The Journey Begins!

We rented a car from the airport the day after our arrival (they gave us a bright red sports car of course!) It took 3 days to find a great deal on a Suburban . It had minor body damage which dropped the value, as well as somewhat high miles. We were thrilled to finally be able to leave the cramped motel and head off to Oklahoma where we had a lead on a trailer..

Grady.. was this on purpose? ;-)

We love Motel 6 because they are dog friendly!

And kid friendly too! Slight stir-craziness started setting in with some of the children after a day or so.. so we started letting the kids take  turns coming with us on our looking-for-a-truck outings all throughout the Dallas area..

We saw more of the Dallas and outlying areas than I ever imagined existed!

We looked at a total of 5 Suburbans over the course of 4 days..

Craigslist was up all the time, searching all the trucks and trailers within a 300 mile radius! :-)

the girls patiently held down the fort while we searched. After finding our Suburban we checked out of the motel, rented a U Haul for our luggage and headed north to Oklahoma where we had our hopes set on a good trailer..

 

Being fresh from Belize, it was hard not to compare homes like this one to Big Maria's...

 

 

We took a wrong turn and ended up 23 miles from the Kansan border. Yup. And we didn't end up buying that trailer! We found a few others in the area which were all (as our Belizean friend would say) Yucka! Discouraged, we checked Craigslist again and found a newly listed trailer which was a bit over our budget but we called on it anyhow. We travelled the 1 hr to see it and really liked it! Only problem was that it was late Saturday afternoon and we wouldn't be able to get the rest of the cash we would need in order to purchase it until Monday morning.. Well, you know what? The owner sold it to us for what we had on hand, which was $900 less than what he had just listed it for! What a blessing! And to top it off, it was parked at a nice quiet year-round RV park on a lake. The retired couple had used it as a get-away but had found that they were not using it much and had decided to sell it. They were paid up at the park until the end of the month and told us to go ahead and enjoy the time and stay 'till the 30th if we wanted to! :-) First we had to return our UHaul to Tulsa but then enjoyed a breather for a few days where the kids enjoyed the lake and we could move in and prepare for our long haul. The couple was so nice, they even came back to the lake to check on us the day of our departure to make sure that we were getting it all hooked up ok. :-)

 

 

 

We got busy unloading the UHaul and packing our stuff into the travel trailer..

After packing our luggage into the travel trailer we loaded everyone up..

 

..and headed back to Tulsa

..where we dropped the trailer and pointed our Burb back to the lake where we would stay the night at the trailer in quiet and get rested up for the start of our trip home.