Quiet Travel Day

It’s been a quiet travel day today.  No check engine lights, no near death experiences, just a lot of time on the road.  Weather, although rather cold, has been mostly agreeable.

Tonight I find myself at a Walmart in Gainesville, Texas.  If you look carefully in the hero image above, can you see the four RVs I was able to capture in just one shot that are sharing the parking lot with me?  There’s more that are scattered around as well, and in the last hour as I’ve been getting some work done, I’d bet some more have magically appeared.

Since the wind conditions were mostly favorable today, I decided I was better off putting in a couple hours of night driving rather than staying where I was at my normal stopping time, in Oklahoma City.  The low temperature there for tonight was something like 21°F, but here in Gainesville it’s 29°F.  Sure, 8° isn’t that much, but it helps.  Plus, by spending more time in the truck driving, I’m spending less time running the propane heater tonight before going to bed, which means less moisture issues.  I’m hoping that by either tomorrow night or the day after, I’ll be in a warm enough place that it really won’t be an issue anymore.

Last night I was starting to seriously think about upgrading to a more capable truck ASAP.  The reason I was in the hotel was because my truck wasn’t capable of controller the trailer in normal kinds of windy conditions.  I started browsing around on Craigslist for F350’s in cities that I was going to be in as well as in Kansas City (where I was at the time), and found an intriguing listing.  It was a 2006 F350, Diesel, with about 130,000 miles, crew cab, with a full 8′ bed.  Pretty much exactly what I’m looking for (and it was white), but it was only a two wheel drive instead of a four wheel drive.  For the asking price of $7,000, I’m pretty sure I could live with that though.  My mouse hovered over the reply button more than once as I gave it a lot of thought.

I ended up skipping the truck due to various issues (I just spent a ton of money, logistical issues in licensing and handling my existing truck, bad timing, etc.).  I think it’s because I was thinking about upgrading to a better truck that my current truck performed quite well today.  I think it knows I was considering replacing it.  Oil consumption was very minimal, fuel efficiency was good (just over 10mpg towing), and no new issues today.

Here’s my planned route from where I currently am to Quartzsite.  Tomorrow I’ll head south ’til I hit Fort Worth, at which point I take a right and head west for several days.  I’m quite purposefully taking a very southernly route to avoid cold weather and as much mountainous terrain as possible.  Of course, I’ve never to been to any of the states on the route the blue line above shows, so I’m pretty much guessing here.