Heading to Houston – Day 1
The first day was the hardest, mainly because I wasn’t well rested. It was the anticipation of finally leaving and getting started on the first leg of the journey. I had planned to get up early anyway so after half a night of tossing and turning I gave up and started packing the remainder of things into my car. Much to my surprise and relief I was able to squeeze everything in. After that I just took off, no breakfast, no coffee. I was barely an hour in when I started getting drowsy and that didn’t bode well. After another hour I pulled over and got an iced coffee from McDonald’s and that helped a whole lot.
About four hours in my phone started acting up. This would not have normally posed much of a problem but I was using it for both entertainment and navigation. I looked down at it and there was a message about a problem with unlocking the phone and advice to restart it. I did and was then unable to login to it at all. It threw off my rhythm in a major way, both because I was annoyed that it had chosen such an inconvenient time to crap out and I because I was relying on it too much. I got off the freeway and counted myself lucky that I found a Verizon store. I was downright angry when they told me that I would have to reset the entire phone. I lost all my apps and all the data on the memory card including all my audiobooks. On top of that their WiFi was terrible (who knew) and I had to set the phone down to try to get some of my apps back before I moved on. I took that opportunity to get something to eat and stretch my legs further. When I got back the downloads weren’t even halfway done. I stayed a little bit longer to download apps I thought were essential then left.
With navigation back online and an audiobook book downloaded from Audible I made my way and I didn’t stop until I made it to Texas. I was well past El Paso and had been on the road for about 14 hours by that time. Two time-zones and nearly 1000 miles later I had had enough. Finding a room wasn’t a challenge. Finding a cheap room was. On top of the price they charged me something like 13% tax. It was outrageous but I was tired and hungry so I gave in, got a sandwich, and set my devices to suck up all the WiFi they could just before falling into unconsciousness.
