Author: Aren Cambre

2007 Summer Family Vacation

Our 2007 summer family vacation was to New Braunfels, San Antonio, and Houston, TX. Here are the highlights.

I-35

I-35 northbound was amazingly backlogged between Austin and Dallas. We found three places where wrecks shut down one or both lanes, resulting in miles of backups. I had never seen anything like that before. Fortunately, we were headed southbound.

This was a typical backup:

Those vehicles in the northbound lanes were almost parked.

Rumors of heavy truck traffic were exaggerated. Sure, there were plenty of trucks, but cars hugely outnumbered trucks. If this trip showed typical conditions, the problem with I-35 is just too much overall traffic.

Southbound wasn’t too bad, although we could rarely sustain speeds over 75 mph.

County Line Barbecue

We went to County Line Barbecue on Bee Cave Road in Austin the first night. Great place, great view. Food is good, albeit a little pricey. We enjoyed it so much we also ate at the San Antonio River Walk location a few nights later. We would have purchased dessert if they had any cobbler besides apple cobbler!

1909 Gruene Road Bridge

By total coincidence, we crossed over this historic bridge over the Guadalupe River the very day TxDOT finally decided to replace it.

There’s nothing terribly exciting about it. The day we were there, water was coming down both slopes to the bridge. I didn’t understand why unless there are natural springs emptying out on the road or water was being pumped out and let back down?

Gristmill Restaurant, Gruene, TX

The Gristmill Restaurant in Gruene is all outdoors and a neat stop. Good food, nice change of pace. The adjacent Gruene community is a tourist trap, though.

Schlitterbahn

Schlitterbahn was about as I remembered it from church youth group trips, albeit with a third park: Blastenhoff. The only disappointment was that our 3½ year old Alec could do almost no rides due to height and swimmer capability restrictions, so that $100 of entrance fees didn’t go very far. It would have made more sense with a large group, where some could watch the kids while others have fun.

My only real complaint about Schlitterbahn is the lengthy expanses of concrete. They tear up bare feet. The only real alternative are sandals or water socks, either of which rub feet raw after enough hours of water fun.

Natural Bridge Caverns

Natural Bridge Caverns is a privately-owned cave park. It’s named after this natural bridge that’s over the main cave entrance:

The caverns were phenomenal. We did both the Jaremy Room and the normal cavern tour.

The Jaremy Room was full of spectacular soda straw formations:

The North Cavern had equally spectacular sights. Recent heavy rains caused the Edwards Aquifer to rise unusually high, flooding low parts of the cavern. This is a submerged bench where you could have gone down many more feet to see a special room:

We saw a few bats:

The last part of the North Cavern tour was the most spectacular. Below are four long exposure shots I took of its largest room:

The tour guide said you could fit a whole football field in this room. I believe it.

To be clear, even though it’s privately owned, Natural Bridge Caverns is not a tourist trap. It’s well worth the expense.

San Antonio River Walk

The night after the cave tour, and two additional nights later on, we did the San Antonio River Walk.

I think San Antonio did a great job at capitalizing on this natural resource. It’s a nice, pleasant walk, and it gives easy access from many hotels to good local attractions.

This is a scene looking north from a Häagen-Daaz that stunk of an open sewer:

Here’s the River Walk closer to our hotel, which is south of the main part. Looking south from Woodward St.:

Looking north:

The waterfall/lock/dam, just about 1000 feet north of the hotel:

Walk a little further north, cross the street, descend again, and look under a bridge, and you see this:

Every day, they parked this city truck with the rear wheels in the water! They better hope the ramp isn’t slick!

Walk a little further north, and you see the corner to turn to get to the main part:

Take a corner to the right, and the lush part begins:

Towards the southeast corner of the Walk is a theater:

The seats, on the other bank, are grass:

This is one of several rosary bridges visible from the River Walk:

Casa Rio Restaurant

Casa Rio has an entrance from street level, and it has a lot of tables on the River Walk:

This is where we ate our first night. I heartily recommend this place. The prices were surprisingly inexpensive, the service and food were great, and the river view is nice.

Rio Rio Restaurant

We ate there our last night, and regretted it. Rio Rio sucks.

Don’t bother. Crap service, food wasn’t any better than the much less expensive Casa Rio Restaurant. It took so long just to get our food ordered that we almost just got up and left like at least two other tables that night.

Inn on the Riverwalk

Fair value. See my detail post on this place.

Sea World

We really enjoyed Sea World. Alec’s inability to do most rides didn’t detract from the overall experience. There was plenty to do despite that. It was also nice that all restaurants didn’t use any trans fat-laden oils.

Obligatory picture of Shamu (mmm, tasty fish):

We didn’t sit close enough to be splashed. Alec’s cousin got freaked out by being splashed when he was 3, so we didn’t want to risk it.

A tasty fish breaching the water at a different show:

Alec feeding a tasty fish to a tasty dolphin:

($5 for 4 little fishies!)

