To Texas

There was a little rain and a little wind during the night. A cold front was moving through and it was 41 degrees this morning. There were refineries again. The countryside has scrubby little trees and bushes in the grass. Later, it was 38 degrees, rainy, and windy! The RV parks we passed were full or nearly full. We are in snowbird country, where the people escape snowy places and fly south, so we called ahead to a park beyond Houston to make sure there would be spots and there were. We stopped at the Texas Welcome Center. The guide said that Hurricane Ike had flooded the parking lot up to three feet deep and the swamp was inundated with salt water. They were waiting to see if it had any deleterious effects on the plants and wildlife, but they hope it won't. We went into Beaumont, Texas so that Rich could exchange some oxygen bottles. Then, for fun, we tried our OnStar turn-by-turn navigation system in the truck to find the nearest Post Office. We got there in no time flat and had not trouble! Back on Interstate 10, we saw road help that we hadn't seen before. On the pavement in the appropriate lanes were the highway numbers so you would be in the correct lane when the freeway forked. That was very helpful. Also, when you wanted to find a way back on the Interstate, there would be sign that said Interstate 10 West, left lane, and it was three blocks before you got there! That's a big help when you have a trailer and you don't know if your on-ramp is going to be on the left or right, because sometimes you find out too late to be able to get into the correct lane.
Later there were grain elevators for rice and then huge, ginormous refineries. We began to see many signs, billboards, and even green highway signs that were damaged or blown over, we thought by one of the hurricanes. When we arrived in Houston at about 4:45, the rain had changed to snow showers, and it was 33 degrees. We got on the 610 loop around town and passed the parts of town that had lots of truck yards and distribution centers with 100 trucks and trailers in each! There were big, beautiful buildings downtown and the freeways looked like Christmas with all the lights in the TEN lanes! Then there were more new, beautiful office buildings towards the suburbs. We saw signs for hurricane evacuation routes and flashing lights that would be used to send traffic into the opposing lanes to get out of town. Diesel was $2.35. We stopped later than we usually do, so we were really tired. We didn't unhitch the trailer or put down any stableizer jacks. We just had a quick dinner and crashed.
We dreamed of snow on the prickly pears and armadillos in sweaters in Texas.

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