a lovely hotel with great views of the Mediterranean and some quirky problems,  they canceled our room keys while we were at breakfast preparing to depart and then got huffy about getting one room open.  The grandkids were excited and full of energy.  The first morning we set out for a day of touring in the van and on foot in Tel Aviv.
Our First Stop was the Palmach Museum. This is new since we last came to tour and was a
wonderful introduction to the history of Israel’s founding. We continued to talk about it for the next two days. We returned to the hotel and set out by cab to a restaurant for dinner, Gina in the old train station Tachana.  Up early the next morning and up the coast to Cesarea then inland ending in Safed (spelling variants include Tzfat and Tsefat) at hotel Rimonim.

Tel Aviv was no surprise to me.  It is a large modern seaside city with an interesting history that starts in 1909. We did see some of the old Bauhouse architecture which is preserved. Safed was more of a surprise because most of us had never had a chance to wander and explore on our own beyond the artists quarter. We stayed over Shabbat so we had a quiet day to recover from jet lag and the days of intense touring.  The grandkids were amazing.  They were attentive, mostly, and well behaved, mostly.  We were asking a lot of them and meal times were “interesting” as we were making that part up as we went along and had to accommodate vegetarians and meat eaters as well as kosher,  easier in Israel but not simple. We toured where some would expect, up into the Golan, where saw fortifications and vinyards. We stopped at Golan Winery for a tour and tasting.  Yarden is still the best although we did not get to taste it, we just bought and drank some.

We drove back to Tel Aviv airport for our flight to Eilat.  We stopped along the way at Zippori National Park which is known for its mosaic floors, over 40 of them!  This had opened since our last tour.  It is certainly an interesting and wonderful place with early history and Roman roads. Unfortunately our flight to Eilat was at sunset so by the time we got over the Negev it was dark. We enjoyed a walk to a restaurant near our hotel, it is hard to believe there is only one restaurant serving kosher dairy in Eilat. Our touring day included a walk to the Red Canyon and a drive to a viewpoint on Mt Yoash. It ended with a visit to the Underwater Observatory and Aquarium, not real exciting.  Getting into bathing suits and the hotel pools was exciting.

. . . I am sitting in the coach in Livingston realizing I never did quite finish blogging about the trip. We are still working on images. Mine are mostly family pictures as we have so many Israel pictures from prior trips it didn’t seem interesting to take yet another picture of the Wall or other famous places. Here we are in Eilat at the Camel Ranch: