Road Trip: Rhode Island to Texas

Earlier this summer, I drove with Carrie to move her in to her new home in Austin, Texas. We drove from the smallest state to one of the biggest.

The stats: 2498 miles. 2 Saturn V rockets. 1 Great Dane. 3 cups Billy’s Special Sauce. 5000 Pez dispensers. 2 terrible books on tape. Five days over 100 degrees.

: All packed up, ready to head south to Texas.

: First stop: Pez Museum. Unfortunately the candy line wasn’t running, but we scoped out some AWESOME PEZ dispensers. No, they didn’t have Rosie the Riveters.

: Next stop: The cabin. Carrie’s grandma Jane hosted us for a lovely evening in western Pennsylvania. Here she is showing off her kick-ass garden.

: Day 3: Lexington, Kentucky. My buddy Billy from Cape Cod just started an entomology grad program at UK, researching ways to control the invasive Emerald Ash Borer. Keep up the good work Billy, and I’ll be coming back for some more bar-b-que and bourbon.

: Highlight of the trip – On day 4, we stopped at the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Here we are in front of the Space Shuttle Pathfinder. Wow!

: Ready for take-off in a Mercury capsule. Alan Shepard once sat here. I’m definitely too tall for old school astronauting and strongly encourage NASA to increase the legroom in future spacecraft.

: We also jaunted down to Port Aransas to check out the UT Marine Science Institute and pick up some gear. We also had to kill some cockroaches, check out the beach, and do some boogy boarding. The water was 85 F, making swimming in 55 F Toolik Lake the following week a bit startling.

: We made it to Austin on Day 5. It’s a lovely town, with both a turtle pond (shown here) and a endemic salamdar pool. Carrie is pretty happy about that.