Time to leave New Orleans…

After another day of wandering the streets of New Orleans, it was time to move on. Monitoring the national weather, I could see there was a front heading right for New Orleans bringing high winds, rain, tornados up north of here, and generally uncomfortable weather. This did curtail my loose plans of taking a couple more tours, riding the paddlewheel, and visiting some of the historical areas of NO. However, the predictions were dire enough that I decided to leave now then come back some day and enjoy the area during a calm weather period. But for right now, hightailing it out of this bullseye was the plan.

And above is a picture to contrast with the beautiful weather I had here the day I arrived 5 days ago and showed in my last post. We were pretty much stuck with the overcast and threatening storm fronts all around.

So off I headed to Texas. Pretty sure I’d find consistently better weather over there. Or at least I hoped so.

Lot’s of long, long bridges in this part of the country. Hey, Morgan City. I should have gone and visited. On another huge bridge crossing yet another huge bay. Hey, what’s all that? Lots of oil refineries I discovered. There’s Houston off in the distance. There’s downtown Houston. I didn’t stay.

So much water in this part of the country. But soon I was heading due west angling away from the coast so the humidity got less and less. Visible water became scarce. For me, that’s better and better. Hours later, I find myself in this non-descript RV park in the middle of nowhere. But it stayed dry.

And the next morning, off I go again.I make it all the way to Fort Stockton, Texas. Not much of a town really, or RV park for that matter, it’s just I’ve stayed here before and it’s conveniently placed along my route. Just for one night after all.

So I leave Ft. Stockton, still on I-10, thinking that my next destination is too far away. I really don’t want to drive until 5 or 6 PM today. Then as I pass Van Horn, Texas, just a couple hours after I left Ft. Stockton, I recall that there’s a Passport America park there, (half price club), and I see a road sign for Carlsbad Caverns (CC). What the hell, why not visit CC’s. I’ve never been. So I pull off the freeway, made my way to a McD’s so I could use their WiFi, and discover in their parking lot that my Parking Brake had stopped working again. Crap. Well, whatever, it’s flat here in this part of the country so it’ll be easy to get along without the brake. Spent a couple hours online sipping one of their coffees (I haven’t eaten at a McD’s for years) and found that I was 2 hours from CC. And I did want to visit. Hmmm. So I drifted over to the Southern Star RV Park in Van Horn and checked in. Paid for 3 nights. They tell me they have super fast WiFi, brand new system. Great!  And they are actually correct. The WiFi is blazing fast. I can watch a full movie without a single hickup.  The town looks like it’s dying. Many, many closed businesses along main street. All different kinds of businesses too. I saw the population sign as I drove into town and it showed 3500 people. I later learned that it’s down to 2,000. Place will be a ghost town soon. RV park was pretty empty when I got there, but it was only 2pm. They start getting most of their business around 5pm.And of course, I’m soon researching a trip to CC’s. I’m sort of planning on going up there one morning, spending the night nearby, and then continuing on north. But wait…the weather further north is starting to suck again. Then I see that all of the RV parks nearby CC have bad reviews. Hmm. Well, we’ll see when I get up there.