We had a long travel day today, so we decided to get an early start. We left our hotel at 7:30 AM and 82 degrees with clear skies and headed for Lafayette, LA. Yes, the day began warm and only got warmer. By noon it was 97 degrees and topped out at 100 for most of the afternoon. They are definitely having a heat wave down here. Guess we need to return to Florida just to cool off.

I love Texas. And today did not disappoint. But first we had to navigate the maze of raised roadways. Texas loves their tangles of roads and we drove up over some and under others and around some as well. With a good GPS it would be a piece of cake, however, the lady in the box told us at one point to keep left when we should have kept right. Thanks to Map Quest on my Iphone we were able to recover, but it cost us some time. Once we were out of the maze, we headed east through lush fields of green pastures with beautiful green trees and lots of grazing cows. If not for the power lines that marred the view, it would have been perfect. Honestly, I don't think Texas has ever buried a power line. They love their erector sets that hold the wires up high and transfer power from station to station.

We followed the trains all morning and we saw many, most heading west. We saw three in the just 20 minutes. The first had to be pulling at least 100 cars filled to the brim with black coal. The next one was carrying containers stacked two high and many tractor trailers, which made me happy because they were not on the road with us. The third was a mixture of box cars, oil tankers and open-bed cargo cars loaded with lumber and other building materials.

We drove through Fort Worth and as we passed, on the outer edge of the city, we saw what turned out to be the Texas Motor Speedway. I was not able to get a photo of this immense facility, but I found one on the internet. This place is impressive, to say the least.

I have to say, Fort Worth appears to be very prosperous. Everything we saw from the highway looked neat and clean and new. We saw a lot of construction going on, a lot of beautiful houses in neat neighborhoods and a lot of industry…looks like they are employing a lot of people here and planning for more.

We stopped for gas before leaving Texas and the highlight of the day could be considered the price of gas. We paid $1.99/gal. I never thought I would see that again anytime soon. It kind of eases the sting of the prices in Canada which were over $5/gal and in California, where they were pushing $4/gal.

We landed in Lafayette with time to spare, so we decided we would look around and hopefully find some old historic houses, perhaps Antebellum houses, to photograph. We headed for "downtown" but that turned out to be kind of old and run down. Not what I had expected. And it was not in the best part of town. So we thought it best to just head for our hotel and get settled for the night.

Tomorrow, Tallahassee. We have not visited our own state capitol, so that is definitely on the agenda for tomorrow.