#63 Texas Hill Country Loop, First stop Belton Texas Walmart , we met Miss Raynell

When Glen got done with us, we went on down towards Austin because we wanted to see the Hill Country. I also thought it would be a good way to give the engine a little bit of a breaking in before we went towards North Carolina. The computer was still throwing codes and putting us into limp home mode way too often but that was unrelated to the new engine. The check engine light would come on and we would go into limp home mode that would only let you go about 20 miles an hour and no acceleration. It actually does this to protect the owner from themselves. I had the rather expensive engine diagnostic tool and I could reset the computer and we would start over again I went to a lot of calisthenics trying to figure out what the problem was. One of the codes said there was water in the fuel so I would crack the line at the fuel filter to make sure there was no water.

This had been happening ever since Washington State and gave me such a time of it up there at Port Angeles. It took over a year to figure it out. Eventually after replacing five or six throttle position sensors and lots of other problems of constantly feeling like you're going to be broken down it was bad wires. I realized that there was some ratty wires that were shorting out and the computer thought these were big problems when they were just bad wires giving bad information to the computer.

It might be nice to know it in retrospect but it is no fun while it's happening to you.

I could have just left Glen at Kaufman Texas and gone to North Carolina but I thought and had heard the Texas Hill Country was really pretty and would be nice to see. I was nice but I was told to come again someday in spring when the flowers are blooming. I put that on my to do list for the year to come . My real motivation was to go south first was this was a $4,000 job and in essence I have a new engine let's go ahead and break it in by doing a loop to the Texas Hill Country back up to Austin. If there were any problems it would be easy to drop by and see Glen 600 miles later.

The good news is there were no problems and there was nothing to see Glen about but it was nice to see the Texas Hill Country. and I amongst many people had no idea Texas was so beautiful in this part of the world in the springtime.

About halfway to Austin was a little town called Belton and it was more or less near Waco. Being in Waco was kind of like visiting the scene of a crime. I’m sure the town does not care for the name David Koresh anymore. It’s been quite a while but that’s all they’re known for nationally and that’s bound to get old. About the only thing we really did there was we stopped at a Walmart to rest our heads and ended up at a church service. We met the nicest little elderly couple and they insisted on taking us to a Mexican restaurant that day after church. I remember her name was Miss Raynell. Then they insisted on paying so that was pretty neat and that was our visit to Belton.