Update from Brownsville Texas

It's been a few days since we have had easy Internet access, so I had to put updates on the back burner.

The trip from Junction to Brownsville was fairly stressful. We managed to slip between the storms, but were hit by a 35-40 mph headwind about an hour before Corpus Christi. The headwind reduced our speed to about 50-55 mph and the truck was really working to maintain that speed. Once past Corpus Christi and headed South, the headwind turned into a side wind. That got scary very quick. I started getting scared for our safety and pulled off in Kingsville Texas about 2 hours short of Brownsville. We spent the night in a small RV park listening to the wind pound the trailer. Later in the evening when the wind died down there were military jets taking off and landing (touch and go's?) every few minutes until 10:30 or so at night. They were doing maneuvers just a few hundred feet over head, so we didn't get a heck of a lot of sleep until late. I was really getting pissed off about the jets - they seemed to jet a lot of joy out of going vertical right over the RV park and rattling the windows. We picked a shitty spot to stop, but with the gusty wind we had no real choice...

We got up early the next morning and after securing a spot at an RV park for the next month, headed to Brownsville. The wind was still pretty strong, but not as gusty or scary as the previous day. We saw some air conditioning shrouds on the side of the road. Ripped right off the roof of another RV by the wind. We also had to stop at one point to secure a piece of the underside of the van. The wind had broken off a 2 foot piece of plastic shroud which was grinding on the road and thumping on the bottom of the van. I used a couple of zip ties to hold it together.

Brownsville is a lot bigger than I had imagined. It has about the same population as Eugene Oregon where we started our journey. It's more spread out I think though... The first couple of days were perfect weather. Nice and sunny and a steady wind from the East. The humidity is very high, but the wind off the gulf keeps you cool during the hottest part of the day.

Last night we got hit by 3-4 thunderstorms. One of them early this morning had 45 mph gusts along with spectacular lightning. Not a lot of rain with the storms, just wind and lightning. I was afraid of the high winds... They kept me up very early this morning watching the weather channel. North of us a couple hundred miles there were tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings, but no warnings this far South. It looks like we may have a couple more days of storms and then the weather is supposed to get sunny and breezy again. Until then, we're exploring the area and getting things cleaned up and organized so we don't feel so cramped in the trailer.