Chapter 82

Once inside the cafe section I thought I had finally arrived at a real truckstop. It wasn't one of the big new Truckstop as a mall inventions made specifically for where big roads came together. I could see plainly the drivers in here had to work for a living. Most of them wore Carhartt overalls and while they all seemed clean enough you could tell they weren't the type of truckers who took a shower every day.

Surprisingly none of them even bothered to notice when we came in. A couple of them eyed the women with me with admiration, but none of them even nodded in our direction.

The waitress came over with a handful of cups and a pot of coffee and she started placing the cups around and pouring coffee with one hand and passing around menus with the other. An amazing display of ambidextrous slight of hand. As soon as she had the menus scattered and the coffee poured she left and returned with a big glass of ice water for us all.

The women, even Sherry, took time to look at the menu, but thanks to previous training from Bill I knew what to order. The waitress had her pad up and her pen ready when she saw I wasn't looking at the menu and I was proud to tell her I wanted four eggs sunny side up, a ham steak, hash browns, grits, and biscuits.

The girls took a little longer to order, but they did acceptably well and the waitress was off for our food right away.

"Do you think you ordered enough breakfast Jimmy," Kathy asked, after the waitress had gone.

"It'll probably hold me for at least two hundred miles. Bill always told me getting something to eat was even more important than flirting with the waitress."

Surprisingly the waitress was back with food very quickly. She had another girl with her since they had so much food to bring. In seconds I was stuffing it in and couldn't be bothered with much talking. The girls did their own good job on the food and when we were finished we all decided, over a coffee refill, this was much better food than we could have had at any Petro, Flying J, or Truckstops of America, the current large chains of truckstops.

I was elected to drive for a while and when I found out where we were I was lost.

"Where in the hell is Carthage Texas."

"It's just south of Tenaha. You slept through both Timpson and Tenaha and we stopped in Carthage for breakfast. Just stay on State Highway 96 South until you come to Center and then you'll take Highway 7 West to Nacogdoches where we'll pick up US 59 South again into Houston," Sherry said.

"You did get us off onto the skinny roads didn't you?" I asked.

"Yes, like any half assed smart trucker would take. We're saving two hundred miles you would have had us sightseeing on. We'll hit the outskirts of Houston about the time we would have been turning south on I-45 off the loop around Dallas if we'd gone the way you wanted to."

I shut my mouth then, but my asshole puckered in about fifteen minutes when we had to turn onto Highway 7. I wasn't sure about taking it and it didn't seem like a real highway to me. It was two lanes with a stripe down the middle, in most places, but there was no breakdown lane on either side. It was two-lane blacktop with grass edges, and the edges weren't very damned far from the center stripe.

Highway 7 wasn't much of a bother though after I got used to it. There was enough room for the truck and trailer on my side of the road and there was damned little traffic on it this time of the morning. When we hit Nacogdoches and turned onto US 59 South and I was comfortable again. It was a four lane divided highway, and even though it wasn't limited access it was still roomy and I felt relieved.

When we hit Houston we took a beltway around to the east and half an hour later we were pulling into one of the entrances to NASA. Sherry got out and checked in at the guardhouse and they called a car to come direct us to the dock where we were to unload.

Unlike the way Bill had warned me I'd sometimes need to help unload, or actually do the unloading by hand, the guy in the car stopped us before we backed up to the dock and had us drop the trailer. signed our papers, and then let us go. We were in and out of NASA in thirty minutes.

"Well that sucks. What are we going to do for a trailer now," I said, secretly glad we were rid of it.

"Don't worry about a thing. There's a load of beef on the hoof waiting for us, trailer and all, about a hundred miles south of Houston. We're running about five hours ahead of schedule though and now we're heading for a truckstop out on the east side of town on I-10. It isn't much more than a fuel stop, but at least we can get some coffee and sweet rolls," Sherry said.

I'd have been lost without Sherry and Jackie. Apparently they'd both been to Houston before. My natural inclination, after looking at the Atlas, was to head for the I-610 loop around town.

"Never get on I-610 in Houston unless you just have to. The city has grown up so it's now the inner loop and the best you can hope for is three miles without a major traffic snarl. Just strike out straight ahead and I'll tell you where to turn," Sherry said.

We took a lot of small streets, but we came out on a road leading to a small fuel stop just off I-10. We parked and went inside for coffee and sweet rolls, just as advertised.

We farted around at the fuel stop for about an hour and Sherry said we might as well get on I-10 and then give I-610 a try on around the south side and try to get off heading south west.

"We'll go through Wharton and end up driving around El Campo looking for a cattle ranch that's supposed to have a load of beef, trailer and all, waiting for us," Sherry said.

We were lucky on I-610, or at least Jackie said we were. There were two big wrecks we passed, but they were both on the other side and all we had to deal with were the idiots who wanted to slow down and look for dead bodies.

I was heartened when I saw a sign point off that said Wharton 85 miles, but it was a damned maze to take the off ramp and wind around to the small highway going the way we wanted to be headed.