Quanah, TX (Copper Breaks SP) to Carlsbad, NM (Brantley Lakes SP)
It was extremely cold last night. The temperature dropped below freezing at sundown, at it was 19 at sunrise. Jay was sleeping upstairs in the penthouse and I was downstairs on the sofa bed. We had the heaters running all night since we knew it was going to be cold, but the temperature differential between the upstairs (52) and the downstairs (72) was pretty amazing. The upper berth has canvas sides all around it and the bed blocks a lot of the heat from the heaters from ever making it upstairs. I think I had the better bed last night, for sure.
We found some ice in our radiator. Fortunately it wasn’t frozen solid and didn’t really affect our driving much. We just gave it an extra long warm up period. Then we headed out for NM. (Jay did buy some extra anti-freeze to add to the existing watered down anti-freeze mixture.)
Today was nothing but a bunch of driving. I thought Oklahoma was a bunch of nothing, but that’s nothing compared to the TX panhandle. There were mainly cotton fields along the roads that we were on. Cotton for 200 miles. Big, semi-truck sized bales of picked cotton standing in the field with plastic tarps covering the tops. Some fields of unharvested cotton. Boring, boring, boring. But at least the roads were good and fast. We drove under the speed limit (the van doesn’t like 70mph) and made the trip in about 7 hours with stops for gas, lunch, and auto parts.
Jay pointed out from our credit card receipts you would think the van was falling apart since our main stops are gas and auto parts stores. But really, we just keep repairing little things (squeaky doors, etc) and the van is running like a champ.