After leaving Columbus and getting our furnace fixed which is working greatβ¦hooray! A couple of reasons for that. First, we made less money than we thought we would at Amazon, and we needed to get some funds in the bank as quick as possible, but we also felt like the sooner we got there the better our chance of getting a gate.
Lee has been monitoring the gate guarding Facebook group we are a part of and was seeing some opportunities in West Texas. Unfortunately, you need to physically be in Texas to qualify for one of those since the need is almost always immediate, so we knew the sooner we got there the better.
The big question was where would we stay while we were waiting. And Texas is a pretty big state, so when we hit Texarkana Thursday night I asked Lee to call one of the Gate guarding companies and nail things down a little bit. We knew about them from people on the group and since most folks were positive about their experience we decided to give them a try.
We knew it would be a long driving day, and since we were essentially going in a diagonal we had a couple of choices. Take Texas State highways through a variety of small towns, or take the interstate and skirt Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio.
Neither choice was great for a long driving day, but ultimately we decided to go the interstate and thankfully we timed it so we missed quite a bit of traffic. We also spent a bunch of time on a toll turnpike that bypassed Austin, which which was good, since we hit that area right around 5pm on Friday. We switched drivers at every stop, which is one of the advantages of only having one vehicle, and rolled into the yard at 8pm.
