Today we woke up at Walmart, ate a quick breakfast and got out as soon as we could. We drove through New Orleans – didn’t get to see the cool parts but got a better understanding of Hurricane Katrina.
We were very excited to drive across Lake Pontchartrain! It’s just one of those things. The longest continuous bridge over water in the world. 24 miles long and for 8 of those miles you allegedly can not see land in any direction. I call bogus to that, but it was still cool. AND we managed to do it during daylight! We saw lots of pelicans and sadly, no gators. I am terrified of them, but seeing one from a bridge in a 7 ton vehicle would be fine.
Once we were across the bridge, I offered to drive and John was going to wrangle the kids and help Trista with her homework. I can report that John’s patience is exactly 52 miles long. 😉
Thankfully no one tracked that metric for me!
Trista’s M.O. this entire time is that she has to go to the bathroom whenever she doesn’t want to do homework (among other things). This is a tough bluff to call as a parent, but it is incredibly frustrating. Finally, when it became clear that this was bogus, John hollered, “Trista, if you don’t get back out here and start doing homework, I’m going to erase what you’ve done and you can do it again!” Why did I not think of this one? I was laughing so hard from the driver’s seat, but doing my best to keep a poker face!
I drove for a total of 260 miles across Louisiana and we wanted to pop over to Cotton Valley and see where John lived from 4-11.5. We were there about 7 years ago, so we opted to not take that detour today, knowing if we could make Lubbock, we get a day off!
We got caught in some lovely Dallas traffic, we went across the south side and came very close to where I lived once upon a time. I do not miss Dallas traffic one tiny bit, what a mess! We stopped for dinner, which helped some and even though it was late, we still really wanted to make Lubbock (I had even booked us a site). We put the kids to bed and set off. Somewhere short of Abilene, John just couldn’t go any more. We stopped at a rest area and pulled in with the big trucks. John set an alarm for 11:40 (1 hour), 11:45 and 1:40. He said, if I sleep through those first two, my best bet is a 3 hour nap. Smart.
I woke up around 1 and John was still asleep. I went back to sleep and sometime later was aware that we were moving. I woke up again around 4 and we weren’t moving, John was not in bed and we were not where I had fallen asleep and not in an RV park where I had planned to wake up. I had no idea where we were. I unlocked my phone to see where the weather app said we were, Snyder, TX. I then opened the map to see where that was. Past Abilene, not to Lubbock.
We got up around 0630 and pulled into the RV park at 0800. I guess you could say we made it!