Leaving Livingston...

We left Livingston at 5:15 a.m. on Thursday. Thursday was our day off before our regularly scheduled departure day of Friday but we figured since we were all packed up and ready we might as well leave. We spent Thursday night near Meridian, Mississippi after driving north out of Texas and across Louisiana. On Friday morning we didn’t get up as early so I guess we got on the road around 9. We decided that we wanted to cover more ground on Friday so that we could get to Durham, by Saturday evening, where our friends Cindy and Wendy will meet us. We had originally planned on meeting them Sunday morning but since Linda wants to get some time in with her daughters and grandson in Virginia Beach (while I am in Urbanna), we decided to step things up a bit. We put in 12 hours of driving and stopped for the night just short of the North Carolina border, in South Carolina.
Our first day, just as we crossed over into Louisiana and pulled onto 20 east….a pickup truck with two guys in it pulled up along side of us and said that the straps on our motorcycle were coming undone so we pulled over. They also stopped and while the bike hadn’t loosened, what they were seeing was the bounce and give in the straps when we would go over bumps. We snugged it up a bit and got ready to pull back on the highway. Just as we did a brake warning light, on the control panel came on with a loud, constant beeping. We checked our hand brake and it wasn’t on….nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Linda got the GMC manual out and looked it up but the causes didn’t seem to fit. Next she flipped to the part of the manual where it lists all the dealers nationwide who can do service on it. She found one in Shreveport, LA….a town we were just a few minutes shy of reaching. She called them and they said to bring it on by and they would take care of it. Seems there has been a problem with the relays on the brake alarm so the mechanic had to reset something and it was as good as new. In 30 minutes or less we were back on the road.
The terrain has been flat up until we reached the eastern side of Georgia and then we started seeing some rolling hills. Once in North Carolina, we started seeing changes to foliage like we would see this time of year in Pa…just not as dramatic. Funny how much attention some states give to their rest stops while others are pretty disgusting. In Texas, a common site is to see cracked windshields on the cars. We were told that this is due to people rolling the windows up too tight and on the hot days it makes the windshields crack. You would think that after this happened to you once that you’d remember to leave them down a tiny bit but from the number of vehicles we saw on the roads with cracked windshields, it doesn’t seem to sink in.
We arrived in the Durham area around 12:20 p.m. and pulled off in a Petro truck stop. The parking lot is huge, with room for over 100 trucks. We pulled to the far left side, off the asphalt on the berm area, under a lamp post. Here we can put all the slides out so our friends can see the rig. Proper RV’ing etiquette is that you shouldn’t look like you are camping when you “blacktop boondock”. You shouldn’t put out the awning, get out the grill (probably would have a hundred hungry truckers show up at your doorstep if you did) or get the patio furniture out. We will put our slides back in once we’ve shown the rig to the girls. We put the slide out where the dog crates are so they have room to sleep at night but we always position the truck so that the slide is not in the way of any traffic (put it over the berm side of parking lot).
Tomorrow it’s on to Urbanna, Virginia. Should only take us about 4 hours to get there.