Daily Narrative    Those of you we've talked to know that this is a day we haven't been looking forward to.  The day we drive into Texas.  Texas has had temperatures averaging in the lower 110 degree range, is awefully wide, and lays directly between us and and any states with mountains.  The only aspect of Texas we have been looking forward to is the promise that eastern humidity ends around San Antonio.  With visions of pounding out the state in one long morning, an afternoon holed up in an air conditoned location, and a long evening, we left New Orleans at 5:00am.  True to our plans, we knocked out the rest of Louisiana and were across the Texas Border by 10:00.  We headed south to Port Arthur for a break and to visit the local museum for a Janis Joplin exhibit we had read about, this being her hometown.  Port Arthur turns out to be an unpleasant sprawl surrounding a dying downtown, but in the middle of downtown is a great little museum.  The Joplin exhibit was interesting, but we don't recommend making the detour just for it.  But maybe we're just bitter, because it was on the way from Port Arthur back to the interstate, as we were discussing where to hide for the afternoon, that the bus stopped running again.  We appreciate the compliments we have recieved from friends with regard to our continued composure as the bus occasionally cries out for help.  We think we would have made you proud today.  After rolling to a halt on the side of the road, we gathered our lawn chairs, road atlas, note pad, pen, and AAA card and headed for some shade on an access road.  We called AAA and got a tow heading our way, Theresa pin-pointed and reserved a kamping kabin at the closest KOA in case we were stuck for the night, and Brian found a local shop that works on air-cooled Volkswagens south of Houston and within towing distance.  The tow arrived and carried us the 40 miles to Pasadena, where we found a suburb of Houston we shouldn't have been in and two stellar mechanics who dropped what they were doing to get us on the road again.  An hour later they had us running again, charging us only $35 in labor and $30 for a new set of points, condenser, and a coil.  There you go, four hours and $70 from roadside breakdown to rolling again.  Not too shabby, we say.  Our issue with how to spend the afternoon settled, we headed west with renewed vigor and moved on through Houston and San Antonio.  We came to rest for the evening in the cool, non-humid town of Kerrville very late with the alarm set for a few hours later.

---

Daily Pictures

The bus preparing for an early morning escape from New Orleans	The sun rises over Lake Pontchartrain
Cows in bayou country	Crossing the Mississippi at Baton Rouge
Southern Louisiana had a lot of these causeways built over canals in swamps	The huge Henderson Cypress Swamp was pretty fascinating to see
We thought there'd be a little more fanfare	Brian tries to grab a souvenier, ultimately we couldn't get it lashed to the roof rack
Theresa assesses a little Texan art	The Texas Welcome Center includes a boardwalk over a cypress swamp out back
These retro cypress trees have bell bottomed trunks	Theresa studying up on little snake info, feet far from the ground
A small  piece of "the largest indoor mural in south east Texas"	This is an authentic "replica painted in the style of "Janis Joplin's Porsche
Meaning, of course, that it was not only not her Porsche, but it didn't have the same paint job either...	Some of the art on the wall was, however, hers from high school and college
Brian was enthused to find out that the nearby town of Beaumont was the childhood home of Edgar and Johnny Winter	Port Arthur is also the hometown of Robert Rauschenberg, and the museum had a nice installation of his work.  This is an album cover he did for the Talking Heads
This kind of sums up historic downtown Port Arthur for Brian	Feeling bad for us aren't you?
Theresa doing a little research on lodging	Our tow arrives.  Not really much of a tow truck and a driver reminiscent of a few Texas Chainsaw Massacre characters
A very small piece of the huge pretroleum refining plants in the area.  This stuff stretched for twenty miles of our tow to Pasadena	Not too many hours later, on the road again
The maze of San Antonio came late in the evening...	...it looks like a pretty city, but it was kind of nice to finally find our way out of it

---

Back To Road Trip Main Page