MILITARY ROACH COACH

Our new assignment took us to Easton, Maryland to pick up a what they called a military kitchen trailer, but what we affectionately called the "roach coach". This monster has everything in it to feed and serve a platoon of soldiers. We will be proudly serving our country by taking it to Fort Hood, Texas.


As Cori would say..... "Ooooh Boy"..... Back into the heat again in the southwest. We actually had quite a few nights this past week where it was very pleasant and we could sleep with the screens on the windows and the vents open. We know that will come to an end very soon. The one thing we did have to put up with again this past week was the humidity.

But driving over what Maryland calls its "Bay Bridge" we saw some areas which given the opportunity, I think I would not mind putting up with the humidity. I'd suffer through the humidity to live on some of the houses we saw right next to the water.



With a hot summer thunderstorm looming large overhead, we quickly got the meal on wheels loaded and securely chained to the trailer. We weren't really thinking when we took off from Easton towards Baltimore at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon. Blame it on the heat and humidity but we did. Almost 5 hours and only 160 miles later we finally stopped at a truck stop for some sleep and a shower.

Feeling refreshed after a hearty breakfast with the biggest homemade biscuits I have ever seen, we were off towards Knoxville. Being that it was a Saturday, carloads of families were out and about, and finding an open spot at any of the roadside rest stops proved to be challenging to say the least. Virginia was green and wet. It was overcast and raining a good part of the day. We then hit Tennessee and the weather turned much warmer.

I was surprised at how green Tennessee is along Highway 40. I have put Tennessee on my short list of places to consider living. We learned from a road sign that Tennessee is the home of country music. You could tell how much they love their country music by naming their rest stops after big recording stars. We were lucky to take a rest at the "Patsy Cline & Chet Atkins" Rest Stop. Hee Haw Y'all. As we went through Elvis' home city, Memphis, we crossed over the Mississippi River.

We were then in Arkansas. Too much like Texas, as it got hotter than we have been used to. But we did see something interesting. For a moment, I thought I had somehow been transported to Las Vegas when we saw this:

We never did figure out what it was but it was in Little Rock, Arkansas. Who knows, maybe it was the inspiration for the Lexor in Vegas.

We stayed the night in Prescott, Arkansas which left us only 400 miles left to Fort Hood. We were up early in the morning to get to the military base by 10:00am. After passing through the checkpoint, being told to go to one area, only be to told there to go back to area we came from, we finally found the right personnel to off load the kitchen trailer. I didn't dare take any pictures while on the military base for fear I would be thought a terrorist.

Tonight we treated ourselves to a hotel room in which we could keep cool, keep clean, and do laundry and start our day fresh in the morning for our new assignment.