May 13, 2010 – Day Six

After getting everything stowed away to leave, I notice an acrid smell, at first I wondered what the dogs had gotten into, but it was getting worse by the second, and then all of a sudden smoke started to pour from underneath our bed. Oh oh!

When I opened the bed to see what was happening, the smoke was overwhelming and I was envisioning everything I had on the trip going up in a ball of flame vividly enhanced by two twenty gallon propane tanks just four away from this ignition point. I quickly closed the bed and unplugged the charger to remove the power source. I could barely breathe as the burning wire insulation gave off fumes that played havoc on my lungs. With the power source gone the smoking ended. I turned on the exhaust fans in both the bedroom and the bathroom and in short order the smoke was gone, but the stinking smell lingered, and so, too, the ash and remnants of burnt insulation.

It turned out to be the trickle charger I use to keep a 12 volt battery charged that I use with my CPAP (sleep apnea) machine when we don’t have 110 volt electricity. Apparently when I had lifted the hinged bed a few minutes earlier and then let it close, the power cord was severed in a guillotine motion shorting it out, causing the wire insulation to become red hot, melt and burn.

We grabbed the portable vacuum cleaner to clean the mess and then noticed that the bottom of the bed a one foot diameter black soot mark. That’s when we realized that we were only seconds away from a catastrophe!

Thank heavens for Fabreeze, which effectively masked all the stink.

Hopefully that’s all of that kind of excitement we’ll have on this trip. Maybe it was a good idea to get it out of the way early.

After we left Del Rio, the landscape started to dramatically change from the desert we had experienced from just east of San Diego to now, to something with more greenery and trees. But the humidity was now becoming a reality. It’s a trade-off.

We were going to stop in San Antonio and visit their famed Riverwalk but the weather was starting to look ominous. I don’t remember San Antonio being as big as it is today, I was last here in 1975 after I got out of the Navy and we were heading to Alabama in our Ford Courier with a Six Pac camper on top – and no air-conditioning – we were crazy! At that time we were traveling with our cat, Fritz, and I wanted to see the Alamo. It was easy to navigate city streets with a little pick-up even if it did have a big camper on it. But now I’m 50’ long with the truck and trailer, and it’s not that easy anymore.

We continued on the Austin, amazed that San Antonio and Austin had practically merged to become one huge 150 mile long megaplex.

This evening after having driven another 250 miles, we pulled into one of the top 100 RV resorts in the U.S. just a few miles outside of Austin very close to Lake Travis. There aren’t too many trees here, but the place is modern and well maintained, as a result a place like this commands $60 per night.

We’re right across from the acre-sized dog run. Our dogs loved being able to run free, and we were all smiles watching them have fun. But when we got them back we discovered that they were covered with 100’s of cockleburs which took Marianne well over ½ hour to cut out of both dogs. A day ago these dogs had long hair on their legs, but not now, heck their legs look scalped.

We called all our friends and relatives in Austin to let them know we arrived and we have plans for the next three days. Trailer trash now has a social life!