Texas A&M University

Monday, April 11 - Bridgette called from Tampa about 5:30 (Texas time) to let us know their flights had all been on time and they were in the car, just about home.  We were glad to leave the humidity and wind of Corpus, and we saw on the news this morning that a wildfire had burned 40 residences in the Ft. Davis area, where we were about 10 days ago.  We were sure glad to be away from that, but we have noticed that Texas is really dry.

We had a nice evening at our little campground, and we even had a few raindrops during the night -- just enough to mess up the windshield so Joe had to get out the ladder again.  But we liked this campground, which we just happened on because it wasn't listed in any of my directories.

There was a little waterfall here, and it is actually a working longhorn cattle ranch, so we got to see a few of these cows up close.

We broke camp and headed to College Station.  We parked on the Walmart parking lot and unhooked the car, then our first stop was the George Bush Presidential Library on Texas A&M's campus.

This was a very nice facility, and we spent about 2 hours there.  We watched a video and toured the various rooms.  A portion of the exhibits focused on the taking down of the Berlin wall, and there was a statute outside memorializing this event.  It is called "The Day the Wall Came Down," and depicts horses being set free.

We left there and drove through part of the Texas A&M main campus, which is enormous.  We entered it in the sports complex area, so we got a few pictures of those buildings.

We drove past some of the classroom buildings but only actually saw a small portion of the campus, which was really crowded with students.  This is one of the Engineering buildings.

Our last attraction to see in College Station was the Texas World Speedway, which John had raced his motorcycle on.  We finally found it, but the gate was shut so we didn't see much here.

Our GPS, Lucille, got a little confused in this area, so we were really glad to see our RV on the Walmart parking lot again.  We weren't sure how we got back there, but we did, so all ended well.  Our day got long, though, when we got to Tyler.  First, we were going to stay on the Walmart parking lot, but the first Walmart was really un-level, and the second one was closed, and posted No Trespassing.  So we decided to try to find Tyler Fittings, the company that Eric works for, but they didn't come up on our GPS.  We called Tiffany and got an address, but that didn't come up either.  So we found an address that was close and headed that way, but it was getting late and we really didn't know where we were going, and we were driving in rush-hour traffic.  Finally, I called a campground and we worked out way out to it.  We missed the turnoff to it and went to the next road (Lucille directed us there), and interestingly enough, we ended up on the road to Tyler Fittings (but it was back the other way).  Then, when we got the brochure from the campground, it had directions to local businesses, including an RV accessory shop.  The directions to that shop, it says, takes you past the Tyler Pipe Foundry, which is real close to that RV shop, so we may find it after all.

The campground, 5 Star RV Park, turned out to be another good one, and it was cheaper than the state park, so that was good.  We are going to run out past Tyler Fittings in the morning, then head out of Texas.  We think we will be sleeping somewhere in Arkansas tomorrow night.

Today Tiffany turned 40, so we called and sang Happy Birthday to her.  Cody got his beginner's permit on Friday, and she said she had aged more over the weekend with Cody driving than she had facing her 40th today.  She said it had been cold all weekend, in the 40s, and there was snow on the Superstition Mountains.  Since we suffered through the heat wave that caught up with us, we are hoping the cold spell catches us as well.  However, it is really nice this evening, in the 70s, so maybe we are out of the heat for a while.  We drove 240 miles today, even with our stop in College Station, so we are making progress toward Indiana.