It Could Have Been Worse....

...But It Was A Tough Day

After 2 nights in Lake Bruin State Park, we loaded up, hooked up and headed for Texas.  It was raining lightly and thunderstorms were predicted but the driving wasn’t too bad.  We had about 260 miles to go to Livingston, TX which would be about 5 hours of driving.  As my friend Ellen taught me, “man plans, God laughs”.

Sign of things to come

As we crossed central Louisiana (CENLA to the cognoscenti), the sky darkened and the rain came in earnest.  In Pinegrove, the winds really picked up.  We were on a highway and crossed one very high bridge feeling the buffeting of the wind.  We could see an even higher, longer bridge ahead.  Trees were bending, stuff was flying through the air.  (Cue Wizard of Oz theme)  We had one last chance to exit the highway before the bridge and we took it.  We parked on a side road and could feel the rig rocking in the wind.  There was a stand of pine trees upwind from us and we worried that one of them would come over onto Chuck so we crawled half a block and pulled under a highway overpass, snuggling up behind a sheriff’s car.   

View out the windows while under the overpass

Apparently he didn’t like sharing because after a few minutes he waved us on.  The wind was still blowing and rain was coming down in sheets.  So much for southern hospitality.  We moved on a bit and sheltered ourselves alongside a warehouse somewhat out of the wind.  After about 30 minutes the sky lightened, the winds died down a bit, the rain let up and we worked our way through the side streets and back onto the highway.  As we crossed the bridge we had avoided earlier, we saw emergency vehicles working around semi-truck that had turned over on its side on the bridge.  We had made a very smart decision to get off when we did.

Storm damage

Disaster averted on we went.  Soon the Navigator Wars started.  We travel with a variety of navigational aids; a standard car GPS (Garmin Nuvii) dubbed Jill, a trucker’s GPS app on the iPad called John and a paper 2009 trucker’s atlas we inherited with the rig which is the Human Navigator’s backup source.  John and Jill disagreed on the next highway and turn.  It could be critical since as some point we’d have to cross a river and bridge height and weight limits make a difference to us.  The Human Navigator (HN) tended to side with Jill, and was trying to persuade John by changing his destination and routing.  Regardless of the changes, John was adamant.  The danger in giving names to inanimate objects is that take on a personality of their own.  We all remember Hal in 2001 A Space Odyssey, right?  So HN was ragging at John saying, “what’s the matter with you, I just don’t understand”, and “don’t be an idiot John”, etc.  I tend to side with John in these disputes because I figure he’s more current than the atlas and more truck-oriented than Jill, but I always defer to the HN decision because I’m driving and can’t see all the info.  So Jill, John and HN quibbled, snarled, sniped and argued for the next 30 miles until it was decision point.  Grudgingly, HN deferred to John and off we went.

15 miles of construction, a 15 minute delay at a train crossing and one construction detour and I had to concede that maybe it wasn’t John’s best day but finally we crossed into Texas.  And we’ll never know what perils we might have encountered on Jill’s route. 

Jill restored to the place of honor

 2 hours later we were at Lake Livingston State Park in Livingston, TX.  It was an 8 hour driving day; scary, exhausting and occasionally a bit tense, but we had survived to camp another day.  Our site is on the lake and very scenic.  The park is very empty this week and we’re here for 3 nights.  Plenty of time to recover.