We woke up this morning in our Days Inn hotel room in Rayville,
Louisiana, after a long drive yesterday. On our agenda for today was
to complete our trek through Louisiana and Texas, with the intent to
get as close to Clovis, New Mexico as possible. After waking up and
getting showered, we got a fresh start on our drive, heading out to
refuel at the Pilot Travel Center just down the road from the hotel.
We had gone almost 210 miles on this tank of gas. Not bad! Our
first stop of the day came at 10:00am, to grab a quick breakfast for
Tyler at a McDonald's in Waskom, Texas. Neither Drew or I are big
fans of McDonald's breakfasts - well, let me say we both like the
hash browns, but they can wreak havoc on our digestive systems, and
that's a risk that just can't be taken when on a road trip!
Our second gas stop of the day came around noon, and was our
longest stretch of the trip so far - almost 250 miles! We pulled in
to the Circle K just outside of Canton, Texas. We also grabbed a
bite to eat at the McDonald's next door for lunch while we were
here.
We made our way through Dallas and Fort Worth - well, along the
south side of these cities, anyway. Thankfully we didn't run into
any incidents as we made our drive. We ended up stopping at the
Eastland County Westbound Safety Rest Area along I-20 to stretch our
legs and take care of business. This was a pretty unusual rest area,
in that it was at a high elevation from the road, and that we were
the only people there despite the gigantic parking lot outside.
Well, us and a single worker. We stopped for gas less than 10 miles
after the rest area, this time at another Murphy USA, this time
outside Eastland, Texas. This stop came in around 4:15pm, and our
mileage between fill-ups this time was just under 190 miles, quite a
drop from the last leg!
Back on the road we went, driving past Abilene, Texas before
turning slightly north as we headed towards Clovis. We had smooth
sailing all the way, until we made our next stop in Lubbock, Texas
to top off at the Chisum Travel Center around 7:30pm. We bumped up
the length of our trip to 240 miles this time.
We cruised around Lubbock and all the way through the rest of our
drive, hitting the Texas/New Mexico border around 9:00pm
central/8:00pm mountain time. It was just a short drive into New
Mexico to get us to the ultimate destination of our trip - Tyler's
new house in Clovis. We pulled in to the driveway there around
8:30pm local time. We were met outside by one of Tyler's new
roommates, who gave us a quick tour of the house. We
ended up getting Tyler's car off of the trailer and unloaded most of his stuff before we headed
out to find a bite to eat for dinner. Unfortunately for us, everything in
town seemed to close at 10:00pm. Although we were trying to get
a table well before ten, the local Chili's stopped seating at
9:00pm.
We ended up going to the La Quinta Inn just a couple of miles
from Tyler's house and ordering
pizza from Dominos (we tried Pizza Hut, but they too were closing
early). After two long days in the car, we were just tired and
looking forward to getting a good nights sleep. |