Last Couple of Days in Fort Worth

After 11 days in Fort Worth seeing my brothers and their wives, it was time to move on and head east toward Red Bay and the Tiffin factory.  Its been over a year since we've been there and our list is growing.

But before we left town, we enjoyed our last few days together.  We spent a lot of time at Brad and Sue's, ate out alot, Sue cooked a couple of great meals and we went to church together on Sunday.  During the middle of the week, we were able to play some golf of our own.

On Wednesday, we all played at Glen Gardens which is an old golf course built in 1912.  Famous golfers Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson used to play a lot of golf here.  It was fun to see what kinds of courses they played back then.

Sue had school so she didn't make it.  Pam, Elena and Amy came out and Pam played with us.  We had fun although Pam thought the rest of us were pretty intense.  (I think they may be thinking the same thing I do:  I don't care who wins, as long as I do?...)

I think it was the sense of competition I feel when I play Marty and Brad.  They play golf pretty often and we try to do our best so it does get pretty serious out there.  I had an 80 and edge out Brad (82) and Marty (84).  Reid shot a respectable 94.  Not bad for playing once every three years.

The next day, the guys were on their own and we played at Hawks Creek golf course which used to belong to Carswell AFB.  It is now a public course and they are making some big changes.

Marty got with it and smoked us with a 76 while Brad had another 82.  I shot an 84 and Reid again had some nice shots and came in at 100.

But there was more than playing golf.  On Saturday, Pam and I went back over to the Colonial and saw some more golf.  And stopped by some of the booths.  Like other marketing events, plenty of vendors were there with some give-aways.  We could take our cell phones into the tournament grounds, but had to keep them on silent.  And no pictures of the golfers.

But I snapped one of Brian, who was a manager with Quest Healthcare.  He gave us a nice water bottle and we chatted for a few minutes.  Nice guy.

And we made it over to the Military area which was for active duty and retired folks.

It was set up over near the Country Club pool area with bleachers separate bleachers right near #1 tee.  Best of all, they had free food and drinks over there which was very nice!

We spent a few hours on the course, saw some of the leaders come through and then made our way back to the shuttle buses and returned home to watch the rest of the day's golf on TV.

One thing we during our time together was eat!  One evening we ate at Tucker Red's in Aledo.

Friday evening we went to the famous Joe T. Garcia's in the Stockyards

The outdoor dining was great.  It was my favorite venue of the places we ate.  The grounds are beautiful.

And then we went to a more upscale restaurant in downtown Fort Worth:  Reata's Southwestern Steakhouse.  We got our own private dining area and chowed down!

It was Brad and Sue's 40th wedding anniversary, we had to top it off with some dessert.

After dinner it was a beautiful evening and we wandered over to Sundance Square and watched what was going on in the water fountain.  It was a perfect summer evening.

But we weren't done.  The next day after church, we had brunch at Lucile's

and gathered for another group shot in front of the restaurant.

We went out to eat alot but we also had quite a few meals at Brad and Sue's place.  They have a beautiful home and a nice sized dining room.

Spent the afternoon and evening at their place and enjoyed our remaining time telling stories.  It is always fun to hear about what their impressions are growing up.  We always hear something new about our childhood when we get together.  And we share news about our kids and talk about how they are doing and how proud we are of all of them.

It was another wonderful Warner Brothers Reunion and we cherish our time with each other.  Not sure when we will get together again but I think Brad put it well when he said, "I think everyone had a good time and don't believe anyone suffered any psychological damage as far as I could tell..."

Thanks for joining us on the Roadrunner Chronicles!  Next time, a little bit about our trip back to Red Bay, AL.  Until next time...

Fun Times in Fort Worth

We arrived at the Cowtown RV Park a week ago and settled in pretty quickly.  The campground is only about 5 minutes from my brother and sister-in-law who live in the Lost Creek subdivision.
Brad and I played nine holes that afternoon and had a good time though we both played less than our best with matching 46's.

