So after leaving Rusty in Waco, we drove to Fort Worth where we had booked a room in the La Quinta Inn and Suites on Anderson Boulevard, Eastchase.
I need to mention all of this as this hotel delivered way over the top.
Clean, efficient, inviting, comfortable, staffed by a team of winners that should make the owner very proud, we were impressed, compared to the same money we had spent at another chain of hotels over 4 nights, La Quinta hit it out the park.
There is cheaper out there, but with the amount of distance we did every day, our minimal sleeping, and general self abuse...... The room had to be half decent.
This was our hotel. Looks good ehhh?
After being booked in by an incredibly efficient, friendly and just way above expectation, Britney, we were also invited to have a few beers and a light dinner free of charge on the hotel. Seems they have a free guest dinner and deserts plus drinks on a Wednesday evening so our plans to go out for a burger, pizza or other fast food went straight out the window.
In stead we had good company and food, plus the chef was as sweet and motherly as you could wish for all the way from the Deep South.
Just how good did I mention this trip got on a daily basis? There really were silver linings to our silver linings.
One of the reasons we had left Rusty by 3pm was that we could go online on the complimentary hotel computer to book ourselves in 24 hours before our flight, we hoped to get some nice seats again.
When we went online, there were no nice seats, so we ended up with a pair of adjacent aisle seats.
The hotel also supplies a complimentary printer, Internet etc...... You have to agree, this is very good service.
We had a whole hotel trolley to get all our combined treasures up from the car park to the second floor.
Our room was massive and had two King sized beds, large clean bathroom, massive telly for Martin (I tend to us them for hanging my laundry over) fridge with complimentary half dozen beers. What was not to like.
After dinner we went out to a couple of shops, including Walmart that had Gas Monkey T-Shirts for $7.50 and long sleeved shirts for $10.00, so I was hoping to get a XXL for my friend Alan in the UK as he is a massive GMG fan. No luck, so we went back to our room and Martin started to sort out his packing, getting the weight subdivided between his cases etc, I watched telly with one eye and him stressing with the other eye, but really should have tackled my cases, a fact that would come back to bite me in the butt in the morning.
Another late night, and good nights sleep, we woke up and went to breakfast downstairs.......
Fresh, modern furnishings, loads of food, including sausage, scrambled egg, muffins, biscuits, gravy, waffles, coffee, juice, fresh fruit and a load more stuff to eat. Life was certainly good.
My favourite part of breakfast....... Cereal and great coffee.
After breakfast we went up again, and it was my turn to pull out Martin's hand held scales, a must have on a trip like this. The other thing, if you have not been to the USA before, is locks that the TSA can open, so they are special ones. Get them.
The idea was to distribute the 84kg or 185 pounds in baggage and spares I had bought in such a way that I ended up with 23kg or 50 pound bags, and that they were done in a way that would not leave heavy items rocking and rolling around inside a bag, destroying other fragile parts.
Yes, it was a challenge.
Martin was clearly enjoying my discomfort at this point......... After all, the previous night he had told me more than once to get on and do this. But did I listen..??
I also had my 2.1 meter or 7 foot tall ski bag with stainless bed strips, side mouldings, my treasured Original Auto steering column bought from Clem and my new panhard rod already packed up, at close to 23kg, so the rest of the stuff had to be thought through sensibly.
I failed dismally the first three times I tried to split up the baggage.
Eventually I did have them sorted into exactly the right weight, balanced with padding, packing and in a way I hoped they would not destroy anything inside.
I chose to take my new cab mounting kit, the 24V LED lights, new chrome door handles and lock set into my hand baggage along with some bolts and heavy stuff, in order to offset my hold baggage.
Martin tried to warn me that Security would pull you over for many reasons, so anything that could be deemed a weapon, dangerous or just weird, could have the rubber gloves and drug dogs out in force.
In the mean time Martin with practiced stress and concern kept an eye on the weather and flight departure schedules as there was a bit of bad weather over Texas in the time we were there......
We were leaving on Thursday late for an overnight flight back to the UK.
Looks like we chose the weather just right to leave.
Eventually, well, by 10.30 we were packed, right down to our back packs.
So armed with the hotel trolley we went downstairs to say our goodbyes and settle up and check out.
Not included in the photo was the ski bag.
So we left and stopped at a few shops along the way to the DFW airport.
The faithfull, out of date SatNag took us straight back to Alamo car hire where we turned in the car, unpacked, almost rented a trolley each for $5.00 when a lady called Missy who was part of the check in system, offered to help us drag all our bags to the bus stop to get to the departure area. At this point we were about 4 hours early...... A $5.00 tip meant we had "rented" the trolleys for half price.
We get on the bus, made it to departures.
Then sat around, watching the world go by, surfed the net, read up on some forums and generally got bored.....
Still stressing about whether my oversized ski bag would be allowed on, whether I would get the rubber glove treatment for my 24V LED Lights or have them confiscated as undesirable or dangerous, we could only wait.
Last bit in a while.