2-4-2011 Through 2-5-2011: Booksales and Waterfalls

The main premise for our cross country travel is to restock Richmond with quality used books from around the country, and no place is better for mass quantity and low prices than library booksales. These are hosted across America in nearly every town's library system, a way for them to weed out old books from their collection, ease themselves of unwanted book donations from well meaning patrons, and to raise money for new books and library updates. Ward's dream trip was to bounce from town to town, hitting a sale like this every weekend. In reality, there is no way to do this without traveling thousands of miles between each sale. So we had to bide our time and wait until our schedule synched up with a convenient sale. That happened to be in San Antonio. The sale was small, but their sellection was great, and we bought 6 boxes to send home. The people working the sale had never seen one person buy so many books from their sale, and were hesitant to take our out of state check, but we smiled and offered up everything but our DNA as proof that we were not flying kites across America, and they seemed to be satisfied. The volunteers were extremely nice and gave us a list of other places to purchase books before wishing us luck and prosperity on the road.

Talking about the weather has a very limited shelf life, so we left out the fact that we woke up to the sound of tires spinning on ice left from San Antonio's first snowfall in 20 years. That was the topic of discussion all morning, and was also the deciding factor in us heading north to San Marcos to camp for a couple of nights at Pecan Park, an RV site that boasted of heated pools, clean bathrooms, and electric hookups. The actual campsite didn't disappoint. In fact, despite the freezing weather, we felt like we were spoiled in paradise. Getting into the 90 degree salt water pool with a waterfall, we realized that this was the first time that our bodies had actually been warm in days. The hot tub was even better. Burst pipes had left two of the three bathroom/showers out of service, so the camp hosts had equipped our bathroom with a large space heater. We stayed for two nights.