We followed up with 18 holes at Sugar Tree Country Club.  It was a very nice course.  I wanted to even things up a bit so, I tripled bogied the first three holes and shot a dismal 89.  Brad did no better though he had a five foot put to win the match and failed to do so.  Our version of the U.S. Open…  Still it was great fun to be on a nice course and spend time with a good guy.

That evening we 'hung out' at their place.  Their house is off the 17th hole at Lost Creek and the perfect place to chill.  And to cook steaks on a Big Green Egg Grill. I was impressed - it really gets hot in a hurry.  It is a big guy and is ceramic so it is really not an option for us.

Saturday morning Brad and I went to his church for a Men's Breakfast and I got to meet some folks.  Another nice group.  And the church is beautiful.  One of the most beautiful we have seen in our travels.

Saturday afternoon we got a windshield tour of downtown Fort Worth and Cowtown.  But that was after we had lunch at one of the unique eatery's in Fort Worth - Angelos.

As the sign says, Angelos has been around since 1958 and has good food.  The money they have made over the years has not gone into the facility -- it has a charming hunters' trophy look from days gone by.  It and its food have long enjoyed being one of Fort Worth's most recognized restaurants.  Some famous people who have eaten here include:  Mory Amsterdam, Kathy Bates, Terry Bradshaw, Ruth Buzzi, Phyllis Diller, Ben Hogan, Willie Nelson, Payne Stewart, Denzel Washington, Henry Winkler….the list goes on.  And now us!

Over the weekend we spent some time checking out cars (for Brad) and made some visits to some dealerships.

This is a photo of the one I think he is going to get.  A low mileage 2009 Lincoln MKZ.  Pretty nice ride.

On Tuesday night we went over to some friends and had a great time seeing them and spending a nice evening.

The next night we ended up at Cotton Patch Cafe.  Surprisingly, it was good food and a good price.  For a chain it was somewhere we'd gladly go to again.

We hadn't seen Brad and Sue since August of last year and it was fun to spend time with them.  We look forward to our next trip to Fort Worth.

That is it for this edition of the Roadrunner Chronicles - thanks for joining us!
Until next time...

Last Day in Texas for a While

Welcome to:

Me and My Dog (Katie)

Our latest Follower!  If you get a chance take at look at her blog 
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We got Kelly all packed up and the house cleaned up so we took it easy yesterday.  The PODS people were supposed to come and pick up the unit.  After that we only had a couple of things scheduled.  We met some friends Kelly wanted us to get together with for coffee and bagels and to talk.  It was nice to meet Mary and Rebecca.

After that Kelly went back to her house for the day and Pam and I drove over to Fort Worth.  It was my
brother Brad's birthday so he and I went to play golf at Squaw Creek while Pam went to get her hair cut and to run some errands.

I was hitting them pretty well on the practice range made some errand shots on the front nine and shot 42.  On the back nine I hit some more than ugly ones and shot a 46.  It was enough to get humbled badly by his  39 and 42.  He played well and he should have---it was his birthday!

The winning golf swing

After that, we went back and talked for a while.  After Sue got home we called and then picked up pizza for dinner.  Sue is a counselor at a local high school and already has earned her pay for the year.  What a challenge (is that the right word) at this time of the year to get all the students scheduled with the right classes!  Ugh!  I don't know how many weekends they have worked in the past six weeks but it has been a lot...  If you are (or have been) a high school counselor, may hat is off to you!

Kelly went out to dinner with friends and we came back to the Roadrunner to pack away things and get ready for a 9:00 AM ish departure.  We are headed to Red Bay Alabama to get some work done on the coach at the factory.

Thanks for viewing today!  We love hearing from you so thanks for the comments!

Learning Lots in Texas

We are in Day 2 of our four day trip from Red Bay to Tucson. It was a bit cold last night but the generator kept the heater running and we were quite comfortable.

Before Pam got into the shower, she noticed some frost on the top of the skylight.
Yikes!

We got underway about 8:00 AM and I drove until we passed across the Louisana/Texas state line. We stopped at a nice Texas Visitor Center to walk around and to change drivers.
Pam drove almost 5 hours yesterday which was her longest one day total yet. As always she did well and I was able to do more work (for pay) online. Sadly, no time yesterday for any siestas...

