As we expected, we got as far as San Antonio last night. It wasn’t that late when we pulled into the San Antonio KOA but we really wanted to be off the interstate before the temperature got below freezing. During the day the roads were in decent shape, everyone was pretty much driving the speed limit, but as we drove past all the abandoned vehicles still on the side of the road, we were reminded not to mess with these conditions. Even though the weather was improving, it was still supposed to get into the 20s at night.
The San Antonio KOA seemed nice. We got set up and still had some daylight left to us so we all went for a walk. The KOA is located right next to a creek side walk/bike trail which provided us a nice location for our walk. Boomer appreciated all the squirrels and the boys made sure to carry on with their tradition of turning any available snow into ammo to throw at each other. The KOA had some nice amenities: a pool, dog park, restaurant, playground, and fishing pond. We did let Boomer run around the dog park by himself for a bit but we skipped out on all the rest.
After spending the night we debated on whether or not to try to visit the Alamo and the River Walk area before leaving town. After looking at the general vicinity around the Alamo with Google satellite photos it seemed like parking our RV anywhere near that area would be challenging… at best. There is a city bus that connects the KOA to the Alamo but between Covid and Boomer, we decided to pass on that as well. In the end we decided to press on towards White Sands National Park, which is our next destination. We’ll have to add the Alamo and San Antonio RiverWalk to our ever growing list of places we almost got to see but didn’t and want to come back for another day (we’re still thinking of a better name for that list). Sigh. It’s going to be so nice to some day make a trip like this without needing to keep to a schedule that must consider school and work, and of course not needing to worry about some nasty virus will be a huge relief as well.
In addition to ice on the roadway, we learned about another hazard – orange road construction barrels. They’re pretty ubiquitous on the freeway but San Antonio must have got a screaming good deal on them because the city placed them EVERYWHERE. Normally they have rubber bases to give them weight and help keep them in place, but maybe the screaming good deal didn’t extend to those based because many of the ones we saw in San Antonio didn’t have them installed.
We ended up having two of these barrels knocked into our way while driving on the freeway through San Antonio. The first one was when we were driving into town – a pickup truck made a very poorly executed last second exit off the freeway and clipped one that ended up right in front of us with no room to maneuver around it. That one cracked our front cowling. The second one was the morning we were leaving. A semi just seemed to drive by one that may have already been on it’s side and it rolled right into our path at the last second. Both times we had to pull over and extract the barrels from under our RV. I’m still hoping the damage didn’t extend beyond the cowling caused by that first impact. We actually caught both instances on the RV cam but I’m not sure how much good that will do us, even though that first incident was clearly caused by someone’s careless driving. In related news, the boys may have just learned that their dad sometimes has quite the potty mouth.
As I’m typing this we’re a few hours west of San Antonio and about halfway home. Our target for tonight is probably going to be a Walmart close to White Sands. There’s no RV camping in the national park itself and we’re not sure there’s much point in staying at an RV park if the weather is going to be ok, especially if we’re just going to leave first thing in the morning to visit White Sands.
