After a 5:30 alarm this morning we took the $2 bus back to the airport. On the way to the bus stop we saw people still coming out of bars from the night before! This time our stop over was in Houston, Texas and we eventually arrived at Little Rock airport in Arkansas at around 3pm, a few hours later than planned as our first flight was half an hour late, meaning we had to catch a later flight to Little Rock.

Bags collected we made our way to the car hire desk to pick up our Hyundai Accent. Then the fun began....driving an automatic car on the wrong side of the road :-/ Dave took the wheel first and after a couple of wrong turns (including driving past the airport again after 20 minutes on the road) got into the swing of it. It seems everyone we spoke to about it was right - it's easy to drive an automatic! We swapped drivers after a while and continued our very long and very boring journey to Horseshoe Bend. The roads are very long and straight and seem to go on forever. Plus the speed limits are lower than at home so you never feel like you're making much progress.

The timeshare resort we were heading to shuts their reception at 8pm and as we were approaching that time we started to worry that we'd be sleeping in the car that night! Dave tried to phone ahead to warn them we might be a bit late but neither of our phones were working properly so he couldn't get through. Luckily we arrived just after 8:00 and were checked in by 'Ginny' on reception. We asked if there was anywhere we could eat and luckily enough 'Pappa Dick's' the onsite italian / takeaway place was open til 9:00, so we quickly drove to our log cabin (amazing!) and dropped our bags before walking back to the restaurant.

It's definitely small town America here - the waitress in the restaurant was amazed that we had come all the way from England and that we were travelling further than the next town! She told us that she'd love to live in England until we told her that our summers were about 20 degrees cooler than here - her mouth dropped open! She was friendly though and made us feel welcome after our mammoth drive. The food was really good and cheap - a calzone and a meatball sandwich which went down well as we hadn't really eaten much all day since we left New Orleans.

Back to our cabin - we've got a large living room/kitchen/dining room, a bathroom with a jacuzzi bath (which is very nice!) and a really comfortable bed. Bit of a difference from our Washington DC hostel! We're looking forward to having a few home comforts over the next few days...