Travel Days

Today was a travel day. It’s fresh in my head and it’s something that I think will be interesting to at least one person. Everyone of these blog posts so far has been written with one of my buddies in mind or to scratch an itch of my own. If I can help one person or answer one question with a post like this, then I’m doing great. 

I wanna give you a peak behind the curtain. I’d love to tell you that it’s magical, whimsical, and overall a dream like experience but that’s just not it. It wasn’t a bad day, but it wasn’t like those motivational posters either. I’m certainly not roughing it. I have a nice 2017 Platinum F-350 with massage seats and a 2019 Grand Design 397TH Momentum toy hauler (also with massage seats). But I’m still parked right next to the sketchy camper van thing at a Walmart parking lot. 

Today, Brenna and I got up at a reasonable time, went through the normal morning routine and began to pack up the trailer. No two travel days are alike but today was pretty normal I’d say. The morning routine is basically, shower, coffee, breakfast, customer orders, client work, get dressed... Not necessarily in a particular order. Anyways, we did the routine and then cleaned up. We put most things away and organized the garage so nothing would fall on the way. 

Pretty simple. 

Today is the day before we actually set up which is the day before we actually start the roping. So, it’s a process. This extra days means that we aren’t in a hurry. We aren’t racing against the clock in an effort to squeeze a few more minutes out of the day. No, we took our sweet time. Because really, if we aren’t gonna enjoy it, then why bother?

We took a nice long lunch break. Where we were staying was about 30 minutes from town. We found a great BBQ trailer and ate outside. Then grabbed some diesel and snacks. It was 35 minutes or so back to the trailer because we took a different way back. When we got back I lubed up the jacks and slides then spooled it all up. After saying our goodbyes to our friends we hooked up and hit the road by about 2pm. 

Hitting the roadLeaving Matt’s house and heading to the Rickey Green Memorial
 

Today was a short drive. We only had 5 hours to go but they weren’t expecting us until tomorrow. We stopped about 30 minutes short of our destination and claimed a small piece of a Walmart parking lot. Yep, I’m laying here in bed writing this on my iPhone in a Walmart parking lot somewhere in the middle of TX. LOL 

It’s a glamorous life I lead as a carny...Oops...I mean photographer. My travel days usually look like this. We stopped once to dump the black and grey tanks at a rest area along the side of the road. (An actual RV dump not just in the ditch) My original thought was to ask a campground that was along the route but they wanted $25 to dump. Ha! No way. We only went about 15 minutes out of the way but it actually was better (detours usually are). Side note: I used to program my GPS to avoid highways and always take the scenic route. I highly recommend that if you can. But pulling this 45’ fifth wheel with about 6” of ground clearance isn’t a viable option any longer. We stopped again for diesel and another snack (or 2). 

Anyway, we made it without incident safe and sound. We got to see some interesting new parts of Texas that we sure wanna go spend more time at in the future. 

My recommendation to you is travel as much as you can my friends! It’s always worth it. 

Thanks for reading this short little story about my travel days.