This is gonna run long. I didn’t have internet for more than a few minutes the entire trip and there’s only so much I could do on my DROID.

• Aaaand we’re off! 8:58 AM Dec 2nd
• GirlChild driving now. 300 miles to El Paso.
• Stopping for dinner in Van Horn TX.

Lousy place, Papa’s Pantry. We walked in and though the place was fairly full, nobody on staff even came over towards the door. Do you seat yourself or wait there like idiots? Finally we were waved into a dark corner where the overhead lights didn’t work. Yeah, yeah we should have left, but it’s fucking west Texas and stops are few and far between. Slow unfriendly service, lousy food, unclean bathroom.

• Texas sucks part 3: GirlChild gets us pulled over for speeding. Cop searches all of us and unpacks the car.

This was ridiculous. It was like he was bored or something. There was hardly anyone on the road and he came zipping up behind her when she was passing a truck so she changed lanes without signaling just to get out of his way. So he popped her for that, for going 79 in a 65 and because I didn’t have a light on my license plate – I totally didn’t realize that one. He put Ginnie in his car, Casey off between the cars and had me in front of mine while poor Kira is shrieking in the car in confusion.  We were all polite (my kids were raised watching Cops) and he still searched the car and then started pulling everything out of the trunk. And it was frikking COLD out there, snow on the ground and dark as hell. Asshole.

• #texassucks pt 4: After successfully dodging a dozen deer Son runs over some pteradactyl’s dinner.

Too funny, I was dozing and could hear Ginnie and Casey mentioning deer every few minutes when Casey suddenly swerved and hollered “What the FUCK was that?” and Ginnie was howling. He thinks it was a giant owl and I (who didn’t see a thing) expect it was more likely a vulture but either way it was trying to drag something huge across the road and Casey hit whatever the roadkill was. We laughed for hours over that one.

• #texassucks Unfortunate HOV turn dumped us into downtown Houston. Light rail stations look similar to ours.

We couldn’t figure out the HOV thing at all. There needs to be a Just Passing Through lane on interstates. Their HOV on the I-10 had three different acronyms with various tolls and we couldn’t decide if it was OK to use then figured what the heck why not, except at some point it emptied into downtown Houston street level. Thanks to my handy dandy DROID we turned the GPS/Google Navigator and got right back out again.

Hey big city sign people, make sure outsiders can figure out what your signs mean. Here in Phoenix that whole I-10 / I-17 / 51 / airport thing is completely confusing and I LIVE HERE. Especially since you can’t rely on direction as the left of the V actually goes north before it goes west while the right of the V goes west before it takes you north and crosses over the road you should have taken to continue west way back there! Anyway…

• Fuck Texas! We’re outta here!

Here’s where we started Day two.