We spent the day looking around New Orleans and enjoying watching mass crowds of people (men included) wearing red dresses, taking part in an annual 'run'. I say run, but really its one big red party that people from all round the States travel miles for.

We hopped on a ferry which was uneventful and a pathetic 10 minutes, but we did it so we could say we'd been on the mississippi river! We popped to a cafe for a healthy lunch of doughnuts, but not just any kind of doughnuts, people again, travel for miles for this sugary goodness! we split off and did a bit of shopping. There are so many quirky shops in New Orleans and they needed to be investigated! But after spending $70 on awesome jewelery I decided it was probably time to call it a day! We went back to our hotel pool where we were offered cold cans of Bud Light by a bunch of lads on another stag do, and played 'the shoulder game' with them until our fingers were wrinkled from being in the water too long.

After our tour guide cooked us a delicious local dish called jumbolia (sausage, rice and spices), the others headed out. I stayed behind to get a bit of well needed alone time and chilled out in the air conditioned room with my book. Turns out i didnt miss anything, as the others couldn't be borthered either and came home an hour and a half after leaving. Sore heads and emptied bank accounts from the night before enforced an early night for everyone!

The following day we headed on another 9 hour trip towards Texas. We stopped for lunch by a lake and promptly got rained on so continued our travels to the stephen Austin State Park and set up camp. The heat was undescribable and we were so bothered by bugs we retired from our game of bulls*** early to take cover in our tents. Bad move! I have never had such a bad night in my life. The air in the tent was non existant, and there was no breeze to flow through the netting so after three hours of sweating, wiping our faces with baby wipes and then blowing my M&S purchased hand held fan at them for instant cooling, we decided we would rather have snakes on our faces than put up with it any longer! So we unzipped the tent and slept with our heads vurtually poking out. I was awoken by a panicked joadie an hour later saying 'rose, we need to shut the tent, there's an animal outside! Just a racooon I think but we didnt want to be proved wrong! Eventually at about 0400 it cooled enough to settle and after two hours sleep we set off to San Antonio.