Last month we took our spring break trip to Big Bend! This was a dream trip for E. J. and after years of talking about it, he got me hooked too. It was our first major trip in the travel trailer and after lots of prep work, we were off...EARLY in the morning! The plan was to leave early so we would arrive during the daylight (12 hours later) to set up camp. You know what they say about plans...
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| Take-off time. |
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| Looking rough at 4 a.m. but nonetheless, excited for our adventure. |
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| Rainy start. |
Because the truck gets terrible gas mileage when you're hauling the travel trailer, we had a number of stops planned and reserve gas in the bed of the truck (gas stations are few and far between in west Texas). Our first stop was two hours into trip, AKA everyone's favorite stop: Buc-ees! We grabbed breakfast, gassed up and then headed out.
As we were leaving the steep parking lot E. J. said, "I shouldn't have gone out this way." And then about a second later we heard a huge scrape and a pop.
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| Yup! Two bolts were sheared off. We immediately drove back up to the parking lot because it was highly possible that the trailer could fall off the truck at any moment. |
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| Look who got pooped on by a bird while he was checking out the damage. |
Realizing that there was nothing E. J. could do to fix it, we drove to a Firestone about 1/2 mile away and waited for an hour and a half for them to open at 8 a.m.
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| I managed to spill coffee all over myself while waiting in the truck. |
Once Firestone opened, things were still iffy. They weren't sure if they would be able to fix it. But by 9:45 a.m. we got the good news that they were able to fix the hitch successfully. We've never been so relieved! Despite the not-so-ideal start to our trip, we were all in good spirits.
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| On the road again! |
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| Beautiful shot. |
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| Once we got on the other side of Austin it was smooth sailing. |
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| It wasn't until 12 hours into our trip that Kathryn asked her first "are we there yet?" Not too shabby! |
But wait, there's more! As we were pulling out of a gas station in Fort Stockton around 5:30 p.m. (on a Saturday, mind you) it sounded like were a motorcycle gang as the truck accelerated. Think of having a REALLY loud exhaust. Once again, we pulled over. E. J. looked under the truck and couldn't see anything that indicated a problem. Meanwhile, I was Googling like a mad woman to find a repair shop. After a few calls, I got through to a repair place that was still open. They were scheduled to close in less than an hour but were incredibly kind and let us stop by. After a quick look, they determined that a pipe cracked under the truck. Great...
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| The family that ran the shop barely spoke any English but we didn't care, they were helping us. I wanted to hug all of them. After welding the pipe, all was back to normal! |
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| Check out their dog! |
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| On the road again, again. |
I'm not even sure how to explain how we were all feeling after that last stop. We were all tired, relieved, still in surprisingly good spirits and anxious to get to Big Bend. With 100 miles left, we headed out into the dark, completely unknown territory with little to no cell phone reception and minimal civilization. As we entered into the mountainous terrain, we could literally hear the transmission screaming. It. Was. Terrifying.
When we pulled into the resort at 9:30 p.m. after the 18 hour drive, we were so happy that we could have kissed the ground. We had no idea what the surroundings looked like (it's an International Dark Sky Park which means no lights on after 9 p.m. to avoid light pollution). E. J. got the trailer hooked up, I prepared our beds, we took showers and then we were out!
I'm incredibly happy to report that we started out the trip by exhausting all of our bad luck. The fun stuff is next. To be continued!
