Georgia to New Mexico - Part 2

Day one of our journey to New Mexico finds us starting out under grey, cold skies.  Perfect!  Engine temps, transmission temps and tire temps will all be low.  Heat for those components becomes an issue on hot summer days.  It is not unusual to see exhaust gas return temps run steady at 900 deg and tires to level out at 130 deg with tranny temps hitting 195 deg, engine and tranny spiking under changes in load.  But there will be none of that today, we'll be lucky to break 50 deg air temp.

Our travel time is arranged as we typically do, we try to find a campground that is within a 4 to 5 hour distance.  That amount of time keeps us from having to rush to get out extra early in the morning and gets us into our campground for the night well before dark.  It is also how long I can tow our heavy trailer on one tank of fuel.  Getting to camp before needing to refuel lets us get unhitched and set up for the night with plenty of time to find a local fuel stop with the best price.  If we refuel with the trailer in tow it pretty much limits us to truck lanes at one of the truck stops, usually the highest priced fuel around.

Our departure route to Interstate 20 is not straight-forward.  The "big" road to take would be to get on I-75 S to I-285 W to I-20 W, but it is a Monday morning and Atlanta traffic will be a total snarl all day long.  But the country roads are no cake walk either.  We spent several hours the day before our departure successfully scouting a way out that would keep us on a road wide enough with no low hanging trees or high clearance railroad tracks.  It took a good while to make our way down to I-20 but it was a stress-free drive through some pretty scenery.

Once on I-20 it was just a matter of getting behind one of the thousands of trucks on the road with us and putting it on auto-pilot all the way to western Alabama.  We arrived at Jennings Ferry Campground around 2:00 in the afternoon. It is a Corps of Engineers operation so we were able to use our senior card and get half off the fee.

Jennings Ferry Campground.  A very nice place for a night or a week.

It's early spring, grass is just beginning to green up but the trees are dragging their feet.
The drive to town for fuel was ho-hum, it's a little wide spot in the road with one station with diesel and a Sonic Drive In.  The grilled chicken wrap was excellent.

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