Port Isabel, TX

Easter Sunday - It’s very pleasant at 8 in the morning but still humid. We ran the A/C all night just to try and lessen the humidity. We are still running off of our water tank without issues. The “lights” still say ⅔ tank but who knows how much is really in there. 

I’m not really sure what plans there are for today if any at all. Bridget, Peter, and Carole went to the wildlife sanctuary north of here on South Padre Island. Hondo got 0.2” of rain this morning when  a storm passed to the south. I had left windows open for ventilation. Hopefully there wasn’t too much wind from the north to blow the rain in. 

The Jeep left turn light was intermittent when towing and I had assumed that it was the wiring on the 6-pin socket on the Jeep. Before we left, I took it apart and cleaned and tightened all of the connections but didn’t find anything that stood out as a problem. When hooking up the intermittent still seemed to be there. Today, I examined the 7-pin to 6-pin cable and noticed a small shard of plastic in one of the pins on the 6-pin side. After googling trailer wiring, the plastic bit was in the left-turn socket. Clipped out the plastic scrap and we’ll see if the problem resurfaces tomorrow when we head back to Hondo.

High clouds and wind was the weather for the day. I think thunderstorms are in the forecast for tomorrow. The beach was pretty empty this morning. By mid-afternoon, it was getting crowded. 

It’s supposed to rain tomorrow morning so I packed up (mostly) this evening. All that’s left is disconnecting power, pack up the leveling blocks and hooking up the Jeep. We had a wonderful visit with family and we would return to this park again. Nice sites and nice location. The only negative was all the traffic over the only bridge to/from the island. 

Starbase, TX

Saturday - Today, we ventured south to Starbase. We had breakfast at the snack bar next to Boca Chica Village. We went on a tour of the Starship factory but no pictures were allowed. Huge, impressive facility. The main door to the Megabay was open with views of the booster and the hot staging ring.

After the tour, our nephew and his wife had a crawfish boil at their home with several of their friends most of them were engineers working on Starship or the SuperHeavy booster. 

No pictures could be taken while on SpaceX property but could be taken from the road. It was fascinating to see these locations as I have been following their progress since the started here in southern TX. 

There was a lot of food in the pot. This was just the veggies. After this was blue crab, andouille sausage, shrimp, crawfish, and corn on the cob! The pot was completely full!

This is the test vehicle for the Raptor engine. It took off and made a soft landing. I believe it’s called Hopper. It’s nice to see it still around. 

This is the new launch tower for Starship. It is right next to the highway. The older launch tower is in the background. It’s nice to see  things which I’ve only seen on YouTube. 

Port Isabel, TX

Friday - Last night around 1am, I turned on the fan function of the A/C to get some air movement. It was muggy. I used the Victron app to check on the power consumption and, imagine my surprise to see the battery SoC was 81%. Apparently, our 30amp shore power connection wasn’t working. The breaker on the pedestal was toast. I switched to the 20amp outlet using an adapter. This worked. 

This afternoon, we fought the crowd to Walmart to pick up a few groceries and I found a 50amp to 30amp adapter for half the Amazon price! I’m not going to complain about that. This town is really busy since is a holiday weekend. After installing the adapter, I fired up the A/C due to the 86% relative humidity. 

We need to get an early start tomorrow…

Isla Blanca Park

Thursday - This morning we headed towards southern TX to meet up with family for the weekend. It was a windy drive with some gusty winds. The class C gets tossed around a bit more than the class A but slower speeds help. I could no longer feel the Jeep moving so the hitch gadget seems to help. 

It was about a six hour drive including a stop for lunch and gas. It’s a pretty nice R.V. park with decent size sites and reasonably level. It continues to be windy and it’ll probably continue throughout the weekend.