On the road again!!

We had originally planned to leave Retama Village on Saturday to start our journey to Iowa. Well, we woke up on Friday morning, realized that we had done everything that needed to be done before we leave and decided to go ahead and hit the road. Linda was kind enough to take some pictures, since we were busy getting packed up and saying goodbye to our friends.


It was going to be a new experience for Doug, since he has not towed the rig with our big Volvo, so we decided not to make a reservation anywhere, since we did not know how far we would actually get. I have to say Doug did a fantastic job. We drove 320 miles, getting through San Antonio right before rush hour and stayed at a campground in Sattler, which is a little bit west of New Braunfels. We have stayed there a few time and it is really nice and quite. Unhooking that night was no problem, we went out for German food in New Braunfels and left Sattler the next morning around 9:30 am. Driving on I35 can be a bit challenging and after what happened we have decided not to travel through a big town again on the weekend. We were driving nicely along towards Austin when a dump truck came onto the highway. Doug gave him plenty of room to pull in, however, I guess the guy did not think so and dead stopped. Doug was able to get over into the middle lane while cars were moving quickly to avoid him. I unfortunately had to come to a full stop. Luckily the car behind me was paying attention and did not hit me and we got moving again.

We made it through Austin, Waco and Fort Worth just fine and then we met another idiot. We were merging from I35W onto I35N when a little Prius decided that he could not do the merge and decided to stop on the on ramp. The car behind him veered to the right and also stopped. There was nowhere for Doug to go, so he hit the breaks hard and luckily came to a stop before hitting anybody. Luckily I had kept some distance behind him and was able to veer to the right as the car behind me veered to the left avoiding me. If we would have been in the F550, Doug probably would have not been able to stop with the weight of the rig behind him. I am so proud of him handling this bad situation and was so glad when we finally arrived in Thackerville after driving 300 miles around 4 pm. Amazingly enough the content in the rig survived all this pretty well. No drawers or cupboards opened up and nothing came flying towards me. It seems that our new air hitch really does a nice job keeping things in the trailer in place.

We decided that it was time to take a break and are staying here until tomorrow morning before we continue. From here we will divide the remaining 700 miles into three 230 mile day trips and should be at the campground at Adventureland on Wednesday. Hopefully, nothing else this drastic is going to happen from here on out.