What a week it has been!!!

I don't even know where to start. We were in Reno and had planned to go on to Hawthorne on Monday, so I had the mail sent to Hawthorne. It is about 150 miles south of Reno and just to the east of Yosemite State Park, which was our next stop.

And then Doug saw a big truck on the Internet that caught his interest and we decided to go to Casper, WY to check it out. Now that was not at all on the way to the mail. So we decided to leave on Monday, me driving to Hawthorne first to pick up the mail and Doug hopping onto I-80 and we would meet up at a campground in Wells, NV. Doug had to drive about 359 miles and I would do 522 miles. Now it really does not sound like that much to do with the little car, however, as the hours were dragging on I realized just how many miles that really is. I am so glad that I was able to drive 80 m/h on I-80, otherwise it would have seemed to never end. By the time I got to the campground, Doug had already set up the rig and I was completely exhausted. I now know that my limit of per day driving is below 500 miles a day.

We went on the next morning and drove another 369 miles to Rock Springs, WY. The KOA was expensive and basically a gravel parking lot, but it would do for a night. After another 220 miles we arrived in Casper and found out that the campground we had booked for a week is also just gravel. Must be something that they do in Wyoming. Since we arrived early in the afternoon, Doug wanted to go check out the truck.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that the guy had lowered the price by $10,000 and made an appointment to have a VIS test done the next day and have Doug do some test driving. The VIS did not find any major problems and other than some driver error, the truck went pretty well. I was amazed sitting in the back that it really did not feel like we were driving 65 mph on I-25, but I was told that that is pretty normal. We looked the truck over some more and tried to talk to the college to see if they can do the dyno and chassis testing. The college declined our request and as more as I kept thinking about this big decision I realized that neither one of us was at all excited about this truck. Now I am not saying that there is anything wrong with the truck, I just believe it is not the truck for us. So we decided to pass on it.

There are other trucks out there that we can check out and it would have been also interesting trying to move three vehicles at the same time. We had found a tow dolly in town, but I have never towed before. I am sure I would figure out how to tow the car behind the F550, but for now the butterflies in my stomach have settled again. Our truck is pulling just fine and the only reason why we are starting to look into a "big" truck is that we have decided to give fulltiming a shot.

As much as we loved Oregon, there are no jobs up there and that will certainly delay our plans of settling down. Who knows, if we can find work to support ourselves during our travels, we might be doing this for a long time. I can't believe that next month it will be two years since we started this adventure and I am not regretting a minute of it. Our next stop will be Sioux Falls, SD, since I want to take another look at what is in storage and maybe try to clean the storage unit out and bring stuff down to Mission. I am really looking forward to getting my carpet steamer back, since our carpet could use a nice shampooing by now.