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Published: September 15th 2006
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Houston Texas. To say Houston is a big city is an understatement. Mike and I have been to many large cities in our travels but Houston is at the top of the heap. We met up with a long lost friend, John Bishop. John was Mike’s best buddy when they were stationed together at a remote base in eastern Turkey and just can’t seem to shake him. He was also best man at our wedding. See what I mean? The wedding was the last time we saw him so we were really happy to be able to darken his doorstep 11 years later.
The visit didn’t start out on the best foot. We planned our arrival to miss rush hour traffic and we tried to set a route that avoided any traffic congestion. When we located the RV park we had chosen we weren’t too happy. When we pulled in we saw a lot of rundown trailers that had been in their site for quite awhile and a lot of rundown cars. It turns out our RV park was in the low-income barrio area of Houston. We didn’t appreciate the exposure to domestic disturbances in the RV park at night
but we did appreciate the local supermarket. When we walked in, the first thing we noticed was the food counter. They sell tacos, burritos and the like that right inside the door. The smell was very nice. We bought all the fixings for pork tacos along with some freshly prepared tortillas and headed home with our groceries.
John is in the wrong business, he should be a tour guide. We got the feeling he had done this a few times before. He started with a drive all around Houston. We saw the rich (where George Bush senior has a home), the poor, the Superbowl, the big shopping mall, and the oil refineries. John has a little jeep and was zipping in and out of traffic like it was a carnival ride. A great change of pace after driving our big truck and towing the trailer. All the refineries spread across the horizon were scary. There’s lots of money in that city.
John took us to the Johnson Space Center which is where NASA was born. We learned a lot about astronauts, Skylab and the international space station they are currently building in space. We were able to walk
through a space shuttle (just a model of course), see the original capsules from pre-shuttle days, actual space suits the astronauts wore and moon rocks. The highlights were visiting the actual mission control center that was used for all the space flights and including some of the earlier shuttle launches. The same control room we all saw on TV. And visiting the astronaut training area which has mock ups of all the sections of the international space station and the shuttle.
Here we are in Del Rio Texas. It’s only 3-4 miles to the Mexico border and we can see the lights of Mexico from our trailer at night. We drove to the border and walked across into Acuna Ciudad to explore the border area and have lunch. Not too bad, full of dentists, doctors, pharmacies, liquor stores and Mexican souvenir shops. A lot of retired Americans come here to get their dental work and have prescriptions filled. The people in Del Rio are very nice but the city of 30,000 people is very dirty. Think about he dirtiest Wal-Mart or K-mart you have ever been in and that is Del Rio.
Today was my first experience with acupuncture. That’s right, acupuncture. Just a few trailers down from us are Jenny & Judy who have taken a year or so off and traveling the world. They have already done the world part, when they returned to the states they weren’t ready to stop traveling so they bought a minivan and pop up camper and are still going. Jenny has an interesting history, she was born in Hong Kong, adopted by an American couple and raised in a midwestern small town where the population was almost entirely white. They came to the pre Superbowl party the RV park had in the rec room and was discussing using acupuncture to stop smoking, then a few days later Mike and I began to have some back pain so we invited her over to work her magic. For those of you who aren’t familiar with acupuncture, it is inserting very thin needles into specific areas of your body to reduce pressure and redirect energy flow through your body. We did feel better after the treatments and it was very cool seeing all the needles sticking out of Mike’s back and legs.
More about our newest location. We have found workamper jobs in an RV park called Holiday-Trav-L Park. We are each working 15 hours per week in exchange for our trailer site. I am working in the office and Mike is working the outside. He is in charge of trash, escorting guests to their sites (he gets to use a golf cart, yahoo!!) and anything else the boss can think of. Unfortunately, one of the things the boss thought of was that he wanted a garden in the back which involves digging up and moving rocks. One day of that and Mike started having back problems. He told management he couldn’t do any heavy lifting for awhile. Well, a few days later the boss drove by in his golf cart and fired us without really firing us. So we’re on the road again. I am working on our travel route west and getting very excited about all the places and people we will see. Our destination is back home to Oregon where we will spend the summer volunteering in Oregon State Parks. So far we have a job conducting lighthouse tours on the coast and being camphost at a park very popular with rock climbers and extreme sports.
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