Saturday May 18th 2019

I made the right decision to stay Baton Rouge for a second night. The area I was heading for today is now under a tornado watch. This area has been mostly cloudy and very humid, but has only had a few micro showers of rain. A line of thunderstorms is forecast to pass through here around day break tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll have reasonable driving conditions when I hit the road in the morning.

The day of rest also allowed me to study the hype from the Weather Channel and do some internet research on the severe weather system. I came to the conclusion that crossing northern Texas was too risky. The bulls eye of the severe weather for Monday is forecast to be right over where I was planning on stopping and I learned that the Red River in the area of another campground I was aiming for is out of its banks. The southern route through Houston, San Antonio and Texas hill country is mostly south of the severe weather.

Tomorrow I’ll travel to the east side of Houston. On Monday I’ll cross Houston after rush hour and hopefully get through San Antonio before the next rush hour starts. Monday night I should be on the west side of San Antonio. If the area is clear of severe weather, Tuesday will be a long boring driving day through Texas Hill country and a good portion of West Texas. I planning on Van Horne TX for the night. It has been my choice the last two times in the area. On Wednesday I’ll finish the cross Texas journey with a stop west of El Paso. My reservation in Albuquerque starts on Friday, so I have one extra day to use. If all goes well I stay in the El Paso area for two nights before finishing the journey to Albuquerque. I’m going to be watching the weather forecast closely. I didn’t book all of my stops crossing the country for this very reason. Being flexible to avoid the worst of the weather is important.

I managed to get a few other things accomplished today. Chief among them was the laundry. It was a bit of a challenge finding the necessary number of quarters to make the machine work. For some reason it never occurred to me to get change at the campground office/store. Instead, I rummaged trough the console in my car to find five quarters to go with the ones I already had. In the end I had three extra quarters after using the twelve I needed. I haven’t been using enough cash lately to maintain a quarter supply. That’s an interesting down side to using plastic cash substitute.