Day 37 -- Monroe, Louisiana to Longview, Texas -- 152 Miles

Yesterday got started with an all too customary trip to the tire store. Fortunately, I found a Firestone dealer who told me he had just the tires I wanted. Only problem was he couldn't work on the rig until 11:00 a.m. since he was booked up with appointments until then. So, having no real choice but to take the offered appointment, we cleaned up our camp, left some money in the RV camp office box, and motored over to the dealer to hang out in their parking lot.

If this sounds like Deja vu all over again, it is. On this trip we purchased two new tires in Dandridge, Tennessee, two new tires in Statesville, North Carolina, and now two new tires in Monroe, Louisiana.

And it looked like the Monroe Firestone shop was ready to do the tire installation around 9:30, which would have been wonderful. But the puney hydraulic jack the store had on hand didn't have a hope of lifting the rig off the ground. So we purchased the tires, then headed off down the road to a discount tire store which purportedly had a decent jack. So now we're waiting again.

Though I wasn't at first pleased with the look of the discount tire store, nor the cadre of very young employees, as it turned out the store and the employees were fantastic. Great care was taken to make sure we had what we needed and just after 11:00 a.m. we were able to hit the road again quite satisfied with the job that was done for us.

It turned out that though the outer tire of the passenger-side dualie was destroyed, the inner tire was still in great shape. This tire became the new spare as our existing spare was twelve years old and not safe to use, nor serviceable at modern tire shops.

There were a couple of dings in the steel wheel where the ruined outside tire was removed, but the technicians said they weren't significant and could be banged back into place. Before long both the new tires were mounted and balanced and replaced on the rig. The jack was removed and we were ready to go.

Most of the day went pleasantly enough. We stopped for lunch at a roadside rest in Louisiana, then continued our journey west toward Dallas, Texas, where my neice, Sherry, and her family live. Fortunately our trip was largely uneventful, though a couple of times traffic was reduced to one lane because of pretty significant 18-wheeler accidents.

At the end of the day we found an incredibly nice camp in the Texas town of Longview, though we checked out a couple of really unsuitable camps before we found Fernbrook. The first one we rolled into was so dingy and rundown that I immediately turned around and left before anyone noticed us. The second would have been okay, but it was completely full with long-time tenants. Permanent tenants has become commonplace in most camps.

Fernbrook, on the other hand, tops the list as one of the most modern and pristine we've seen on this trip. All the sites have widely spaced and level concrete pads. The streets are all paved and not the dirt or gravel we see so often. The laundry facility was large and modern. Seeing that the laundry was basically empty, we lost no time in gathering up things in need of washing and dashing over there once our camp was set up.

And that's it for yesterday's events. Since we got such a late start back in Monroe, we didn't try to stop at any historic sites. Fortunately we didn't really see anything to drew our interest.