Westbound

Friday morning (Black Friday), we left Thousand Trails Lake Conroe to start on our way to Arizona.

We were planning to make it past San Antonio on this first day of our travel - this involved heading south toward Houston, taking a loop highway around the northwest side of Houston, and then starting west on I-10. We got onto I-10 around mile marker 742... only 742 miles on I-10 before we leave Texas!

Carl likes a particular type of coffee that we have found at Ollie's Bargain Outlet stores, and we know that they are not present in all areas -- we had checked, and there are none in Arizona that we've found... so we decided to stop in a mall in San Antonio where there was a store located (it was only a couple of miles out of our way) -- "sure, stop at a mall on Black Friday, what could go wrong?" It actually wasn't too bad -- we parked at a larger mall next door to the one where Ollie's was (the parking at Ollie's was quite full). Unfortunately, however, Ollie's did not have the coffee he was wanting (he got some Keurig pods instead). As we were walking back to Gracie (a bit of a walk away from the store), we passed a BBQ stand in the parking lot. It smelled so good...

... so we decided to get a pound to take with us to eat at our stop for the night.

Cutting up the brisket that we'd requested

West of San Antonio, we had a reservation at a Harvest Host that was very near I-10 in Comfort, Texas.

Parked at the Harvest Host

The Harvest Host was a nano-brewery (smaller than a micro-brewery, I guess). Although they had indicated that they would welcome guests on that Friday, the brewery wasn't actually open, so we just stayed the night there. It looked like it would be a fun place to visit with nice outdoor areas for seating and nice lighting.

Saturday morning, we headed out...

As we headed out the driveway, the roof and top passenger side of Gracie was scraped by some live oak trees in the driveway (we probably didn't plan our exit as well as we should have). So we stopped briefly so I could go up on the roof and make sure that nothing on the roof had been damaged or loosened by the limbs (all was fine).

We easily got back onto I-10 -- our drive on Saturday was to go to Fort Stockton, Texas. Almost the whole drive would be on I-10, with no cities to have to drive around or through.

As we were heading west, we saw a vehicle with flashing lights a long ways ahead of us with other vehicles with flashing lights following it. As we got closer and decided to pass, we could see that it was a huge windmill blade.

We later saw a back up of traffic at an exit ramp, almost back onto the highway. There really aren't towns of any size, so we couldn't figure out why there would be a traffic backup -- I looked and could see that another blade was at the bottom of the ramp and the traffic was all backed up behind it. It appeared, however, that it may have gotten off at the wrong spot as the advance vehicle was heading back to re-enter I-10 westbound. That definitely is a vehicle that you don't want to get going in the wrong direction! (Note: if I-10 had been going under a low overpass, the load may have had to get off to avoid a bridge too low for the load, but I-10 was elevated there so that did not appear to be the issue.)

Just a view as we were driving -- as I frequently say, "There's a whole lotta nuthin' out this way!"

We eventually got to Fort Stockton. I had planned that we'd stay in the Walmart parking lot, but when I called earlier in the day, the person I spoke with said that they don't want RVs parking for the night in the lot... we considered called back later to see if we'd get a different answer from a different person, but I had checked on RV parks as alternatives and we decided that we'd stay at an RV park instead. Here we are in a nice pull-through site at Fort Stockton Resort and RV Park.

It is a nice place for overnight, and they have RV ports (covers) for many of the sites that would make them nice for longer term stays too. We did not need to unhook the Jeep which makes it nice for continuing our travels.

Moving on west!