Adventures of The Loya Family: Heading West

And the count down begins.

In T minus 4 days we will be hooking up the truck and heading west. That's right we will actually be leaving the South.

San Antonio,

Waco,

San Antonio (again),

New Orleans,

Shreveport,

Austin

We've been down here for a long time now, and we are looking forward to a change in climate, temperature, and culture. Not that there is anything wrong with TX and LA they've both been great. Lot of good people there, BUT it will be nice to experience a new state.

These past few weeks have kept us pretty busy.

Jonathan flew off to colorful Colorado for some training. Not knowing when we'll be back in this area again, the kids and I took advantage of his absence and spend the time with my parents.

After a week of playing with Grandma and Grandpa and ensuring that their flood of toys had successfully breached into every room in the house, the kids were ready to pick up Daddy from the Austin airport.

We stopped briefly for joyful airport greetings, then we headed over to pick up our fire truck and started our slow drive to Abilene. Slow? How slow was it? Oh, an average cruising speed of around 45mph. Pretty sweet, right? But hey, it's a behemoth of a beast from 1975. What did you expect?

Regardless of the speed the drive was quite lovely.

You'll know you are in Texas on a Friday night when over half of the radio stations are covering the local high school football game. After all, no body does high school football like Texas.

And the stars...oh the stars. They are most defiantly big and bright. It was all I could do to stay on the road and not stop and just stair up at that amazing sky for hours. If I was a stellar home school mom, I would have stopped and had previously taken the time to research some constellation for the kids to look for. But hey, I'm new at this whole ,every moment is an educational moment, kind of thinking. I don't sweat it. I'll get there one day. We're all learning together as we go along.

Back to the trip. I have to admit its a pretty cool feeling to be cruising down a lonely Texas highway with no one on the road except our 4 wheel drive mini van and our very own fire truck.

On one of our many stops to fill up the tanks, a cop car pulls up behind the truck, but get this... they just wanted to check out the truck. "We saw you drive by and though it looked like a neat truck and wanted to know if we could check it out." Now you know, that's a pretty cool ride.

We made it to Abilene where the truck will sit until we are able to come back and invest more time, money, and love into it. Before getting back on the road to go visit our new nephew, we were able to have dinner with some friends. A wonderful full time on the road family that we met in Austin. They were working a job in Nebraska, but just happened to be in town looking for property on the same day we were there. Small world. This little full timer community is something else.