Week One

We have been on the road for 6 days.  That just doesn't seem possible.

We left Sunday Morning, a bit later than planned, but no big stumbling blocks.  We headed South out of Tucson and then East toward New Mexico.  That was when our first "adventure" happened.  We have good tires on the van, and no-one would have suspected that one of them would totally throw it's tread.  These are not re-treads - or at least they weren't supposed to be.  Steve was driving, and managed to get the van safely to the side of the road while I had my hands full trying to keep Ginger out of my lap.  Poor thing had never done any real traveling except from Phoenix to Tucson, and that was not a good start to her indoctrination.  We, fortunately, had brought along a full sized spare, so Steve changed the tire and we were on our way again.   Steve refused to drive the speed limit, though, afraid another tire would fail. 

We got to our first night's destination Santa Rosa, New Mexico, with little more drama (except when I tried to drain the battery by leaving the lights on when we made a pit stop).  The next day brought us to Haysville - again late.  Tasha had planned a wonderful dinner that we couldn't get to in time, but her parents got to enjoy it.  Haysville was cold and rainy, but we got all we needed to do done, and thoroughly enjoyed our time with the kids and grand-kids.

Thursday we took off for Norman and had a wonderful dinner with Hank and Carol.  Hank had just been awarded a professorship award (sorry Hank, can't remember the title) so naturally, he treated us.  The dogs had a great time chasing around the back yard of their rental home and barking at "Jackie".  Pepper could barely move the next morning.

Friday got us to Shreveport.  The surprise of the day was the beautiful country we drove through.  Gorgeous green country when I was expecting - well  - dry open Texas.  We had taken a route North of Dallas/Fort Worth, avoiding the busy freeways.  We arrived at a decent hour (finally) but the reserved room at the Hotel was not what I had requested.  I had reservations all along the route for accessible rooms - no smoking.   There we found ourselves in a smoking non-accessible room.  A call to the front desk got me a "Sorry, but we are booked up".  Later, they came to us with another room in another motel (same chain) for less money.  What happened?   Someone at the reservation desk got smoking and non smoking confused.  And it turns out a dog show was scheduled for the same day, and the whole area was crawling with poofy foofy doggys.  We finally got settled in our new room late, once again. 

Saturday started nicely uneventful.  Somewhere in Louisiana, we encountered some very rough (although, once again, gorgeous) highway.  After we got past that, the front end of our van started shaking and pulling.  We hope it will hold together another 600 miles, because there will be nothing open tomorrow, and we must move on.  If it gets worse by the time we get to Gainesville (hopefully we get to Gainesville) we may try to get it looked at before heading down to Miami.  Maybe just dump it and get a rental.

So, we have managed to get though our first week of travel.