Road Trip Back To Florida

After Mom's Fun-morial, we went over the van very carefully in preparation for the drive back to Florida. We put on new tires, changed the oil/filter, the air filter, wiper blades, etc... With the exception of the air conditioning dying one-third of the way across Texas, everything went pretty well. We even picked up a geocache for every state we traveled through (of course).

As you can see, we had a teddybear traveling companion with us. Whenever we passed a car or bus with kids in it, Dad would wave the teddybear out the half-open window at the kids.

This was a big mistake on my part... We ended up driving on I-10 through Houston at 5:30 on Tuesday afternoon. Nothing like rush hour traffic to make you appreciate driving on I-10 at 3 in the morning... Maybe next time.

Looks like we made it to Louisiana. We tried for 2 geocaches here, but one was missing and the other was just too deep in the woods for a quick Park & Grab. We ended up finding one at the welcome center on the exit side (in our direction) of the state.

When we tried to find the first (missing) cache, we came across this cute frog near where the container was supposed to be.

Then, the next morning we saw this good-sized lizard hanging around outside of the hotel we stayed at in Lafayette, LA.

At the point where the A/C gave out, I decided to try to tighten the window locking lever. Unfortunately, the piece of metal that was used was hardened, so I ended up breaking it off. I had to make up this Rube Goldberg device to keep the window shut.

There's the van in the parking lot, and the cache we are looking for is under that metal plank running across the sidewalk.

This thing was loaded with travel coins. We picked one up to bring it back home.

Ah, Mississippi, we're getting closer...

Oh cool! A tunnel! Here we gooooo!

Ok, now watch out for the truck...

Hooray! We made it through! And I passed that pesky blue truck too...

We even passed by the USS Alabama battleship. No time to stop though, I was told that I needed to be back at work tomorrow (Thursday) to teach some students from Poland. Some day, I'm going to have to visit that thing. Take a look in the mirror and see how close the truckers like to get on our back bumper...

Since Dad had taken his 'water pill', we had to increase our bathroom stops some (actually, I was sick to my stomach too, so the extra stops were welcomed by me).

Since I didn't need to visit the facilities on this stop, I decided to pick up a quick geocache near where we parked. This one wasn't so bad...

At the time this picture was taken, we still had quite a way to go, because we actually arrived at the house by 12:30 AM (Thursday morning). It was a tough, grueling trip but we made it. It took 3 days, 2250 miles and $621.00 (158.928 gallons) in gas to get home.

Yep, we made it, just in time for me to get up at 6:00 AM and get back to work...