Pressure

This is what it looks like after you open a plastic bottle at 7,000 feet and leave it tightly closed until you reach sea level. Crossing the Rockies is a surprisingly noisy endeavor - bottles crackle and pop, cans flex and ping, and objects of mystery emit occasional bongs, thumps, and sighs. Add the high rpms of a laboring diesel and an engine fan that comes on with a deafening roar when the water temp hits 200, and sleeping becomes iffy at best.

Oh, and it's important to remember this pesky physics stuff before you begin opening bottles of mustard for a sandwich. Just sayin'.

Touching

The Mojave

Approaching the San Bernardino mountain range from the high desert of the Mojave. It's beautiful here.

Des Moines

How cool are John Deere suspenders? Especially when paired with elastic waist cargo shorts, frayed denim flip-flops, and a white v-neck undershirt. Gramps rocks!

Pollo Tropical, Homestead, Florida

Since we were deep into Cuban food territory - Homestead, Florida - we decided to seek out a Cuban sandwich for lunch. Gretchen (the name of our current GPS) displayed Pollo Tropical restaurant as a Caribbean venue. Off we went!

For just over six bucks I had an enormous platter of pulled roast pork, beautifully flavored, on a bed of white rice, black beans, lettuce, corn, and a wide variety of sauces to accompany it all. Thumbs up!!

Wyoming

A couple of quick pics of Wyoming (sorry about the splattered bugs). This area regularly is shut down due to blowing snow, despite these enormous wooden snow fences.

Breakfast Eggs

Asparagus, grape tomatoes, black olives, red onion, spinach, and bacon scrambled eggs with big bits of queso fresco. Yummmmm!

Haul, no!

We sometimes pick up freight that's been banged about some, with a crumpled corner here or there, or a gash in the cardboard. But we drew the line on this one. These boxes of padded furniture originated in Canada, but had evidently encountered a rhino stampede somewhere along their journey to Austin. By the time we were called to drive them to Houston, they were emittingtheir death rattle. Despite the outrageous rate it was paying, and that it would take us closer to our Holiday Ranch for the weekend, we refused the load.

And still made nearly four hundred bucks for driving down there. Heh.
 

The 4th at Winstar Casino, Thackerville, Oklahoma

The fireworks were great, and we had a front row seat in the RV park. Speaking of which, I got a laugh when I looked at the back of our park ticket:

Shrimp!

On our way to a shipper in Selma, NC, we came across a young guy selling fresh shrimp under a tent at the side of the road. He'd gotten them right off the boat that morning, "fresh from our local ocean". Yep, he really said that. They did look fresh and good, so I bought 3.5 pounds - sounds like a lot, but when beheaded and shucked, it would have fed 3 or 4 skinny people ... Or Hoss and me. I marinated them in olive oil, garlic, lemon, and rosemary. I'm drooling even now. They were awesome, and worth every minute of labor.