take the long way home: part one

So when I finally left Austin on Saturday morning I realized that I had revised my travel plans about a hundred times. I gave up the ghost and instead decided to let the wind blow me and the beagle around (yes it tickled, and yes we liked it). We left somewhere between 10:30-11am that day and actually had a tailwind help push us out of Texas and into New Mexico, and we must never speak again about how we enjoy the wind this way.

Objects in picture may appear smaller

On the way out of  Texas I remembered two things before leaving. The first was that I took all the online lessons of driving slow when pulling a rig (to the point of annoying everyone behind me) to conserve gas. Two years prior I made the mistake of driving way too fast (i'm no superman), and blew an obscene amount of money after making it only a quarter of the way to my destination. Had I gone all the way I would have blown about triple of the budget. I decided to tuck tail and return home which resulted in only costing me half the trip budget. An acceptable loss all things considered. The second lesson was making sure my weight was absolute. What I mean by this is that I also had also made the mistake of traveling with a full tank of water which contributed to the financial loss due to the additional weight. 

We stopped in Carlsbad for some gas, rest, and dinner around 8pm. After spending about an hour in the McDonalds parking lot (for the free wifi to figure out our next move and not for dinner) we decided to stay the night there since we just spent the last 10 hours driving, stopping for gas, food, and/or to pee/poo. Sorry, no pictures of our stay there since we arrived at night. Trust me, I'm doing you a favor since it didn't look that good at night. What I saw in the daylight wasn't any better. 

I slept so so that night since it was my first night in the rig in a while. Even though it was a restfull sleep it still felt strange. This was two nights in a row of odd sleep. My first being on the couch and not my bed (which  was packed away) at the apartment. I'm expecting/hoping sleep to get back to normal since I'm sleeping in the same bed each night again. The beagle is adjusting about as well as I am to travel, but in all due honesty seems to be doing better than I am. I constantly hear her sawing logs in the truck, trailer, truck, trailer, truck, etc. When we stop she seems to reap the rewards of the walk more so than I do. I am determined to take her lead and derive more enjoyment than she.