To Dallas

On Monday morning, minute by minute precision planning took over and we swung into action. We had to leave at 9.00, to return the RV by 11.00 (we arrived at 10.45). Having spent $45 on a taxi to the RV rental the previous Tuesday we had decided to rent a car for the day, so we were then collected by the Budget Rental driver and taken to collect our Budget Rental Car. Because of the late notice, I had to rent the car for 8 days in order for the Budget Computer to think we were worthwhile bothering with (it is spring Break and a lot of cars are already hired out). This meant that we had to return it early, like by about 7 ½ days, still it worked out OK. As we had about 5 hours to kill we went up to Downtown Orlando, as we had never been there. We found a lovely park and a historic district to have our lunch in, then we went for a wander round the Florida Mall, avoiding all the temptations (apart from a Goodie with our tea and coffee in Panera Bread) . We then drove the 15 minutes to the airport, dropped the car, did a Bag Drop, had some tea and arrived at the gate just in time to go straight onto the plane. The plane was more than on time – it landed 20 minutes early. We took the shuttle to the car rental, picked up the car. Interestingly using the Fastbreak programme with Budget the guy at the desk swiped my card and then said to choose any car in section 1 of the car park, which gave a choice of about 5 different compact cars; we chose a Nissan. We arrived at the Motel 6 by about 10.20 and flaked out. Next day we jumped up early and drove north to Sanger, where the trailer was stored. Lo and behold, the trailer was clean and bug free and the Chevy started first time. Having read the small print on the budget rental car we find that Sally can drive it at no extra cost, so Sally drove the car and I drove the Chevy and we returned the hire car. We then drove back south to the Corps of Engineer lakeside campsite at Hickory Creek Campground near Lewisville that I had booked a couple of weeks ago.

This evening we went out for our first Steak of the trip at the Texas Cattle and Land Roadhouse Grill. It was excellent. We also had a great conversation with our waitress, Stephanie, who had just returned from a 6 months tour of Europe.