archived published austin part two and started on dallas piece

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+From Austin we drifted north, toward Dallas. We pulled into Fort Parker State Park on a Thursday afternoon and spent the next day watching the campground fill up. This is more or less the pattern, even in summer, the weekends are jammed full, during the week we have the campgrounds to ourselves. We passed a couple of days in Fort Parker State Park and then headed north to Plano, TX to visit Corrinne's sister and her family.
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+Thanks to the bus we ended up spending an entire week in Plano. Let this be a lesson to those of you who have invited to your homes, sometimes we way overstay to that point when the smell of rotten fish is upon us. Possibly worse we shipped a ton of parts, random purchases, laptops I'm reviewing and other stuff that piled up around the house. Seriously, think twice before you invite us over.
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+It all starts out innocently enough. We show up for a couple days, make some vague plans and then. Then.
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+The engine was, yet again, running hot on the way into Plano. I figured since we had a couple days and there wasn't really room to park on the street anyway, I would take it to a repair shop and get the radiator fixed and have a place to park -- two birds one stone sort of thing. 
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+I found a tiny pinhole size leak in the back side of the radiator, but then the shop that I went to at first turned out to not be able to solder. Kids these days. But they didn't seem opposed to me leaving the bus there for a few days, so we pulled the radiator off and I drove it over to another shop that did solder (I had the first shop replace two belts, which was about the same price as paying for a week's worth of parking). 
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+The old guy at the radiator shop -- by the way, never trust a mechanic under 50 -- took one look at the radiator and said I can't patch that. When we first got it off and I saw the back my reaction was very similar. I believe what I said was, oh shit. The pinhole leak was small enough that you could only find it when it was pressurized, but it had obviously been going for some time. And the fins were bent in at the corners which means someone had probably been in there already. 
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+Long story short, for those that don't find engine adventures entertaining[^1], I gave him the go ahead to re-core it. Expensive, but we want to be able to get into the mountains and not worry about overheating. I even considered making it four core, but held off on that since clearance could have been an issue.
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+Getting the new cores and having it all rebuilt added a weekend and some change to our stay. But it gave me time to install the water tank and get the solar panels on the roof. So I spent my morning in the alley behind a mechanic's wrestling a 65 gallon water tank under a bed and crimping pex. To do all that I had to empty out everything under the bed and pile it out in the alley with me. And then run back and fourth to home depot ten times in two days. Oh who am I kidding, it was probably almost twice that many times. I actually didn't think much of the whole project, but then one day I just left everything outside the bus while I was at home depot and I came back around the corner and realized it looked like a small tornado had hit a dumpster and blown everything all over the alley. 
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+In the afternoons I would eventually start sweating so much my eyebrows would fail me and I couldn't see anymore. I'd give up and pack it up. Fortunately there was a pool back at the house and I could spend some time recovering in proper fashion -- floating it all away. The kids of course spent nearly all their time in the pool playing with their cousins.
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+Eventually I got the water tank in and the radiator back in to. Started it up, drove home, everything seemed fine. Well. Maybe it was a tad hotter than I'd like, but it was 95 that evening so I dismissed it. 
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+We said our goodbyes and headed west, into the sunset.
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+We weren't even out of the subdivision when the temperature gauge started to climb again. There was some creative swearing in the bus for a few miles. It's frustrating to fix something and realize you didn't have the right problem, but it's even more frustrating when you spent almost $1000 doing it. I stopped at an auto parts store and let the bus cool,  while I contemplating trying to install a thermostat in the parking lot. The part store intervened and saved me from myself by not having the part I needed anyway.
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+Eventually the engine cooled and I thought screw this, let's push on. Perhaps not the best choice, but I'm stubborn and I needed to get on the road. But, I wanted to test something. Back when we first entered Texas I put some insulation around the engine doghouse, mostly just to cut down on the heat coming off the engine into the cabin, but also to cut down on the noise. It happened to coincide with the engine starting to run hot, so I thought well, let's crack the doghouse and see what happens, maybe that extra airflow was helping. 
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+Crazy, I know. But. *But*. Well, no that didn't help at all, but it did reveal something interesting -- a loud clattering sound that was previously muffled enough that I assumed it was just some pans in the oven rattling, was very clearly not coming from the cabin. The mechanically inclined could probably put those tow clues together -- rattling mettle sounds and overheating engine -- and figure out the problem. It took me about 20 miles but it slowly started to dawn on me, water pumps have ball bearings in them. 
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+[^1]: If engine adventures bore this is no the blog for you. Until we get everything dialed in I expect to have more engine adventures.
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+We eventually managed to book a campsite at McKinney Falls State Park, which is just a few miles from downtown Austin. It's a short drive into town, but it is a drive, and it is a drive through the massive sprawling suburbs that encircle Austin. 
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+Corrinne grew up here, before all the sprawl, or perhaps in the first round of sprawl. This round of sprawl has happened shockingly fast. The difference just in the six years since we were last here is astounding. One of the blacksmith's we spoke with at Pioneer Farm had a son in a high school where the freshman class is three times the size of the graduating class. 
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+Driving in we got an interesting tour of what's drawing people to town -- mostly high tech companys, particularly hardware makers -- and then the suburban sprawl where the employees live. It's easy to mock that sprawl, it's pretty ugly, but what other answer is there? Athens has had some pretty intense growth as well, and the city tried to combat sprawl by encouraging development downtown, but all that did was bring in a bunch of huge generic high rises that turned downtown into, well, it could be anywhere -- there's nothing left of the downtown Athens I knew and loved. So Austin has sprawl, but still have it's downtown. I think that's the way to do actually because downtown Austin feels and looks about the same as it did when I first drove through a decade ago. 
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+The traffic is crazy though. Our running joke was that nothing was less than a 25 minute drive away. Grocery is four miles? Twenty five minutes. Didn't matter what time of day it was, traffic was constant. In fact I passed on buying our house batteries because the shop was 15 miles away, but that 15 mile drive was never less than a 1 hour drive (according to Google Maps anyway).
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+I do still like Austin though. It's a little hip for its own good, but it has some fabulous food, great camping close to town and tons of stuff to do. It's hard to beat in that regard.
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