Leaving Belton Lake. Again.

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Travel day and rain. We knew it was likely to rain, in fact, it was as near a certainty as Texas ever gets. So the guys had taken down the satellite dish the day before and we'd tidied up most of the stuff outdoors. The one thing we left was the big outdoor rug--we knew it would get wet, but that seemed better than tracking mud into the Mammoth RV.

So we got up Wednesday morning to find it was still very warm outside. I put on gloves to walk the dogs and soon pulled them off again. I needed my hands free to scrape up the large pile of very smelly loose stool Molly deposited in a neighboring campsite. All that junk she'd been eating off the ground had finally got to work on her bowels.

When we returned I found that her brand-new dog bed in the cage had an even bigger pile on it. To our infinite good fortune, she'd put the pile in a corner on the bed and not a single bit escaped to the edges of the cage, the motor home floor, or even the pad underneath her bed. It was all contained on the dog pillow and it washed off pretty well. Of course we'll take it home and run it through the washer, but all the same we were incredibly lucky on that.

So we got as early a start as we could manage and were at the dump station at around 10:45. During breakfast it had come a shower, but it conveniently stopped while we were loading up things outside. I was wearing a tee shirt and no jacket at that point.

But when we were finished dumping and headed out (9:59 a.m.) the rain started in earnest. We stopped at the usual place, Buc'ees in Temple, and did a quick fill-up. It probably took ten minutes. Then we headed north on I-35 and it rained. Every single setting on the intermittent wipers was used on the trip over to Corsicana. When we got through Corsicana--the traffic wasn't too bad there; it was right around noon and I guess people decided to stay at home--we headed north on I-45 and it rained harder. And harder. Not the kind where you have to use high-speed wipers continuously, but the kind where when you passed a big truck you had to put them on in hopes of seeing the road in front of you. (You couldn't)

And the wind! It was horrid. Ed said that on the trip east on highway 31 he could never get Mammoth's engine to shift into high gear. It insisted on thinking it was going uphill the whole way. The wind appeared to be shifting from south to east to north, because it was pretty much in our faces the whole way. I later read that there had been a tornado, an EF0 or EF1, reported in Corsicana. ...before the lunch hour on December 30.  Well, there we were. We had no idea. I definitely didn't hear any sirens.

Despite the crummy driving conditions, it was a pretty easy trip. We passed two wrecks--one when we were just starting out, and one huge one at the I-635 / US-175 intersection in Dallas. Both were in the opposite direction, so all we head to deal with were a few crazy onlookers driving stupidly. We arrived to a wet and soggy home at 1:53 p.m.  But it was nice and dry and remarkably clean inside--I'd cleaned up before the trip--and we were soon comfortable again.

TRIP NOTES:
1. Now that the fear is off the convection oven, consider other kinds of bread. Like cheese biscuits or muffins.