Halfway through the day, we got Alec measured to see which rides he can do:

Alec loved the Shamu roller coaster:

That and a teacup/ferris wheel ride were all he could do. Mommy and Daddy had enough after 8 hours at the park, so Alec “only” got to ride Shamu about 7 times.

Looking back, we would have done a few things differently:

  • Stayed at a nearby hotel at least the night before and the night after. Sea World takes all day and then some. There’s no point in staying downtown if you’re doing Sea World one day.
  • Take a nap during the middle of the day. Alec still needs a roughly 2 hour nap. He skipped his nap that day. While he was tolerable, it sure would have been nicer if we could have left during the middle of the day for a nap.
  • Get the bonus 2 day pass. We purchased tickets in advance, and we thought we saw an offer for 2 days for the price of 1 day. Had we stayed at a nearby hotel, we should have pursued this. We didn’t even get to touch the water park. We probably would have done that instead of Schlitterbahn had we realized how little we could do there.

We did Sea World the day after Natural Bridge Caverns. The cavern had a ton of steps, so Alec’s legs were sore when we started Sea World. Being a very mean Daddy, I made Alec walk anyway because I knew that they wouldn’t hurt once he really started walking. (I was right.) He retorted that his legs “are gonna break off.”

San Antonio Zoo

The San Antonio Zoo was acceptable. It doesn’t deserve acclaim, and it wasn’t particularly unique.

Alec enjoyed brushing a goat in the petting zoo section:

We enjoyed a train ride through Brackenridge Park afterwards.

Our enjoyment of the zoo and the park were tempered by sparse water fountains and oppressive heat.

The Alamo

I couldn’t find the basement!

Alec in front of the Alamo:

The Alamo was originally the first of several missions that are in…

San Antonio Missions National Historic Park

…the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park. This “park” is really a set of 4 defunct missions on the south side of town. They are interesting historical artifacts and continue to have functioning Catholic parishes. They suggest what the Alamo compound was like in its mission days.

These missions weren’t intended to exist as missions indefinitely. The plan was apparently that once the population was sufficiently Christianized, the mission reverted to civil authority.

The missions seem to be in declining states of repair or prominence the further south they are from downtown.

Texas Transportation Museum

San Antonio’s Texas Transportation Museum is neat but run down. It’s a volunteer operation.

The staff were unexcited to have visitors, treating us as if opening up to the public is something they had to do, not something they wanted to do.

Central Texas Museum of Automotive History

Awesome. See my detail post.

Houston Arboretum and Nature Center

The Houston Arboretum and Nature Center was a complete waste of time unless you like walking through mosquito-infested undisturbed forest filled with non-notable flora. It was free, and I still felt ripped off.

Museum of Printing History

Houston’s Museum of Printing History was nice. Give yourself an hour just to read the stuff, longer if you want to take part in the exhibits.

A/C Blower Motor Event

Upon returning from a 11 day vacation (I’ll write about it later), I found that the house was 92 degrees inside:

This was despite a thermostat set at 85. My kitties weren’t happy!

Listening closely, I could hear refrigerant gurgling through the evaporator despite no fan.

Oh, no!

I shut the system off. Later, after inspecting the electricity meter, I found that the compressor ran almost constantly, chewing through about $190 of electricity before I caught it.

Here’s all the ice that formed on the evaporator coils (the part inside the house):

I could hide a penny in the ice:

Here’s all the water (and mold!) that accumulated next to the evaporator:

Yuck!

Ice even formed on the refrigerant return line:

Yes, ice was even on the refrigerant line outside in the upper 90s heat!

By the time I took that picture, most of the ice already melted off. The system had been shut down for a few minutes. The bottom of the condenser had a lot of water, suggesting that even the entire condenser was cool.

This is after I used my shop vac to vacuum most of the frosty ice off one side:

The ice in the very rear was solid, clear ice. I pulled that off by hand.

A new neighbor in the A/C business came by and helped me confirm that the blower motor died. He helped start it back up by manually turning it while switching on the thermostat.

Note of caution: those fan blades can eat fingertips when it’s moving. Be very careful doing this!

After unpacking the car, we left for supper and shopping. Returning about 2½ hours later, the fan had shut off again. It could not even maintain speed!

Fortunately, I already had taken off the next two work days, so the following day was spent replacing the fan.

Here’s the furnace. The blower assembly (fan) is in the back:

The blower assembly removed removed:

It’s so dirty partly because the previous owners used a low quality reusable filter resembling a thin wicker mesh coated in some blue substance. Very ineffective, and actually very costly, considering that a new blower costs a lot more than the value of a few saved filters. I could smell their nasty cigarette smoke while I was disassembling it.

Here’s the fan housing later all taken apart, with the blower separated from the squirrel cage:

Between figuring things out for the first time and dealing with a squirrel cage fan that didn’t want to budge from the blower motor, it took me about 45 minutes to do this. The bricks were used to support the bottom of the blower housing while I banged on the blower motor shaft to separate it from the fan.

At that point, I took the blower motor to my local Grainger Industrial Supply for a replacement.

