Day 3

Day 3 - Tuesday, 12/16

Well, no mouse ventured onto a glue trap overnight. We have a lovely breakfast with Ken and Elsie and head out. No problem with steering, just with the human steerer who takes a wrong turn out of the Rays neighborhood, which we have often exited before, and end up at a dead end. We quickly disconnect and smoothly back up, re-connect, and proceed. At an early rest stop Susie discovers that a basket of bananas on the kitchen cabinet has been visited and dined upon by friend mouse. Yuck! How did he climb straight up the side of a cabinet? We clean up and place a trap at the crime scene and proceed.

Our route is I-20, through Dallas and on to Shreveport. Pretty heavy traffic around Dallas. Also, skies thickening and lowering as we go, but it's not precipitating and the pavement is dry so we keep going. It's cold, though, and we wrap up in blankets and turn the furnace on to supplement the heater. The heater that comes with the truck chassis that Tuzi is built onto can't heat a motorhome cabin, we've found.

At one spot on south side of Dallas there has been some snow and an accident and we move very slowly through there. Just east of Dallas there's another slushy bridge that backs up traffic again for a considerable period. We had just debated turning south on I-45, towards Houston, and then taking a more southerly crossing, but traffic was moving well at the intersection, so we stayed on I-20, but then almost immediately got in the back-up from the slushy bridge. Should we take the first exit, turn around and catch I-45 south? Once we get by the slushy bridge, though, traffic flows normally, so away we go. Right decision, though. So far, so good.

The GPS had wanted to route us from Dallas up through southern Arkansas, but we'd had the Weather Channel on and saw that parts of AR had icing conditions, so no way were we going any further north. I-40 through OK and AR were said to be seriously iced and snowed, so that confirmed that our Sunday decision not to try to go to OK was the right one. The optimum decision, though, in hindsight, might have been to leave Tuzi home and fly to Florida, but look at all the fun we, and you, would have missed.

Mid-afternoon we stop on the shoulder of an off-ramp for a potty break. I check the kitchen counter and Bingo! there's a mouse stuck to the glue-trap. Pitiful, but without sentiment we toss trap and mouse out the door.

We stop for the night at an RV park just west of Shreveport. We've still got 500 miles to go to Red Bay, so we won't make it tomorrow as we had hoped. We find our way to a restaurant advertizing the best catfish in the ARK-LA-TX area and then call it a night.

Cheers,

Susie and Rob