DAY 157 FRIDAY 15th FEBRUARY 2008

Big Spring, Texas (Miles to Date: 16680)

It has been a very frustrating few days. After the weekend we had a few telephone conversations with the RV dealership we had visited the previous week near Houston and decided to upgrade our current motor home to the one we had seen the previous week. After all we had had this one for about 5 weeks now!!! We also have the news that the repair work will not be ready on the Jeep until later in the week – supposedly an administration error meant the required parts had not arrived. So off we set back to Houston. As is normal with these things it took longer than expected to get things sorted with transferring over the motor homes – not only physically moving our possessions from one to the other but we had some modifications to make to the new coach. Anyway two days later we leave Houston and head back to San Antonio to retrieve our Jeep. We decided not to find a campsite- instead we park up at a Cracker Barrel restaurant (for you non-US readers this is a chain of restaurants offering good old Southern Style cooking). We had heard they didn’t mind motor homes stopping overnight in their car parks so we thought we would try it out. It only seemed fair to eat there as well so we had dinner there and breakfast. This was a first real road side stop!

Today we picked up our Jeep. The whole repair business had been somewhat farcical – we had the delay in getting the parts in but after a week the job was done. Unfortunately we had bought a supplementary braking system for the Jeep to enable us to tow it behind the motor home. The getting of the braking system, which we foolishly bought on the Internet to save a buck, was just a disaster as was getting the repair work done on the Jeep. It was meant to be delivered to a friend in Florida, but instead got sent to our mailing box in New York and in trying to get it shipped overnight to San Antonio it got delayed by bad weather and ended up taking 3 days. In many ways it was the perfect storm. Anyway finally everything is done and at 4pm we set off – only 250 miles to do in the day.

We enjoyed our first road side stop so much we thought we try to do it again! This time we decided on a truck stop in Big Springs, north Texas. Sitting here just off Interstate 10 amongst all the trucks-their generators throbbing away in the cool night air, made us feel at last we were real journeymen of the US roadways.