Get out of my SWAMP!

11:35 am March 17, 2009 Oh wow, it’s St. Patrick’s Day.
Ok, ok, for the billionth time, I promise, I won’t mess with Texas! Good god almighty, these signs are everywhere. I figure they post them every 10 or 20 miles and when you are crossing the home of our illustrious former president you go about 700 + miles so I figure I’ve been told about 70 times not to mess with Texas, but they only tell you one time what exactly they mean by that. When you cross the border into Texas, you get the requisite “Don’t mess with Texas” sign but with a translation below it for those non-Texans among us, that says “Please don’t litter.” So ok, I won’t.
I might actually get internet access and be able to post today from the lovely Corpus Christi Lake KOA campground. I have lost count of the number of times we have yelled at each other…”all of you fairy tale creatures, GET OUT OF MY SWAMP!”
And a swamp it is. But getting here from the desert to the swamp was the interesting part. Yesterday morning we had a relaxing morning in Whites City New Mexico. I made pancakes for breakfast, a pot of coffee and started a loaf of bread in the bread machine and did a load of laundry. (We do more before 9 am than most people….ok, ok, I’ll shut up!) Then we packed up and got on the road. We intended to use the bread for sandwiches that afternoon, but realized we had no bread knife with us and therefore no way to slice the bread. Believe it or not, we stopped at a Wal-Mart along the way and they did not have a bread knife (obviously not a supercenter). So we carried on, and had the interesting and frightening experience of having the car battery die at a rest area. Luckily the guys parked in front of us happened to have jumper cables and a good disposition. We decided to get as close to the coast as possible and to make an obnoxiously long story short, we made it as far as Corpus Christi Lake (we are about an hour from the coast). When we arrived at 5 am this morning (no joke) we parked the camper and it began to rain. Sure, you’re thinking, so what? Well, first of all, we’ve never had this camper in the rain (we have never come this far East in the camper…) so we had no idea if it was actually waterproof. We woke up dry, so now we know. However, for the sake of demonstration, imagine that you are in a giant Campbell’s soup can, trying to sleep and a hail of beebees keeps falling on the can. That gives you a close approximation of what it sounded like. But it was 5 am and it was clean, dry and legal. I was happy. Then it happened. It started as a faint rumble and got louder. It wasn’t like we hadn’t seen the train tracks, we had driven right over them on the way in, but when we parked we had no idea that we were about 20 yards from the tracks. And oh my god, you want to talk LOUD…as the foghorn thing blared several times Charlie raced to the back of the camper to calm any panicked kids if they woke up.
And there you have it, proof positive that you can INDEED drive a freight train through the kids bedrooms and they won’t wake up.