3952 Miles Later...

We have arrived in New Jersey at Sarah's Dad's place. We are here for about a week. What a great trip we had! We had a few disappointments, but on the whole the trip was very good.

• We had a very good visit with my Uncle in Palm Springs. He has a great pool, and we spent nearly all day in it (with some good wine too, of course)
• When we got to Houston we met with a friend of ours. He took me over to the USS Texas. He volunteers with the ship or something, so he had keys to get into a few not-so-public areas. But it gets even better - we ran into a guy he knows who is a volunteer for the preservation of the ship. He had some time to kill that morning, so he took us all over the ship - literally everywhere!! We went down into the Ammo Storage room (the very bottom level of the 14 in guns!) and I got to lift and move a 14 in shell on the chain hoists!! Then we went over to the electrical generation room, the electrical distribution room, a boiler room, and (best of all) aft steering!! These rooms are totally unpreserved from the time the Texas was decommissioned - the flooding waterline was still visible in the aft steering room!! I was totally covered in rust when we finished. It was the tour of a lifetime!!!!!! Absolutely thrilling! Then we went to dinner with his family to a great Texas BBQ restaurant.
• In New Orleans we got to tour a plantation, see another, and walk around bourbon street and the French Quarter. We didn't hang around to see the fireworks, but I did catch glimpses from the hotel room. We had a great hotel room and enjoyed the trip.
• From there it was pretty much a rain-soaked straight shot to New Jersey over 3 days. The rain was so hard in Mississippi that I had to place myself behind a well-lit semi so that I could see something! That was basically 2 days. On the 3rd we tried to stop at the Biltmore Estate in NC but arrived to late to make the $45/per admission fee worth buying. So we pressed on.

And now we are at Sarah's Dad's place for a week. Then we go to Pittsburgh for a week (and buy the dreaded minivan!) and then its back to work!!