God Blessed Texas...

...with rain!

I tend to be the type that keeps a positive outlook. So much so that I think my optimism gets on Malcolm's nerves sometimes. Oh well! This trip to Texas has been plagued with what some would consider bad news. First we loaded on Friday morning in Stockton, CA, knowing we couldn't deliver until Monday morning. A few hours later, Mark called with our reload, and the unfortunate news that we couldn't pick it up till Tuesday morning. That was bad news because that meant sitting in Elgin, TX for a day with nothing to do.

My being the ever persistent optimist immediately saw the blessings to this situation. I pictured myself roaming the streets of a quaint little Texas town, browsing shops, taking in the quiet beauty of simplicity, and maybe getting my brows waxed. As it turns out, Elgin in just a few yards shy of being an Austin, TX suburb. There is a quaint Main Street, but its all businesses occupying the old buildings, and the main part of new Elgin has a 4 lane highway running through it.

I imagined what a great opportunity this would be to take the girls out for some long overdue running time. They love to run full tilt in big wide circles when we let them out to play, and they did that a few days ago in Oregon, but it was a brief stop. I imagined we would take them out for a long long run! Alas, its raining, and appears to have been doing so for some time. Everything is soggy, soggy, soggy. Add to that a chilly temperature of 55....anyone who knows my girls knows they wouldn't be running even if the sun was shining, especially Paris. They'd be huddled at my feet asking to go back to the truck.

Still I my optimism persisted. We'd find a good place to eat and have a yummy meal just as soon as we dumped off our organic soybean meal.

We arrived at our destination around 8:45 am. The equipment immediately got plugged up and we weren't finished unloading until after noon sometime. Malcolm got soaked because he was trying to help the guys fix the problem in the pouring rain and gusty winds. We snacked on crackers and cheese when he got in the truck to warm up.

Finally unloaded, we called our reload to ask if we could load today possible? And the answer was sure, as long as we could be there by 3:00pm. We had two hours and the trailer was filthy, and there isn't a truck wash within a 30 mile radius. Malcolm feeling discouraged, still damp and cold, and operating on an empty stomach, finally decided to just wait till tomorrow and hope the rain washes the trailer. Of course...its stopped raining now. So after a lunch at a local BBQ place that looked promising and turned out to be just so-so, he's now back in the trailer trying to sweep out soybean meal that has turned to glue because of the rain that got in the trailer while unloading.

OK, so we can't load till tomorrow. Fine! We'll have a relaxing evening, treat ourselves to some dessert somewhere, and load first thing. We can still be in Flagstaff first thing Wednesday morning. Its only a little over 1000 miles. Malcolm called Nestle Purina in Flagstaff to change our Thursday appointment to Wednesday. The appointments there are always way too far out, but they always move them up for us. Not this time! They are out of bin space and we can't deliver till Thursday at 9:00am. There went our last hope for a decent week. We've had 2 really good weeks, running over 4000 miles each week since we left the house last time. This week, we'll get two trips in. This one we just finished technically goes on last week, so the Flagstaff run will be our first trip for the week, and unless there's a really good paying shorty between Thursday and Friday, we'll probably be loading for the weekend after Flagstaff which means we'll have another trip with too much time.

I don't mind the leisure time, but when your working on goals, pushing to accomplish things, hoping to be able to take a few days off for Thanksgiving and Christmas feeling quilt free....well you want to the weeks in between to be just as jammed packed full of work as you can handle.

Oh well...always the optimist, I'm already off looking at silver linings. We'll have time to eat at that little place north of Dallas that we like. We'll be driving across northern New Mexico and maybe we can stop at the Mexican restaurant in Moriarty that Malcolm loves. It will be dryer there, surely, and maybe the girls can play then. Its supposed to be cold and snowing in Flagstaff on Wednesday, but nicer on Thursday! We'll have at least two more nights of sleeping in a parked truck. Maybe we can find one of those Red Box movie things and I can get "The Proposal" which I've been wanting to see. I haven't shared these "good" things with Malcolm yet. He's spirit is almost as damp as the weather. I don't think he's in the mood to hear them yet.

Here are a couple shots I got coming across southern NM and TX. I was driving when we went through Phoenix on Saturday.so no picture of that city. What a traffic nightmare! Four lanes merging down to one for construction and DOT had it out for the trucks! They had at least 7 pulled over in a 15 mile stretch! But I did get this shot of Las Cruces, NM on Sunday morning.

Las Cruces is just a hop, skip, and jump from El Paso, TX, which is on the New Mexico and old Mexico border. I mean this quit literally. At one point driving through El Paso you are on I-10. There is the interstate, next to that the railroad, next to that the Rio Grande, and there is Mexico.

I know that all of Mexico does not look like this, but the city across the river from El Paso is about the bleakest I've ever seen. It truly looks like every image I ever pictured in my mind of "Mexico." Crumbling adobe houses, narrow streets, poor, poor, poor. Perhaps my eyes deceive me, but gazing across the river, that is how it appears. What saddens me more, is that they can gaze across the river too. Not such a great shot of El Paso. It was hard to get one. And granted it has its crumbling adobe houses, its graffiti, its poor sections, too. But looking at that particular view of Mexico made me incredibly thankful that God placed me in a country as grand as the good ole USA. Granted we have our issues, and our government is screwy sometimes. But thank God I live on this side of the river!There flag was bigger......but these two meant a lot more to me.

And after loading these pictures and looking at them blown up to full screen size, I'm thinking that with a soggy day spent in Elgin, TX with too much time on a load and the prospect of a week with lower profits...what do I have to complain about?

God blessed Texas...and me!