Well, we made it. WE are in Austin. I meant to post a good play by play of the trip as it happened, at least every night when we got to our hotels, but my server was having issues (they decided it would be a good idea to rescind my 'write' privileges. Easily and happily fixed but OF COURSE the snafu happened while I was unable to do anything about it). So this is a basic summary post. The car didn't give us a moments problem (thank you Subaru!). Erin, Bean and myself all got a little fussy at one point or another, but nothing too bad. We spent the first night, after many sad goodbyes and much annoying and Tetris-like UHaul packing, in Annapolis with my mom. It was nice AND fortuitous, Nice to get to see Mom and fortuitous in that by staying there we only had a five hour drive or so, where if we didn't have Mom to stay with we probably would have gone a lot farther the first night. After the day we had we were probably too fried to really be going much further at all. Next morning we got up, went to the Double T diner (an Annapolis favorite of ours) and Trader Joes (jerky, nuts and mangoes), said goodby to Mom and hit the road. Bean miaowed a lot. Eventually we made it into country that was unfamiliar to both of us: southern Virginia and eastern Tennessee. The Tennessee welcome center was very nice, like a stone hunting lodge, only with donut vending machines. There was a building shaped like a huge 3 storey guitar across the street from it but everyone acted like it was no big deal. We stayed in Morristown, Tennessee (which I mentioned), ate fried catfish, fried chopped steak, fried french fries and fried Mello Yello. All were excellent. We got rolling pretty early the next day, through Knoxville. We ate lunch at Loretta Lynn's Kitchen (more fried food, EXCELLENT beans and biscuits, mixed reviews on the fried chicken (me: "eh.", Erin: "mm!"), good greens but the hot bar didn't keep them quite hot enough for me). We bought a jar of corn cob jelly at the gift shop and moved on. Bean miaowed a lot. At some point we started seeing signs for "Goo-Goos", saying things like "This exit! Goo-Goos, 3 for $1!". We didn't know what Goo-Goos were so we eventually stopped at a place advertising a wide selection of Goo-Goos, Fireworks and Elvis memorabilia. We found the fireworks and Elvis memorabilia right away (we bought the sticker you see above at this gas station. Erin wouldn't let me buy any M-80's). Erin asked the sleepy, amused fellow at the counter what Goo-goo's were. "Excuse me, where are the Goo-Goos?" "The Goo-Goos? Well, I don't know." "We've been seeing signs advertising them for miles, it's painted in red letters on the window here and you don't know what Goo-Goos are?" "OH! You mean Go-gos." Apparently Goo-Goos are pronounced Go-gos. Who knew? Regardless, they were delightful little candy bars, not unlike the world famous "BUNN bar", filled with nuts and marshmallow. We bought three and ate them all before we made it ten miles. Bean miaowed a lot. I was eventually disappointed to find that there is no station in Memphis that plays only Elvis music. Shouldn't there be? I mean, shouldn't at the least there be a government funded all-Elvis radio station in Memphis Tennessee? It boggles my mind that when driving through Memphis I could listen to The Eagles or the Black Eyed Peas on the radio, but if I wanted Elvis I had to play my own. Surely there could at least be Graceland Radio? Arkansas is the first state that really starts to look vastly different from the northeast (Blah, blah, blah. Gross generalization made from a car speeding by on the highway. I know.). Arkansas, about 30 seconds on the other side of the Mississippi gets flat flat flat. Aside from the poor roads the most I can say about our brief visit to Arkansas was that it was mostly flat. OH! Also, there were these pro-rice billboards every here and there. Apparently rice (an inarguably fine product, to be sure) is a HUGE part of the Arkansas economy and somehow they got it in their minds that a good way to show their rice pride and instill pro-rice feelings in the population was to put up many giant billboards with a picture of a happy child eating a bowl of rice along with the caption "Rice. Awesome!" I guess "Rice. If you wanted Goo-Goos you should've stayed in Tennessee!" was too cerebral. Anyway, We decided that we were going to stay in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, largely because of the name. We found a cheap place (more free wireless internet. Wee!), ordered a pizza (weird. not sure if it is all Domino's or just the Arkadelphia Domino's, but that was NOT what I would call pizza. Not BAD, exactly, just odd. The greasy cheesy bread was quite tasty though.), ate and slept the sleep of the dead. We got going early, made good time and were unfortunately too distracted to get a good picture of the "Hope, Arkansas. Birthplace of William Jefferson Clinton" sign on the highway. Ah, well. We made it in to Texas around maybe 10 am. We went to the (huge) welcome center, Bean miaowed a lot, we took a few pictures and than continued on our way. Funny, we got to Texas and got that excited "we're there!" feeling, and then remembered that we still had a good 6 hours to go. We got caught in a Texas sized storm outside of Dallas, dime-sized hail and all that. It came and went pretty quickly. We had one reasonably hairy driving moment when, on a long stretch of two lane highway, just after the rain, we crested a hill (I was driving) and about 200 feet ahead of us traffic was stopped cold dead. We (along with everyone else) had been doing 70, the pavement was not exactly wet but not exactly dry and we were going downhill with a TOTALLY loaded trailer. I hit the brakes and there was a lot of noise and the rumble of the anti-lock mechanism kicking but very little actual deceleration. I simultaneously downshifted from 5th to 3rd, gently steered the old family truckster towards (but not off) the shoulder and pumped the brakes a few times. We stopped (in plenty of time, actually. like 50 feet) but for that first moment of "are we actually going to stop?" it was a little scary. This weekend is the Republic of Texas Rod Rally, so there are 40,000 motorcyclists in town. We heard about it on the radio. Otherwise I might've thought that this was a VERY motorcycly place. It IS a pretty motorcycly place, I guess, but not like this. Lots of bikes. At any rate, we made it. Here we are in Austin. Rebecca and Ted have a REALLY nice house, big airy clean 4 bed ranch with a nice fenced in yard. We are awfully lucky to have the use of it for a few months. We'll see how we like Texas (and how our financial life goes) but we'd love to buy ourselves a similar place, although probably a bit rattier and a bit closer in. We'll see. I'll set up the scanner soon, and put up the Polaroids I took on the road.