Grainder technically doesn’t sell to the public; you need a business account. Fortunately, the salesman was nice enough to use my employer’s account. (I need to print up some DBA business cards so that I can register myself next time I come across this!) About $75 later, I walked out with a replacement fan and capacitor. (The capacitor sends a surge of electricity to the fan to start it up from a stop.)

Now here’s where things got a little hairy. The original Carrier furnace had a special connector to connect its primitive logic circuitry to the fan:

I knew I could rewire this, but I figured it would be best if I could find a similar connector so that I didn’t have to cut everything up. The original blower motor was permanently connected to this part, and the new blower motor just had wires ready to be crimped to something.

After a wild goose chase involving a nearby electrical parts supply, an air conditioning supply, and a motor supply house, I decided to just rewire it using standard blue butt crimps.

The new blower motor had a broken oil port cover:

Easily fixed by a dab of black RTV, left over from my Nova days:

Another problem with the motor is it had four studs that protruded way too far:

My Dremel and a cutting disk fixed that:

Test fitting the blower motor and the fan:

After about an hour of cleaning the grime and cigarette residue out of the fan and the case and reinstalling the fan assembly into the housing, I ended up with this:

Ready to be tossed back in the furnace! By the way, it was difficult to get that to fit correctly. The three arms slide into a band that is cinched around the motor. You had to hold your jaw “just so” to get it all in the right position as you tightened the band whose bolt and nut were barely accessible! That was frustrating.

Empty furnace:

Furnace with fan and wires connected using butt crimps:

My special tool to keep the door switch depressed while testing (the neighbor taught me this one!):

I got the fire extinguisher ready, crossed my fingers, turned on the thermostat, and IT BLOWS! Even though this is almost an exact replacement–almost identical specifications as the old fan–it blew much more strongly. That old fan must have been ready to go.

I can already tell this new blower has improved air conditioner performance. Temperatures are somewhat more consistent in all rooms.

The best part is I only gouged one finger:

It bled through three band aids before it came under control.

I spent the next evening sealing up a major air leak in the system. This air leak pushed nasty crawl space-smelling air into the living area of the house. The bad thing about this leak is it was across the width of the unit in the very back, where the furnace sits on the evaporator housing. (Basically, the thermostat housing’s bottom opening protruded about 1/2″ past the edge of the evaporator housing.) 2 hours of fun with foil tape and improvised tools got the leaks mostly sealed up, at least well enough that I don’t get crawl space moldy stink in my house every time I run the A/C.

Texas fishing license = revenue

At a recent Boy Scout Roundtable meeting, a Texas Parks and Wildlife police officer talked about what adult leaders should know before taking their packs and troops fishing.

A surprising fact was that White Rock Lake, an inner-city Dallas lake, is among the cleanest and most diverse sources of fish.

Toward the end of the Q&A period, I asked, “What is the purpose of licensing recreational fishers?”

Short answer: revenue. He could not identify any other purpose, although he waxed eloquently about where the revenue went.

“License” revenue generated $80 million of gross income in 2006-2007 (source). Subtract $7.7 “license” issuance costs (source), and subtract TPWD’s $45 million law enforcement budget, the minimum profit is $27.3 million. The profit is likely several millions higher because not all TPWD enforcement time is spent punishing un-“licensed” fishers.

Possessing a license is supposed to be certification that you meet a standard. We’re all familiar with the driver’s license, but there are many other forms of licensing, such as refrigerant purchase licenses, concealed carry licenses, etc.

Having money taken from you is not a “standard.” Calling this function a license cheapens the term and fuels cynicism. Just call it what it is: a tax.

10 years in Scouting

I just completed 10 years as a Boy Scout adult leader. Here’s what the top of my left pocket looks like:
Scout shirt
Left to right, top row: 3 years in Cub Scouts, 7 years in Boy Scouts, 10 years as an adult leader.
Bottom row: Eagle Scout with Gold Palm, Cub Scout God and Family award, and Arrow of Light.

District Commissioner patchI became White Rock District‘s District Commissioner last November. This means I am one of the “Key 3” adult leaders of the district.

Even though it’s called “Key 3”, I operate a staff whose sole mission is to help those “in the trenches” deliver the Promise of Scouting to their youth. This position is about helping my staff be effective in their mission. It’s not about honorifics, and I can’t stand it when people get pompous about their adult leadership positions. Scouting is about the youth, not the adults.

I have made some changes to the Commissioner Staff, but I still have a lot to do. I still need to improve information sharing and recruit more commissioners.

What movie was this?

I remember some movie from the late ’80s or early ’90s that was about a ventriloquist and his dummy. I don’t remember the plot well, but there may have been a conflict between the dummy and the ventriloquist. I recall it being very family safe.

The final scene was the ventriloquist walking off from the performance hall with Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up playing in the background. It may have been a made for TV movie.

What movie was this?

EDIT (1-21-09): The song may have been Together Forever, not Never Gonna Give You Up. Either way, a commenter has the answer: Ron Lucas’s Who’s in Charge Here? from 1983.