Our "Hopefully not, though..." wishes for another slow slog day ended up falling on deaf ears.
By 7 am Friday morning the T42 was being buffeted by strong winds that reminded us of the King Kong portion of the old Universal Studios backlot tour.
We checked the weather report to see if it was something we could "wait out", but the forecast was that things were only going to get significantly worse as the day progressed. We got ready to leave, and apprehensively got back on the freeway around 9 am.
Driving conditions were significantly worse than the previous day, and for the first 45 minutes of the trip Tom kept couldn't drive faster than 45-50 mph and still feel like he was maintaining control of the van. We passed through a number of dust storm areas like the one shown above, where visibility at times dropped to only a few car lengths. Semi-trucks were occasionally pulled over by the side of the road (although most were passing us by at comparatively high speed), and they turned out to create an unexpected type of road hazard: even though they were completely off the road, they formed a temporary wind break as we passed by them, and the sudden loss of a 50 mph side-wind and then sudden reappearance of that 50 mph side-wind a few seconds later completely confused the Cross-wind Assist and Stability Control Features of the van, causing a horrible sideways jerk that had to be corrected for manually. Short stints of traveling NE instead of due E were better, since the side-wind became a tail-wind providing a temporary break. By late afternoon, we managed to outrun the worst of the storm and were able to drive 65 mph again.
We crossed over into New Mexico around 11:30 (with the clocks jumping ahead an hour to 12:30 with the change to Mountain Time). We were finally travelling some roads that we "had never driven before" (although scenery shots out of car windows never look that great) 😉):
After over 9 hours of driving, we finally pulled into our stopping place for the night (Oasis State Park) around 8 pm. After getting our campground bearings for the next morning, we had a dinner of air-fried frozen fish fillets, Instant Pot rice, and salad.
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The plan was to fill water and dump before leaving Oasis SP, since it was the last dump site we'd "have access to" until after our eclipse days in Lampasas. The winds were buffeting the van again when we awoke the next morning, though, which made those tasks much more difficult than they should have been. For those of you that don't know, the water panel on our Travato is inside the back door (a design choice by Winnebago to make it a 3+ season coach by moving all the water lines inside) so to fill the fresh water tank or use the black tank flush the rear door(s) have to be open. Christine ended up having to hold the doors open to keep them from slamming shut and/or being ripped off their hinges by the wind while Tom completed the other tasks.
We also used a campground "shower house" for the first time at Oasis. Many folks on the Travato FB Group had mentioned using them when available instead of their Travato showers, and we wondered whether they were free in other parts of the country (since you have to buy tokens to get a few minutes of water from the CA state park ones). It turns out that at least at Oasis, the showers are free - and a little . . . interesting. You basically repeatedly push a button to get a 5 second high-powered blast of water from the shower head - a somewhat stinging, exfoliating spray. 😛
We left Oasis shortly before 10 am and drove rural country roads for over half the day. It was still quite windy, but not as dangerous as the previous day. We didn't see a proper Texas entry sign when we crossed over about 20 minutes later, but the road abruptly smoothed out and the speed limit changed to 75 mph (despite still being a two line rural road with no barrier); we'd say that on average, Texas has the best maintained roads of any of the states we've travelled so far. Occasional dust storms were still an issue, though.
On the "flora and fauna" front: Texas bluebonnets are in bloom right now. Unfortunately, the only place we've seen them so far are in patches growing by the side of the road where there's no safe place to pull over to get a good photo so the best we have to show you for the moment is a dashcam screen grab, which really doesn't do them justice (look in the lower-right):
And while we're pulling dashcam footage: we also had to swerve to avoid running over this little turtle crossing the road in one of the towns we drove through:
We arrived at the "Skies Over Texas Winery" (in Early, TX) , our Harvest Host for the night, just before 6 pm after 6.5 hours of driving.
The winery was small, but cute inside:
Not being drinkers, we fulfilled our HH purchase obligation by buying pizzas (a veggie, and a sausage and veggie) for dinner. Since the kitchen is small and the pizzas arrived slowly and separately, this food photo is from dinner-in-progress. 😉
Getting ready for bed that night, we noticed sand all over the bed and realized that it had blown in that morning when the doors were open during the fill and dump exercise. We were
very happy that we were carrying a Dustbuster at that point. 🙂
Lampasas should normally only be an hours drive away in the morning. 🤞
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