It was another beautiful day. It was still cool--never got above the low 50's.Yesterday I was going to show you how far we went, but didn't know how to do a Screen Capture on Pam's iMac. But Rick knows how to do that and offered his help in Comments to yesterday's Roadrunner Chronicles.

Rick has a great blog of his own and he is good at explaining things. I especially like his brief, easy to follow tutorials on:
- Mifi and broadband
- How to beat the 5GB limit (resizing photos)
- Sony bookreader and the Kindle 2
There are plenty of others too, I just highlighted a few.
Plus he is a good photographer and takes some great pictures. You might want give Rick and Paulettes RV Travels a look.

Back to our travels:
Here is what our first Day and 393 miles (Red Bay Alabama to Ruston, Louisiana) looked like.
Day 2 we went 478 miles (Ruston, Louisiana to Sweetwater, Texas).
We ended up in Sweetwater and parked overnight in the Walmart parking lot. It was still a pretty nice day outside when we stopped about 4:30 PM.

Then uh oh....

Pam checked the Honda and the battery was dead. Thankfully we had some long jumper cables courtesy of my brother-in-law Mike. He gave us a set a few days ago.
Basically he saved our bacon. We were able to charge the car and re-look at our procedures for getting the toad set up. I think we turned the key to the #2 position instead of the number #1 ACC position and drained the battery. We are learning... We may also need to pull the radio fuse.

We left the Honda charging for a while and it checked out fine. Later, we had cordon bleu, mashed potatoes and a salad for dinner. I did a little more work online and Pam watched some football. How about those Browns!

We were pretty whupped so we went to bed around 9:30. We have another long day another and we are hoping to make it to Deming, NM.

Thanks once again for joining us on the Roadrunner Chronicles!

On the Road Heading East

On Sunday we went to Christ Chapel in Fort Worth. The young pastor had a good message on The Heart of the Motive out of the gospel of Luke. What motivates you? Duty and Fear or Love and Obedience?After church we went back to the campground and dumped the tanks. The weather forecast on Monday said rain and cold, so we wanted to get that done while it was decent. Plus I wanted to have everything done so we could just hitch up the toad and leave without delay on Monday AM.

Next we went over to Brad and Sue's to spend the rest of the afternoon. We watched some football and had pizza for dinner. Sue did some exercises and is really doing great! The new knee is getting more flexible every day. She is doing real well with the Physical Therapy too. We are very excited for her!

Kelly headed back to Fort Worth and another work week in Dallas with 5G. We heard from Adam and he is moving from Croswell MI to just outside of Detroit. We look forward to seeing both of them in a few weeks. They are flying to Arizona and we all will drive to San Diego for Christmas.

It turned out to be a beautiful morning and I took a few more pictures of our campground at Holiday Park, COE recreation area at Benbrook Lake.
We have 701 miles from Benbrook to Red Bay Alabama, and we wanted to get as many miles as we could. Along the way we passed a milestone: we have put 10,000 miles on the Allegro Bus since we bought it May 22, 2009.
The odometer read 21,156 when we bought our RV in May. I did not think we would put that many on it in the first year, let alone the first six months. I guess naming it the 'Roadrunner' is fitting.

I love driving this coach. It handles very well and is a comfortable ride. We left about 8:30 ish and got past Jackson MS by 5:30 or so. We are in a Jellystone Park campground. We pulled up as they were closing but were able to get a nice site (I think since it was dark when we hooked up). The main thing is that we wanted to get hookups since the weather is supposed to get down into the high 30's/low 40's.

We had a frozen dinner and watched some football before we called it a night. We have about 250 miles to go to get to the Tiffin factory for our appointment and it looks like we will be able to check in a day early. We want some other work done in town also.

Thanks for viewing the Roadrunner Chronicles! We always appreciate your comments. Feel free to 'Follow' us by clicking on the right panel. We still have a ways to go to get to our goal of 100 'Followers'. Thanks again and have a great week.

