Mary took us to the Greyhound station for 8.30am on Tuesday; we weren't particularly looking forward to the 24 hour journey in front of us but it felt good to be on the move again. We got as far as Tucson, which is not very far - still in AZ, when we hit the first problem. Our driver began to argue with his boss about whether we'd pick up some passengers on a broken down bus. We just sat for 40 minutes. He lost the argument so we picked up extra passengers and were now way behind schedule. There was a guy that dressed like Tupac surrounded by rap groupie types every time we had a rest stop. In front of us was sat a guy who spent the first hour talking in a very menacing, Samuel L. Jackson-in-Pulp-Fiction type way on the phone. Every sentence ended with 'juunaaamean?' (do you know what i mean). So that entertained us for a while. Then I memorised all the states in the US. That passed some time. We were on the I-10, which runs from LA to Orlando on the east coast, and we should have stayed on that all the way to Houston. We crossed the border into New Mexico near the point where the Rio Grande flows into Mexico, then finally got to El Paso, which is just in Texas, and about 440 miles into our 1200 mile journey. Here, at 8pm, we were told, without apology, that we'd missed our connection to Houston and would be re-routed through Dallas!! This makes no sense as Dallas is north east Texas and Houston is south east.... So, we drove through the night towards Dallas, passing the glittering lights of the oil fields, and arrived there at 11.30am (about the time we were due in Houston) having had the scariest woman driver ever who seemed to be in the middle of a delusion of being a sargeant major... The journey to Houston from Dallas was uneventful and on time, and the landscape was distracting, it was nice to see some grenery after a month of the desert followed by the skyscrapers of Dallas. Serena picked us up at 7pm, we'd been travelling for 34 hours by the time we got to her house!