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Monday, March 2, 2009

A Quiet Day at Home

I don’t want to say it was a lazy day because we both got a lot of things done, especially stuff which needed to be done in preparation for moving tomorrow, but one in which we enjoyed.  I even got the dreaded defrosting of the freezer done.  I also did another load of laundry to clear out the dirty clothes hamper.  The washer is only a dollar here and a dryer is 75 cents.  Very few places are that cheap so I took advantage before our departure.  Gene got the truck windows cleaned and trailer tires aired up.  He also reviewed our bank e-statements and declared we have enough money to last til the end of the month.  Well, that was good news.  We each spent a portion of the afternoon with good books.  So, even though a great deal of work was done, it was still a very relaxing, lazy sort of day.

This day started out on the very cool side at about 35.  Thank goodness it didn’t get as cold last night as they were predicting—28.  However, as the sun came up things warmed up quickly and in the end we had a glorious, sunny afternoon with temps around 70 and very little wind.  As we went for our walk around the campground this afternoon, we saw many folks out enjoying the day.  There were several who appeared to be readying their rigs for travel.  We have noticed over the past couple of weeks that the campgrounds are showing several empty spaces now as the “winter Texans”, or “snowbirds”, are starting their northern migrations.

I just have to say a few words about tea.  Good southerners that we are, we enjoy a big glass of iced tea.  My favorite glass of the day is the one I have after dinner.  For some reason I don’t enjoy any of the others as well.  Since we have been in Texas, we have been having some difficulty with making tea with the water we get at the campground.  My tea recipe is simple and I got it from my good friend, Rich Shaw.  I have modified it a little bit because he makes his tea in the microwave, but I took his basic instructions along with a few words Barefoot Contessa said on her Food Network show one day to come up with what we like.  I bring one quart of water to a boil on the stove.  When the water is boiling, I turn off the heat and put in one family size tea bag (Lipton).  I set the timer to let it steep for 5 minutes.  When the timer goes off I take the tea bag out of the tea.  I let it cool in the pan and never pour it into tea made previously (Alton Brown said not to do that on one of his Food Network episodes).  This makes the strength of tea we like and it is a crystal clear light amber color.  The water from the campgrounds here in Texas makes a very dark tea (about the color of cola) which has a light scum on top.  Within 24 hours it is very cloudy.  We started buying bottled water for tea and that has worked out well, though a bit inconvenient.  However, today I was very discouraged when even the Hill Country brand bottled water made a dark tea.  I guess I need to stick with Wal-Mart brand water.

Tomorrow is a travel day, but it shouldn’t take long as we have less than a 100 miles to go.  Our new campground will put us in a better location for exploring Fredericksburg and the Hill Country.  It will also be closer to Austin and closer to San Antonio than we are now.  We have enjoyed being at this Escapee campground, but we have very poor TV reception and are, for some reason, in a dead zone for our Verizon phone service.  Now that has been a bother.

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