Being here near Palm Springs feels like we are already home. This is one of our go-to places for a getaway while we are home based and even though we are still technically full-timing across the country, it definitely feels like our trip is all but over. Officially, it will be in a couple of days but it is hard for us to make that distinction. We still won’t have a house to move into for a couple of weeks but we will be sleeping under a roof supported by walls sitting on a concrete foundation at Marlene’s parents house.

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During one of our first visits to Tucson several years ago, we were introduced to the great Hotel Congress. Our friend Carrie use to live in Tucson and she acted as a tour guide and introduced us to lots of neat places in town.

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As some of you might know, we have been back in California for some time now and have gone on many other adventures within the state since then. However, we cannot start sharing about those experiences until we are done with these last couple of weeks of our trip around the country. This is my best attempt at wrapping these last couple of weeks up so we can move on closer to the present. Let me rewind back a couple of months: Today, we are in Tucson.

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We intentionally spent the night just short of Tucson last night in the town of Benson so we can go see one of the best preserved natural caves in the world. We found a Wal-Mart in Benson that had a no RV overnight sign but the manager had no problems with us being there. It is becoming more common to have cities and counties ban RV overnight parking in Wal-Marts.

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As we drove west last night out of Las Cruces, we contemplated making the long drive all the way into Arizona and settle somewhere in Tucson. That would have been a really long trek and we would be missing a stretch of I-10 that we have not explored much in the past. We decided to stop at the town of Deming, New Mexico for dinner and stay the night at the Wal-Mart.

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Marfa is quite an amazing place to be this time of year. Something is different about the high desert in West Texas. We are only sitting at 4,600 ft in elevation but the lightness of the air and the special hue of blue in the sky makes you feel like you are much closer to outer space.

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Our ordeal with the Texas Highway Patrol last night left me pretty riled and unable to sleep well for the rest of the night. If you don’t know what I am referring to, go read the end of this post and you will know what happened.

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Last night we spent our first night at a Texas rest stop. Most, if not all, of the roadside rest stops in Texas allow at 24-hour stay. It stems back to the depression era when people were moving west to look for work and needed a place to camp for the night.

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Our campground in Dickinson is located about 20 miles southeast of Houston. It is just about right in the middle between Houston and Galveston just a few miles away from Johnson Space Center. We intentionally found a spot there so we would be able to spend the day at the Space Center after we check out in a couple of days. Today, we are headed into Houston.

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It was a good thing we made a second trip into the city yesterday as today we woke up to rain. Actually, we have been hearing rain on the Airstream all night. We have been pretty lucky in the bad weather column of this trip in not seeing too much rain but it has finally caught up to us.

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This morning we said good-bye to our ocean front Walmart parking space in Mississippi and headed west into the state of Louisiana. Our oldest kid, Ava, was super excited to finally cross into Louisiana. There are four places that she really wanted to visit during our current road trip adventure. First was to see our friend Carrie for Halloween (check!), then it was to go to Disney World (check!), then to see mermaids at Weeki Wachee (check!) and last, but not least, was to go to New Orleans… to eat beignets!

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We made up some arbitrary rules awhile ago that in order for us to count a state as one that we have visited, we needed to tick off some boxes on a checklist that we will create. I am sure there are lots of other travelers who subject themselves to stricter requirements but the ones we decided for ourselves are pretty easy.

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