YCGL - Day 11-12 - Wednesday/Thursday, April 10/11, 2024

My neighbors, Jim and Valery, took off early this morning, meaning before 9:00. I've enjoyed talking with them. Last night, Jim was telling me about how he, in his pre-college years, worked in a machine shop which repaired cast iron engine blocks. Especially those that had been left out and frozen so the ice caused the block to explode outward. They would put blocks on the casing and then compress the pieces back into place. Then they would magnaflux the side to show where the cracks were located. Then they would drill holes at the ends of the cracks, thread them and torque in a tapered, iron screw. Then starting at one end, they would drill a hole overlapping the edge of the previous iron screw, tap it and torque in another screw. Doing that locked the first screw into place and filled the crack with a uniform thickness of iron. They would repeat this process along the entire crack until they came to the first screw and then lock it into place as well. Here's a YouTube showing the same basic process a little more up to date. They are avid petroglyph and rock art hunters.

They travel thousands of miles a year with a 50-year-old Boler trailer.

This isn't theirs, but a similar one. The design has carried over to a number of manufacturers that are making them now, including Casita in Texas, Armadillo in British Columbia, Scamp in Minnesota.

In fact, when I finished my M.S. in 1977, Sally and I rented a Scamp and took mom and dad on a camping trip around Colorado and New Mexico. We pulled it behind our VW Dasher. It was a great trip, including celebrating mom's 60th birthday camping in Mesa Verde (when mom went to the bathroom that morning, Sally and I hung banners and streamers, Sally had cupcakes with candles and, since we had warned people around us about the celebration, everyone in the campground sang Happy Birthday to her and came and congratulated her!), and we saw Salome at the Santa Fe Opera.

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And this is as far as I got that night. (Well, from the picture down was this (Saturday) morning.) I went looking for a picture of a Boler trailer like theirs and couldn't find one. And then I fell asleep. Which is not unusual. But what happened when I woke up at 3:00am was.

I had a case of tourista, Montezuma's Revenge, Amenhotep's Hop, almost continuously for the first three hours, and then intermittently for the next six. It was not pretty or nice, it was the sh...ts. And it became very obvious, very quickly that I wasn't going anywhere that day. Luckily, the Boggy Creek RV Campground had plenty of open sites, so I knew that staying over would not be a problem. I slept pretty much the whole day, not being able to eat anything. Finally, at 6:00 that night, I decided that I was hungry and feeling just well enough to go buy some Campbell's chicken noodle soup and ginger ale and Imodium. Which I fixed up, ate and went back to bed exhausted.

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OK, going back to the beginning of this blog, I was going to write that the neighbors left before 9:00 so I didn't get to send them off, but Jim and I had said our goodbyes Tuesday evening. I cleaned the trailer and slowly got ready to go by noon. I had waffled back and forth between driving I10 through San Antonio or adding some miles and driving 'way south through Pleasanton. After spending far too much time trying to decide, I decided it was getting late enough that I might have trouble in Shiner. So I drove through San Antonio at 1:30 and it was just fine. No worries.

I got to the campground a little before 4:00. I told the lady in the campground that I was in a hurry, and she said "you're either going to the brewery or the Catholic church." I said she was correct on the first one. I unhooked and headed over to my Shiner destination, the Kasper Spoetzl Brewery where they make Shiner Bock Beer. This was to be a pilgrimage to the site where one of my favorite beers is brewed. (Which all this is ridiculous, I'll have a 6-pack of Shiner Bock longnecks in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator for two or three months at a time. I'll normally only drink them with Mexican food or BBQ. And Mary will drink one of those with me.) It's one of my top three favorites, along with Guinness and Anchor Steam. Yeah, it's that good.

And I missed the last tour of the day. So I got a pull of Bock and enjoyed that on the grounds of the brewery.

They had a lot of picnic tables and cornhole games around. I saw a nice tree to sit under and read for an hour. Sadly, sitting there had an effect on me beyond the tourista later.

And since I hadn't had any Mexican food for the entire trip, I found a Mexican Restaurant in town and ate there. As I was driving out of the restaurant parking lot, I saw a church spire standing above the surrounding buildings. I figured that must be the Catholic Church so drove over to see the other landmarck in town.