Back in Texas!

We left White Sands, NM around noon, with a very long, 700 mile drive across Texas in front of us. We took pictures of most of the 34 state signs as we drove, and this one was one sight for sore eyes.

Similarly, we watched many-a-sunsets over the last 4 months. This one stands to be one of our last, setting over the plains of west Texas.

We drove late into the night finishing our drive in the suburbs of Dallas, spending two nights with our friends, Matt and Marie. We arrived just before midnight, on Tuesday night, so we just hung out in their apartment, catching up on each of our extensive travels. I worked from their place on Wednesday, and later that night we went to an upscale movie theater that serves food and beer. We had a great time!

Thursday would be a very exciting day! We would be seeing our puppies, Tiger and Aggie, for the first time in over four months. We drove down to Irving, TX where our great friends Corey and Alissa live and have been wonderful puppy parents in our absence.

Corey and I agreed to each film the reunion with our digital cameras. I give you with the two clips. First, from the point of view of Kim and I:

And from the puppies' point of view...

Aggie was absolutely adorable, whimpering as Kim pet him.

Tiger was completely beside himself. He was awesome, jumping his big ole self up into my lap as soon as I sat down. As engaged as he was with excitement, he never did put his sloppy rawhide bone down.

Aggie got some time on my lap too. I had almost forgotten just how sweet and affectionate of a dog he is.

Tiger always like to be wherever Aggie is. In this case, I can't quite fit both of them on my lap at the same time, so he worked his way over onto Corey instead.

It felt so good to be back with our dogs. Honestly, I think I missed them more than anything else. We spent hours showering them with love and attention.

On Thursday night, we went out to dinner with Corey and Alissa at an Italian restaurant in downtown Irving, and then back to their house to watch a movie in their awesome home theater.

I worked from Corey's house on Friday, but Friday night, we went out to a coffee shop just south of downtown Dallas called The Opening Bell. Here, we met up with our extraordinary house-sitting musicians, Vanessa and Rip. Vanessa is a gifted musician and experienced traveler herself, and we met Rip (and his remarkable sense of humor) for the first time.

I love this picture below, of the people who really made our journey possible -- Corey (and Alissa, not pictured) for keeping our dogs, and Vanessa and Rip for keeping our house in Austin. Thank you guys, so-so-so much. We're forever in your debt and hope to make it up to you somehow, sometime.

Notice that Vanessa is wearing a Texas Rangers jersey... During her second set, the hometown team defeated the New York Yankees and earned their first ever trip to the World Series. Needless to say, Dallas was abuzz, so we hopped over to another bar where we met up with some long lost friends from Austin, who happened to be in Dallas for the night -- Marie, Josh, and little Dagny.

After a couple of rounds, celebrating with the locals over the big baseball victory, we retired back to Irving for our last night on the road.

We had a pretty lazy Saturday morning, sleeping in and packing our bags. Before we started the laborious process of loading the car, Tiger and Aggie wanted to show off their newest talents.

Unable to keep up with them running full speed, or wear them out running human speed, Corey takes each of them on a run along side his Razor scooter. Here's Tiger in a full sprint.

And Aggie making sure that Corey is doing okay. So thoughtful. :-)

It took a solid hour to pack the car in a manner that we could haul all the stuff that we've carried for last four months, plus two 65 pound dogs!

It looked something like this...

And the puppies were stuffed in the back. Thankfully, it was only about a three hour drive.

We unloaded them briefly, to run back inside and get one more picture of all of us.

We left around 10am, driving south on I-35 down toward Austin. When said she was getting hungry, I was already one step ahead of her, having planned to stop at Rudy's Country Store and BBQ in Waco. Oh, yeah. Smoked turkey, white sliced bread, pickles, jalapeños, cream corn, and banana pudding. I have been dreaming of that for months! The dogs were adorable angels, hanging out right next to us eating at the park benches outside.

Another hour-and-a-half later, we'd find ourselves rolling into Austin, and eventually down Canyon Edge Drive, where this adventure started 128 days ago. According to the speedometer, we traveled 14,776 miles. Wow. It's a little hard to comprehend right now. Give me a few weeks, and I'll probably write an epilogue about the whole journey, but I'll need to step back and give that some thought.

Anyway, my time in Austin would be short, leaving 18 hours later on a flight out of Austin to Orlando for work on Sunday morning. The dogs were visibly excited to be back at home, running around their own yard. Kim and I unpacked the Jeep, and hauled everything upstairs or into the garage. I checked over the house pretty well, and the other vehicles, even took a walk down to the creek. And then I proceed to open and sort mail for the next 2 hours, while watching NCAA football on my own TV.

There are things I missed about home, and things I already miss from the road. And conversely, there are a few things I don't miss from home, or from the road. I should let Kim speak for herself on this one, but I very much enjoyed my adventure away, the people we visited, the stuff we saw, the things we did. We will be forever grateful to the people who helped make this possible and we look forward to hosting all of our hosts in Austin some time soon.

Thanks for following us here in our blog, and please do stay tuned. There's lots more to come. We're just getting started....

:-Dustin