Cowtown

Fort Worth was settled in 1849 and became the last stop on the famed 'Chisholm Trail' where thousands of cattle were moved north to cattle markets in Kansas. With the arrival of the railroad, Fort Worth was a major shipping center for livestock in the 1880's. Fort Worth continued to grow in the 1900's with the discovery of oil in East and West Texas and now is the fourth largest city in Texas.

We wanted to see some of the interesting spots and decided to go to the National Historic District Fort Worth Stockyards on Saturday and spent a couple of hours walking around.

Fort Worth still maintains a western heritage and keeps it alive through a very strong educational and visitor center program. The cowpokes shown in the following pictures work for the city Visitor/Tourism Bureau. They were great and even stopped to talk and point their horse toward the camera for a better picture.

There are a lot of shops, hotels, eating establishments and historical points of curiosity at the Stockyards. We walked by the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Cowtown Coliseum which is near the Stockyards.

There were a lot of street vendors, entertainment and curiosities along the main street. I have never seen someone ride a Texas Longhorn!We stopped an talked with some posers. 'Phineas Navida' hammed it up a bit with Kelly and ended up wearing her sunglasses for a picture.

The corral was at one end of town with the Longhorns. Those cows are quite impressive beasts. Twice daily the cowboys round them up and run them down through town from the stockyards to the coliseum, so folks can get an inkling of what it might have been like back in the day.
Did you know that there are seven types of Longhorns?

Kelly and I took turns seeing it we could stretch our reach to that of the Longhorns spread.

We had a good time and learned some things. I have been coming to Fort Worth for 30 years but have never been to 'Cowtown' and the Stockyards. It was a very interesting place. We have to go back and spend more time.

Hope you have a great week. We'll be leaving Benbrook Lake/Fort Worth and heading east for our appointment in Red Bay, AL.

Before I go, I want to thank you all for reading the blog --- appreciate it! We also love the comment, keep them coming! :)

Repairs Day

While Pam and Kelly ran errands and did some shopping in Fort Worth, I got a couple of repairs done; namely Pam's bike and my laptop. I also had time to do some other chores around the Roadrunner back at the Army Corps of Engineers campground.

Early in the morning I got a call from the Dell Technician who was going to replace my hard drive. He said he'd be there after noon.

That gave me some time to work on the bikes. Pam's bike needed a new inner tube so I replaced it.

That didn't take too long and I pumped hers and mine up to the proper psi and put it aside for a while.

Next, since it was such a nice day I decided to get some work done on the Apple outside. A little while later Ray, the Dell technician called. I directed him to our campsite and he was ready to go.

He swapped out the hard drive in about 5 minutes and then spent about 25 minutes doing the paper work so he could ship parts back to Dell. I am pretty impressed with how their repair process works.

I went online with Dell Support on Monday night. They determined I had a hard drive failure and sent parts to Ray. He called Friday morning and set up an appointment with me and I am all set up. Hopefully in the next few days I can get my old laptop fixed up with all my software.

After Kelly and Pam got back by mid afternoon so I decided to clean Kelly's car. It was pretty dirty and I used The Solution. It took about an hour to clean it up and looks great, so she was pleased.

While Pam was cooking some lasagna for dinner, I went for a short bike ride around the campground.

The campground has some hills and goes along Benbrook Lake . I see a number of groups of cyclists every day riding through the campground. My ride was only about 30 minutes and I needed to get back so we could go over to Brad and Sue's.

We had a nice dinner and watched some TV for a while. We saw a portion of The Proposal but the DVD player messed up. It was about time for us to go back to the campground so we said good byes and returned home.

We watched the remainder of the movie back at the Roadrunner. The coach has 'Surround Sound' and we enjoyed the movie. It was a late night for us and we headed to bed after 11:30.

We had a good day of getting some things done and enjoying the day. Pam and Kelly made their way through some stores on Black Friday and picked up a couple of bargains.

That's about it for now. Hope you are having a good weekend. Thanks for viewing the Roadrunner Chronicles! Hope to have you stop by again!

Thanksgiving Days

Hope you all had a very nice Thanksgiving Day!

