Day 3251

 I woke up at 6.  I thought I'd woken up at 7, but I'd miscalculated the time zone that we were in.  There was no point in getting up, so I played games for quite a while.  I finally got up at 7:45.  Then it was breakfast and hooking up.

Hooking up went as it usually did with the addition of tightening the lug nuts.  The nuts on the new axle seem to get a little loose each day.  We were on the road a little before 9.  It was Sunday, so traffic through El Paso was fairly light.  There wasn't even any problem through the construction.  After that it was clear sailing until we were 20 miles west of Van Horn.

Some asshole semi driver had done something stupid.  His trailer was crashed on the side of the road and on fire.  I'd first seen the smoke about a mile away.  The crash was off the right side of the road and all of the traffic was moving to the left lane.  Folks were slowly driving past until some asshole about 6 vehicles in front of us decided that it was too scary to drive through smoke.  Traffic came to a standstill.

Eventually the police (3 cars) and firefighters got to the scene.  We sat on the road for about an hour until the fire was converted to a smouldering load of either cabbages or lettuce.  At least we were close to the front of the jam, so once the road was opened (1 lane) we got going fairly quickly.  One of the worst part of the ordeal was that there was no internet.  That meant that we couldn't listen to pod casts.

We got 11 mpg for the trip.  That was probably because we had a tail wind for most of the way.  That kind of makes up for the head wind when we were going west.  The rest of the trip to the park was uneventful.

We got to the park and set up.  Then it was back to Fort Stockton to fuel up.  We went to the same station that we did the first trip west.  It had inexpensive fuel and we'd used it before so we knew it was good.

We went back to the trailer and watched videos.  Ellen took Abby to the dog park.  Abby met another dog there and did a lot of rolling in the dust.  When Ellen brought her back she immediately got a bath.

Dinner was a frozen pizza followed by more videos.