Crossing the country…
The US is big! You can drive for hours and hours and still be in the same state. Before we came here I thought I knew what rural was but it’s next level in a place so vast. All to say - we were on a pretty tight deadline to get our minivan built out and drive across the country for hotel reservations for Amy’s birthday in Utah. It’s an almost 50 hour journey, something I definitely hadn’t appreciated when I made that hotel booking. We’ve been on the road for 8 days now and have covered the majority of the distance. A few things we’ve learnt in these very early days:
Cracker Barrel car parks are reliably good places to sleep for the night. It’s a chain restaurant owned by Mormons with a policy of not turning away people who need/want to crash there for the night.
Minivans are well insulated! It might be the tonne of thinsulate we put under our floor or the thick window covers but even down to -3 celsius we’ve been cozy without needing to use our heater.
We found that 7 hours on the road would get us around 5 hours of driving time adding in stops for food, walking around and swapping drivers.
Texans are the worst drivers of all the states we’ve been through (sorry guys!) driving through Dallas was a genuinely terrifying experience
We’ve just arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and have seen pride flags for the first time in a long time. During our drive through the bible belt I hadn’t really clocked how tense it made me feel to pretend to be besties with Amy and hope I didn’t accidentally slip and give her a kiss in front of the wrong person - but arriving somewhere with more of a queer culture was like jumping into a warm ocean, deeply relaxing.