The last few days have been beautiful here at the Holiday Park, COE campground at Benbrook Lake.

Pam and I went for a little hike the other morning and had a good time. The park has a modest 'Nature Trail' we hiked. Then we walked around a large section of the campground and enjoyed the good weather and nice day. We need to walk more often.

After our hike we had lunch and Pam ran errands. While she was gone I decided it was time to 'wash and wax' the Roadrunner. It was pretty dirty and it has been a while since I cleaned it. I bought Protect All from Camping World but don't like it as much as The Solution.

When we were with Mark and Dortha the other day, I bought some from him. I like the way it cleans and it has a very thin film to wipe off compared to the heavier, more 'wax-like' Protect All. Both are waterless cleaners.

It took me about 3 hours to finish most of the coach. I will do the windshield and front cab when I have more time to get all the bugs and creatures off. After I finished the rest of it, the Roadrunner sparkled and looked great. Plus I got some good exercise. Kind of like mowing the lawn except not the same. :)

While were in Canada this summer we saw Ladderball, an outdoor game. It really intrigued us. Later, in Sioux Falls we saw the game again and bought it at Menards. Ladderball is really a lot of fun. I set it up and we played in the backyard yesterday while the turkey was cooking.

Each player has three 'balls'. They are actually a set of two balls that larger than a golfball and smaller than a baseball and soft plastic. They are connected by a 12 inch rope. When you throw them, they wind themselves around one of the blue/red/white bars.

Brad came out the big winner and retired undefeated. He had help from the cheering section on the sidelines where Sue watched.

Our Thanksgiving Day spread was buffet style. We put the food on the coffee table and ate on TV trays and a card table in the living room. Meanwhile, the Cowboys played pretty well and won again on Thanksgiving Day.

As usual we ate too much (who doesn't on Thanksgiving Day). Kelly is staying with us and we returned to the Roadrunner before the 10:00 curfew. We had a nice Thanksgiving but missed our boys (Adam and their two sons, Mark and Drew).

That is about it for today's edition of the Roadrunner Chronicles. Thank you for viewing! We appreciate it!

Full-timing in Fort Worth...

One great aspects of being full-time RVers is having the opportunity to be with friends and family. This one of the many things about this lifestyle we are very thankful for. We don't take this for granted and are so grateful things worked out so we be out here.

Pam and I spent 17 years on the East Coast and a large part of my family is west of the Mississippi. We have taken a few trips over the years to see family but never got see to our family as often we would like. Now - we look forward to setting up trips and expect our visits to increase. Right now we get to spend a few days near Brad and Sue for the second time in six months.

Yesterday before we went over to Brad and Sue's, we hit the gym. We used the Fitness Center at Naval Air Station, Carswell Joint Reserve Base. It is about 20 minutes from the campground.

We had a good workout and then ran a couple of errands before we met Mark and Dortha for lunch.

We got to meet them for the first time in June when we were here and continue to follow them on their blog. We had a ton of questions about their summer trip to the Midwest and Northwest. Recently they also took a trip to Red Bay (Tiffin Factory).

They have a beautiful 2009 Phaeton and invited us over to take a look. It is a beautiful motor home! They have a lot of different options and have had some custom work done in Red Bay.

Dortha picked up a little laptop table that looks nice and is very functional. It is near an ottoman/storage bin they had made at Red Bay. Both fit very well and look great.

We talked for a time and we had a thousand questions about things. They were glad to answer them all and our time passed too quickly. We look forward to seeing them again!

Next, we picked up some Thanksgiving food

before we went over to Brad and Sue's for the rest of the day.

Jo and Andy dropped by for a few minutes. Sue and Jo have been friends for a long long time. Sue continues to make very good progress. I am amazed at how this whole knee replacement process has gone...

Later, Pam fixed Sloppy Joe's and we watched TV before we back to the Benbrook Lake, COE Recreation Park and our campsite. We stayed up a bit, but went to bed pretty early (9:30 PM).

That wraps up another day in the life of the full-timing Warners! Thanks for viewing the Roadrunner Chronicles today!