Day 38 – Houston, Texas

After last nights stay in lafyette Louisiana, we headed off towards our next state; Texas! I was extremely excited about the prospect of arriving here and our first stop would be Houston.

On first impressions it doesn’t look how I expected, by that I mean that so far there’s no desert! I know it may sound silly but I was expecting to walk into something like a western film. Ben asked if so far it was as I’d expected and when I shared my thoughts with him, he had a rather good chuckle! He admitted that he thought the same before he came here, but has assured me that there should be an area that will represent that idea somewhat better.

The second thing I noticed was the roads. Driving in America is chaotic at the best of times, there is no such thing as undertaking, so cars come at you from both sides. The roads are so big and quite often you find yourself on a five lane road, so getting over in time to make the turning can be tricky! It’s quite a job for poor Ben to watch both sides of the road, make the right turnings and generally cope with the lack of indication by other drivers. Another thing is that back in the UK we leave a decent distance between cars when changing lanes, they do not do that here and someone will just pull in right in front of you. In addition to these struggles Texas has gone a bit mental with their roads! They have this odd system whereby if you want to go into a place just off the highway you have to do a long detour, that takes you down and under the current road you are on. You drive back on yourself rather a lot. I am very proud of how Ben is handelling the driving! 

Texas is massive and it’s not really possible for us to spend a day in each part of it. We spent a rather long time in Florida which threatens to affect our schedule, so we decided early on that we wanted to do a drive through of the major cities in Texas. Say Hello to Houston:

Whilst in Houston and fairly close to the airport and in particular our car rental company we decided to pop in. We’ve been having some issues with the Crysler, the change oil light has been on for a few days, and the sticker on the front (think it’s equivalent to the UK tax sticker before it went!) seemingly expires this month. For a rental car the Crysler has done a lot of miles and we’ve both lost confidence with the battles with recent weather. We’ve driven a whopping 6272 miles in the Crysler so far and consider it our home, but we thought it time and a sensible move to pop in at this point.

We rented with Alamo, and I have to say they went above and beyond and we’re incredibly helpful, even searching the entire lot to help us find the perfect replacement. They basically told us to go up and pick any car we like and then joked with Ben that he couldn’t take the Corvette! So we went up there and there was every car you can imagine, they had a huge selection to choose from! It was hard not to get carried away when surround by Mustangs, Challengers, Chargers, Jeeps and more

We took our time to decide as it needed to be sensible with all the luggage and the possibility of ever having to sleep in it. We also wanted something comfortable and reasonably fun as we spend so much time driving!  

After much deliberation and without further ado, I am very excited to introduce to you the beast that is the Dodge Ram Pick-up Truck!

It has some big engine and tires stats (a V8)  for any of you motor fans! We love it! Ben fits nicely in and seems very comfortable, which is good as I had to give up my heated seats for this! It should also hold up better in any deer related incidents compared to the Mustang Ben had before 😉 (sorry Ben!) 

With time having flown by we decided to head of and get some sleep. We think Texas will be a very demanding state in terms of driving because of the huge distances involved.