We now have 75,000 miles on Arcturus, our Alpine motor home. I was having them check things like brakes and shocks. The reason I was suspicious was last winter as we were driving through Laredo, Texas we had to stop at five or six lights in a row on a stretch of 50 mph highway. Judy looked out her side of the coach and declared we had a rear tire smoking! I pulled into a parking lot and surveyed the scene and it was just hot brakes. Still it was something to check out.

Today we have the diagnosis: The rear axle seal on one side of the coach is weeping oil onto the disk brakes and the other side is just starting to ooze a little. So… tonight we are camped under the breezeway at Pacific Power. It will be $500 for the night’s camping and tomorrow they will replace the seals for free! Such a deal!

Another seal story? O.K. You remember we were headed down river with Regal Jug, our 23 foot sailboat? We were preparing the boat for launch and I started to move the outboard motor to place it on the transom. An ounce or so of dark oil drained from the lower unit onto the cabin sole. I assumed the worst case situation and decided the seals in the lower unit had been damaged. I was unwilling to take a seventy mile trip with a sick outboard, so we abandoned the trip and stored the boat for winter. Later I was trying to locate some parts to repair the motor and the service manager listened to my diagnosis. He assured me that I had misdiagnosed the problem. These Honda outboards are famous for loosing crankcase oil through the exhaust pipe when laid on their sides. It doesn’t hurt them, it just makes a mess. The seals almost never give trouble. If I had taken the chance and gone anyway we would have been fine. However, I would have stewed over the perhaps imminent failure of the outboard all the way to Astoria and back. I don’t regret taking the safe course.

If you want to review my earlier seal story look up the story of the new born seal pup in my July 14th blog.

We will see some of you at the camp-out this weekend.

Gary and Judy

What we were discovering was the history of the area. We were driving on roads with names like Mazurek, Ohnheiser, Mansik, Lidiak, Mazoch, Knape, Kallus and Guenther. These were the same names we also saw in the cemeteries at the churches we were visiting. The histories of these churches indicated that they were founded from 100 to 150 years ago by Czech and German immigrants. Early buildings were lost to hurricanes or fire, but the congregations repeatedly salvaged what they could and rebuilt again and again. We crossed trails with a tour at the 150 year old St. Mary’s in Praha Texas. The tour leader stopped to hand us some helpful literature and told us that his father had helped shape the stones that made up the walls of this church.

The roads themselves wandered around the countryside, past tidy farms and close cropped pastures. The land in this area of Texas is rolling countryside dotted with small ponds behind earthen dams. The live oak trees command the fringes and less tillable areas of the farms and some of them are huge spreading canopies with multiple trunks. The sweeping limbs frequently droop clear to the ground thirty or forty feet from the cluster of trunks. In parks it is not unusual to see these grand denizens of the forest supported by steel posts.

The churches themselves seemed outwardly to be of a common architecture. The construction varied from wood to stone to brick, but the form was a soaring bell tower with steeple above. Rectangular shape with a door in the middle of each side. Inside the arched ceiling was forty or fifty feet high and there was a balcony above the entryway which contained the pipe organ. At the opposite end, the chancel is set into the wall in a high arch. The sun was splashing through the stained glass windows in a glory of color only to be outdone by the elaborately decorated interiors of the Catholic churches. In stark contrast to these churches was the simple elegance of the interior decoration of the Lutheran church at Swiss Alp, Texas. Outwardly the building was nearly identical to all of the others.

Each community was only five or ten miles from the next, and indeed the record speaks of circuit riding preachers before communities were able to build and support their own church. We traveled almost exclusively by narrow county roads. As we approached Dubina, Texas we were privileged to cross the single lane “Piano” bridge built in 1885 by the King Iron Bridge Company of Cleveland Ohio.

Now we were riding in John and Marie’s Dodge truck for this trip of exploration. The entire circuit was just over eighty miles. There were two factors that were stacked against us for our usual bicycling excursions. The distance was a bit longer than our best 63 mile ride this year, but more importantly, Path, our gallant green dragon tandem bicycle, is feeling poorly this week. Stress fractures caused our seats to become less than securely affixed to the frame of the bicycle. I have completed the replacement parts, and as soon as I get them painted we will be back in business.

Here is a collection of photos from our tour.

Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Dubina, TX	St. Mary's, Praha, TX
St. Mary's, High Hill, TX	Balcony and Organ, St. Mary's, Praha, TX
Bilingual Relief	Piano Bridge Near Dubina, TX