DAY 52
Week 8
CORINTH (Texas, USA) to AUSTIN (Texas, USA)
Friday August 11th, 2006
TODAYS MILEAGE – 241 miles or 388 kilometres
TRIP MILEAGE – 7264 miles or 11690 kilometres
What's the Capitol of Texas? About two dollars!!! Not really, it's Austin. 
9 days in Dallas was enough for this little black duck. Time to hit the frog & toad. It generally takes about 2 hours from go to whoa for me to get going. This is due to having to pack everything away in the Man Pad. It also entails loading the Trailblazer on the tow dolly, checking all the fluids and doing the usual pre-flight checks.
As I was doing these checks, I had a county Mountie come and check me out. He didn't get out of his car or anything, but you could see him running rego checks on the RV and the Trailblazer. It'd be a fair guess that one of Mike and Bek's neighbors dobbed me in, but what do you do?
I can understand that the neighbors don't want to have RV's sitting on the street, but on the same token, if I've paid $250k + for a house, then I should be able to have any visitors I want without the "Neighborhood Nazis" getting all fired up.
Around 11AM saw the "caravan of love" hitting the road and as it turns out, getting out of Dallas was a bit more difficult than leaving. I was headed due South through several "mix master" interchanges which meant that I had to merge to the right four times to avoid ending up in Oklahoma, Arkansas or Mississippi.
The trouble was that the local drivers wouldn't let me over, no matter how much notification I tried to give them. So in the end, I would simple stop the Man Pad in the middle of where traffic merges and everybody stops. I then force my way over and traffic starts flowing again once I'm in the lane I want to be in.
I got into Austin (Texas) around 3PM and was on Dash & Christine front porch in Southwest Austin around 4:30PM. It was pretty hot outside as the "Man Pads" temperature creeped over half way and sat there for the entire leg of the journey.
The evening was spent working on Anglo - Cyrlic relationships i.e. imbibing upon multiple White Russians.
That's it for the day, check ya tomorrow.