day 4

january 29, 2014

it's finally starting to warm up!! we woke up in the camper (!!!) this morning to sun. the grass is green!! i'm still wearing a hoodie and a toque, but no jacket! things are looking up - and it's only supposed to get warmer as the day goes on. 

we had a really nice visit with jenna in dallas last night. went out for mexican food (again. i'm not complaining, it's spectacular food) and drank some wine and chatted for hours. it's so lovely to see familiar faces when we are so far from home :) 

today we are heading for houston, a short day of driving. we are going to do some last-minute running around before heading to mexico in the morning. going to pick up a few things like crocs (MOM - i realized i left mine in calgary, heh, sorry for making you look for them!) and a tarp. we're also hoping to find a central/south american road atlas - we bought a canada/usa/mexico one for $7, but central/south america seems harder to come by. our GPS has started working (we assume it was protesting the cold weather earlier), however we do not have 100% of the maps for central/south america, and would like to have a hard copy just in case something happens to the GPS again. 

update: our heroes of the day are the folks at key maps, on alabama st in houston! i called to ask if they had the maps we need, and they did, however the lady said they wouldn't stay open after 5:30 - it was 5 and we were about 35 minutes away. we went anyway, but got bogged down in traffic and didn't arrive until almost 5:40. well, i guess the lady we talked to left for the day, but the other employees had stayed, and even pulled out the south/central america maps for us so that we wouldn't have to search around for them. we got detailed road maps of mexico and south and central america for just under $40 - money well spent, considering our GPS doesn't have full maps, and hasn't been the most reliable creature thus far. 

as i write this, we are driving through rush hour traffic in houston - heading to do our shopping, then to stay with my lovely friend leaha and her family. mike says that houston reminds him of futurama, with all the huge freeways and buildings. i don't know if it's because we have been skirting all of the big cities so far, but houston seems gigantic! it's the largest city in texas,  anyway. we have started seeing both palm trees and mega-churches, so i guess we're at net zero for cool things today. 

we're still a few hours from the mexico border, so we're going to actually set an alarm tomorrow and get up early, so that we can be sure to arrive at the border nice and early in the day. tonight we also need to cross reference our GPS with the information about places to camp, so that we know where we can stay in mexico tomorrow night. we want to be prepared and not end up somewhere sketchy! we're also going to get the camper all organized - i did a lot of that back in the warehouse in toronto, but we've acquired more things since then, and as of tomorrow we'll officially be living out of it.