SUNDAY

Well dear friends and family I am back home, recovering from my aborted trip and resting my exhausted body.

I started off with Google directions which bypasses Dallas, but took a wrong turn, so I looked for the southbound interstate, reasoning that at least I will get to Texas. The kind lady at the Visitor Centre desk on the state line gave me very clear directions, and a map with the route highlighted, and instructions on which exit I needed to take to get on to the right interstate to where I was going, However – and please try to understand this – leaving interstates at exits isn’t quite the doddle that it is leaving a motorway at an exit. There are six lanes of traffic around me, exits every few yards, and it is not easy – or at least not easy to me – to be in the right lane, at the right time to leave at the right exit. I got over to a right hand lane, reasoning that I would just pull off at the right exit, like I would at home.  But the lane I was in pulled me off at the wrong one.  I tried hard to figure out how to get back on to the interstate I’d left, I drove round, pulled into garages and places and asked, but I just got more and more mired up and lost in the Dallas suburbs.

So I quit and decided to go home and turned on my GPS which was the only resource left to me. You might ask why I didn’t use it in the first place, and the reason is that it is just not satisfactory in that kind of traffic – not here anyway.  Coming back I followed the GPS instructions exactly because I had no alternative, and it took me round and round the Dallas suburbs, literally in circles. No sooner would I leave one suburb than it would take me round and round in more circles in another suburb.  Until EVENTUALLY and hours later it got me on to the Highway to Shawnee.  The journey back from Dallas should have taken three hours, following the GPS it took me six, that's why it is the last resort. 

I think I should have stuck to my original plan and gone along the back roads, like I do when I go to Beaumont.