As expected

There isn’t much excitement to be found in today’s lengthy drive across the widest part of Texas.  We were up early and out on the road around 6AM.  We found a near by Dunkin Donuts, unfortunately they made pretty lousy coffee.  I was able to choke mine down, Cindy gave up after downing about a third of hers.

The 80 mile an hour speed limit was welcomed to help gobble up the seemingly endless miles in western Texas.  Unfortunately pushing the van to 85 mph meant the gas mileage was horrid.  On the one fill up I calculated my mileage to be in the high 13’s, ouch…

For bathroom breaks we normally would use either a rest stop or a gas station during a fill up.  Well we both found ourselves having to go badly in the middle of no man’s land with neither of those options available.

Cindy pulled off on an exit that only had a couple campgrounds listed as attractions, no gas or food.  We figured before we would resort to using a tree as a bathroom we would try the main office at the campground.  Fortunately the women that worked there were very nice and didn’t mind if we used their employee bathroom.  We bought a couple ice cream sandwiches there just because.

The drive wasn’t bad for me during my first 5 plus hour shift but during my second shift I started losing it a bit.  I felt like a babbling idiot making stupid sounds and noises to entertain myself.  I just wanted the driving to end.

I spent almost all of my time out of the drivers seat playing Plants vs Zombies 2 on my Iphone.  It’s a great game but I HATE the way they have put micro-transactions into it.  Actually they aren’t all that micro if you ask me, $2.99 to buy a cool plants? $5 to unlock a level??  Fck that.  I much prefer the model they used with the first game where you paid 5 bucks for the game and that was the end of it.  With 2.0 the game is free but if you lacked financial discipline you could easily drop 50 bucks on the game with these transactions.

I refuse to pay for these upgrades and am doing it old school style, meaning you grind and grind until you earn the in game currency needed to progress instead of pulling out your credit card for the fast track.  Even with the annoying pay model the game is very fun, and addicting.

The place we are staying at in Beaumont is surprisingly nice, it’s called the MCM Elegante’.  It also is the first hotel I ever stayed at that has a huge statue of the Ten Commandments by the front door. Weird.

We had a nice dinner at the hotel restaurant before retiring for a well deserved good nights sleep after 13 plus hours of driving.  This was the last brutal driving day of the trip.  We have about 450 miles to get to Pensacola tomorrow and about the same to push into Naples on Sunday.  The van has already racked up 4,400 miles, whew…