After driving a grand total of 1,028 miles yesterday we pulled into a nice enough rest stop somewhere between Houston and Bauemont at about 2:30am local time. Like many things in Texas, Houston is big! It felt like we were driving through the city for about an hour, and that was with zero traffic. Yesterday was by far our longest drive in the RV, and probably ever. I checked the mileage and that was a bit more than driving from San Francisco to San Diego for some tacos, and then driving right back. And guess what, we’re attempting to do the same thing today (those tacos better be good!).
This morning, Lana once again woke up on the early side and got us going. By the time I woke up for good we were at a gas station in Baton Rouge. After we all had breakfast (or maybe it was brunch by then?) and Boomer did his business we hit the road with me at the wheel. Today my beauty sleep cost me the sight of us crossing the Mississippi, which is of course the most definitive milestone of any cross country trip. Oh well, I’ll just think back and remember what it was like last time. In terms of our pace though, I’m pretty sure at one point we passed some guy who looked like Dom DeLuise driving an ambulance, I figured we must be doing pretty well.
Yesterday we set a new record for most miles in a day. Today we set a record for being in the most states in a day, with 5: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi (which we didn’t even set foot on), Alabama, and Florida.
Driving through Mobile we felt like we needed a short break from the road so ended up stopping at the USS Alabama Memorial Park. We didn’t actually board the ship, which I’m sure would have been interesting, but we did walk the grounds and checked out their impressive collection of tanks, artillery, and aircraft. It was definitely a nice stop to break up the day’s drive. Hard to believe we had to drive over 2,300 miles before we did our first touristy thing.
As I’m writing this post, we’re on the road a bit south of Gainesville, just about 3 hours from Venice which is our target. It’s about 1am local time, so we’ll see how far we get . We would have been farther along, but had to pull off the 75 due a to crazy combination of wind and rain for about half an hour. At least in typical Florida fashion, the nasty weather passed over us pretty quickly.