2018 Adler San Diego Road Trip

Starting mileage:  7561  Starting time: 7:30 am Ending mileage: 8239 Ending time: 5:00 pm Travel mileage:  678 Travel time: 9:30 hours (lost another hour due to time change) Soon after leaving Gadsden, the terrain changed significantly, becoming hilly and mountainous as we entered the Appalachian mountains and the area around Smokey Mtn National Park. It didn't rain all day but we did have precipitation that varied from misting to torrential downpours where we could barely see the road. It was pretty stressful driving in the pouring rain. At one point in the late afternoon we saw a rainbow. Many of the trees had bare or nearly bare limbs but we don't know why. It looked like it was from some insects that had chewed the leaves off. Day 30 map Smokey Mountains

Starting mileage:  7053 Starting time: 8:30 am Ending mileage: 7561 Ending time: 5:00 pm Travel mileage:  508 Travel time: 8:30 hours We decided to head home directly from Lafayette so today and the next two days will just be travel days. In this part of the country Fox & Friends seems to be the preferred TV channel in the mornings. It is interesting to see how the "other side" thinks. This is certainly the Trump TV channel. When we were leaving Texas and entering Louisiana, the trees were Live Oak with Spanish Moss and then pine trees of some sort. Coming into Mississippi, there was a wider variety of trees that I couldn't identify although there were Magnolias in the highway median. We got 445 miles on our last tank of gas which is the most we've gotten. Our mileage has improved to 30-31 mpg which is a big improvement from the 25-26 mpg that we were getting going across South Dakota. Driving at 70-75 instead of 80+ must make a big difference. We deci...

Starting mileage:  6799 Starting time: 9:30 am Ending mileage: 7053 Ending time: 6:00 pm Travel mileage:  254 Travel time: 8:30 hours Today was mostly visiting the Space Center Houston which has many exhibits about the US space program, both past and future plans. There are a number of rockets on display, including the largest, a Saturn V for the Apollo moon program.  It was also interesting to see a Space Shuttle on top of the Boeing 747 that was used to move it across the US from a landing site back to Cape Kennedy. This approach was proposed by a NASA engineer who was a model plane enthusiast and created and tested a model 747 with a Space Shuttle on top.  It is easy to see why Houston had such a problem with flooding during last year's hurricane with so much rain. It is absolutely flat with many houses just a few feet above lakes and bays. There is no place for the water to go quickly. Houston is a mix of pleasant residential areas and huge industr...

Starting mileage:  6392 Starting time: 9:30 am Ending mileage: 6799 Ending time: 5:00 pm Travel mileage:  379 Travel time: 7:30 hours It is pitch dark when I got up at 6am. Hot and sticky already. I went swimming just as a storm was coming in, bobbing in the crashing waves. There were black clouds to the south-east that soon came in blocking the sun. Fortunately, we were able to get the car loaded just before it started to rain seriously. It rained fairly hard for about half an hour which was good as it cleaned all the butterfly remains off our windshield and the front of the car. It is absolutely flat here, similar to south Florida. The vegetation is mostly mesquite, grassland and prickly pear cactus.  There appear to be huge cattle ranches - we see the entrance to the ranch and a driveway that disappears into the distance. We saw hundreds of snowy egrets, often among or on the cattle. There are large cotton fields and huge bales of white cotton sitting in...

Starting mileage:  6013 Starting time: 8:00 am Ending mileage: 6392 Ending time: 5:00 pm Travel mileage:  379 Travel time: 9:0 hours We certainly enjoyed our visit to San Antonio and would recommend it. This is apparently a popular time to visit as it gets very hot in the summer. We decided to take the longer route down via Laredo. In Laredo, we went to the Museum of the Republic of the Rio Grand, a very short lived country declaring independence from Mexico in 1845. It was taken back by Mexico but then shortly afterwards by Texas and the US. It would have been interesting to take the short walk across the bridge to Mexico but wouldn't have been able to come back as we didn't have our passports. On the way down to Brownsville, there was a swarm of butterflies that made quite a mess on our windshield and the front of the car. Carmen "Googled" and found out that there is currently a migration of the American Snout Butterfly to the Rio Grande valley! The Monarc...

Zero miles on the car today as it stayed parked since we got here last night. But I did get in 13,750 steps and 6.5 miles according to my FitBit. This morning we went back on the River Walk on the way to the Alamo. The River Walk is (was) a natural rectangular bend in the San Antonio river where Spanish missionaries from Mexico (New Spain) founded a mission and fort in 1738. This section of the river became popular in the early 1900s with restaurants and accommodations but was almost completely destroyed by a flood in 1921 that killed over 50 people. An enterprising architect came up with a plan to prevent flooding but it took about 10 years for it to be funded and put into place.  The fix mainly entailed "short-circuiting" the loop with a deep canal and installing gates to control the water height. The actual River Walk was created in the 1930s as a WPA project and substantially improved after WW II and again in 1968 for the big Expo in San Antonio. San Antonio has qui...