6/12/2013–Wylie, TX to Chickasha, OK

We left the East Fork COE campground on the morning of 6/12/2013.  We decided to take the back roads to Hwy 380 and avoid the narrow curving roads.  We first took the road behind the Walmart in Wylie where there were some trucks delivering more pipes for the masssive water project extending from Lake Texoma to Lake Lavon.

We drove east on Hwy 380 to I-35 and turned north toward Oklahoma.

We crossed the Red River at the Texas/Oklahoma border.

And arrived in Oklahoma.

We took an exit south of the recent tornado ravaged city of Moore, OK and continued to Chickasha where we spent the night at a Passport America campground.  It was a small, but nice park.  There was an Elks lodge in town, but we preferred 50amp electric hookups with the temperatures in the 90’s.  We did drive to the lodge though and enjoyed a spaghetti dinner before returning to the RV for the night.

6/8/2013–McKenna’s Graduation Day

McKenna’s graduation from Wylie East High School was held at the Allen Event Center, a very large venue and it was impossible to get any decent photos of the stage area.

McKenna entered the arena just below where we were seated so this was one of the better photos of the ceremony.

Her name is called and she walks across the stage to receive her diploma.

We are very proud of McKenna as she graduated with honors in the top 10% of her class (#16 out of about 320 students).  She has already been accepted in the honors program at Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX.

After the ceremony, McKenna poses with Kendall, Chris and Laurie.

Chris and Laurie held a graduation party in their backyard with food prepared by Chef George and desserts by his wife Katie.

Demetrius, Laura, and Butch.

Butch and his daughter Bailie.  She’ll be graduating next year in Cheyenne, WY.

Chris and Kendall

The graduation cake.

Needless to say, we all stuffed ourselves and had a nice visit with the family.  Congratulations to McKenna on all your achievements!

6/5–6/7/2013–Wylie, TX and The Dallas Aquarium

I posted a photo of McKenna a few days ago and now here is our son Chris with his wife Laurie and our younger granddaughter Kendall.

On the 7th, Laura and Demetrius (daughter and grandson from Spokane) needed a ride to downtown Dallas so they could pick up a rental car.  While we waited for the car to get there, we went out to lunch, then wandered around the outside area of the Dallas aquarium looking at the animal exhibits.

This is a Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo eating corn on the cob.

And this is a Shoebill Stork.

Laura was finally able to pick up the rental car and we headed back to Wylie to visit with the rest of the family for the evening.

6/3–6/4/2013 The Graduate and Friends in Van Alstyne, TX

We spent some time on Monday afternoon with our granddaughter McKenna who will be graduating in a few days.  We are very proud of her for what she’s accomplished in her young life and for her strong beliefs.  She is well on her way to doing very well in life.

After our visit with McKenna, we decided to check out some possible places for family tours later this week.  We never watched the tv show Dallas in the 70’s, but a few short miles from Chris and Laurie’s house is the Southfork Ranch which is the site of that tv show.  We walked through the gift shop/visitor center and picked up a coupon for a discount on a tour if we should decide to go through there later.

Back at the RV, there were three blossoms on my transplanted cactus.  Okay…I know I’m bringing this up too much, but I don’t have a green thumb and it should have died by now.

I was out on my walk before sunrise this morning and tried to catch it with my cell phone camera, but it doesn’t do it justice.

And then this afternoon, we drove up to Van Alstyne to see our friends Terry and Sylvia and our favorite little white dog Keeper.  Keeper is showing his age, but he seemed pretty happy to see us and we were happy to see him too!

And of course we had an enjoyable visit with Sylvia and Terry too!  Terry’s sister Brenda runs the Durning House in Van Alstyne and we had lunch there for Bubba Tuesday.  The chicken fried chicken lunch was the best we’ve had!

Sylvia and Terry.

We said our goodbyes and drove back to Wylie on the backroads to avoid heavy traffic.  I didn’t get a very good photo, but this cowboy limousine pulled out in front of us and we followed it for a while before it turned off on a side road.

We arrived back at camp for another quiet evening.

