lets try to work around the travis error...

I'm not crazy about this, but after spending a few hours trying to figure out why this test breaks on travis, looking at other projects that have encountered the same error, the consensus seems to be that:

1) it is probably rooted somewhere outside the code. A network socket either closing or returning something unexpected.
2) there isn't much you can do about it other than try a second time...

I'm going to merge this. If the error shows up again even with this retry in, I'll take the retry back out and go back to the drawing board.