6/2/2013–Spring Branch to Wylie, TX

We kept busy for the last week or so making our preparations to leave our property in Spring Branch, TX.  We had a real estate agent come out to discuss listing our property, and we decided that it would be in our best interest to continue to update the ad on Craigslist and on various RV forums.

The evening before we left, we even had a tarantula travel through our driveway to wish us safe travels.

All hooked up and ready to hit the road in the morning.

Since we were traveling on a Sunday, Ken decided to follow GPS Gertie’s routing instructions.  Rather than taking our usual route north on 281 to Burnet, we took a route east through Austin.

Once we made it through Austin, we continued north on I-35 passing this building that looked like an alien spaceship.

We continued on through Dallas, and before going to the COE campground in Wylie, we stopped at Walmart to fill the fuel tank at $3.39 per gallon.

The cactus that I took from our property had two blossoms when we arrived at our site.

And here we are set up our site for the next 10 days.  Lake Lavon is in the background (middle left of photo).

We are here for our granddaughter’s graduation next Saturday.  It probably won’t last, but we did have a cooler evening for sleeping last night.

5/19/2013–Another Week in Spring Branch, TX

Another week in Spring Branch…we made a couple of trips to San Antonio to see doctors for Ken’s knee which has been giving him more trouble again, and he got another cortisone injection on Tuesday.

I completed another Impossibles jigsaw puzzle.  They’re always interesting to do…750 pieces, no edges, 5 extra pieces, and no picture that shows it how it looks when completed.  That’s okay…just makes it more challenging.

We made a trip to New Braunfels on Thursday to pick up some groceries and visit the Verizon store.  We’ve been thinking of breaking our ties with Hughes.net satellite internet and wanted to see what was available.  They had a mifi jetpack available which was good for 5GB of service in a month for $50 and that sounded reasonable so we came back home with it.  It is now Sunday night, and we have used up close to 2GB of that service, so that obviously won’t work for us, so it will go back to Verizon this coming week.

Last week Ken built a stand so he could get our Splendide washer dryer out to see if he could find out the problem with it.  We knew by the codes, that it was either the timer or the circuit board.  Once he got it out of the cupboard, he couldn’t see any damage to the circuit board, so we decided to take a chance that the less expensive timer was the problem.  We ordered the part from Westland Sales in Oregon and the part came in on Friday.  Ken’s project for Saturday was to rebuild the stand, pull the washer dryer out and replace the timer.  Once that task was completed, it was pushed back into place and hooked up and two loads of wash went through the cycle without a problem!  Alright!!

The timer is the round piece in the middle of this photo and it connects to the selector knob on the front of the machine.

The first load is churning right along.

My transplanted cactus had another nice blossom on it this afternoon.

We had a visitor this afternoon.  This doe decided she needed a break from her newborn fawn and left it hiding between the property stake and pole behind her.  You can just barely make out the fawn’s head to the left of the property stake.

After 2-3 hours, it decided it wanted to move to another hiding place and moved back into a better hiding place.

Here it is standing at the first hiding place right by the road.

And here it is moving to it’s new hiding spot a bit more to the left.

We did show our property again today and they seemed to like it, so we’ll see if anything comes of that.  At this point, we try not to get our hopes up too high.

That’s it for this week.

5/12/2013–Happy Mother’s Day

Not too much going on this week for us.  We did go out with friends for our usual Sunday breakfast.  As it was Mother’s Day, there were larger groups and longer waits for food.  When we exited the restaurant I spotted this very unique obviously “girly” car complete with eyelashes, etc.

Back at the lot, we didn’t do much today other than some very minor work on the lot.  I didn’t take any photos, but Kenny drove his bobcat over and moved our burn pile over to Jerry and Sue’s lot which is moving it to the next destination of Trey’s lot which is behind J & S’s.

Earlier this week I posted some photos of cactus transplants to be moved to Arizona.  One of them actually blossomed today.  So far my black thumb hasn’t done any damage. 

After dinner, we stopped by to see Kenny and pay him for the work he did on our property.