After an excellent road trip full of fun and adventure, we’re back home in Saskatchewan, Canada.

It’s possible to drive from where we winter in south Texas to our summer home here in three days. We usually take a few days longer than this in order to look around a bit along the way.

This time we took nine days to do the drive and I was able to fulfill four bucket list hits as we zigged and zagged across New Mexico.

Up until this trip, we had visited every USA state except Hawaii and New Mexico. Now we have only one to go.

My feature photo is of an overpass in Laredo Texas. Hubs and I had been in Laredo many years ago when he was driving semi in the USA. I would use some of my vacation time from my nursing job to hop in the truck with him once or twice a year. The year we went to Laredo, he was driving LTL (load to load), which meant once he delivered a load in the USA, he had to wait for another load to bring home to Canada.

It’s illegal for Canadian drivers to “interstate”, meaning picking up in one state and delivering to another. Their loads must go from Canada to the US and vice versa.

Because there were no loads back to Canada immediately available, we had to sit at a Laredo, TX truck stop for three days that trip. Hubs unhooked the tractor and we used it to explore over those three days, so, except for the fact that it was summertime and extremely hot, it wasn’t all that bad. The tractor cab was air conditioned, so we were comfortable that way. We even spent one 100 degrees plus afternoon at the market in Nuevo Laredo, MX.

This year, as we traveled through Laredo on our new route home, we laughed as we recalled those memories of that trip in the early 1990’s. The overpass in my feature photo wasn’t built yet at that time.

Photo Note: Because my feature photo was shot through the tinted front windshield of our car, the colours in the original were distorted. I took the photo into Snapseed where I first corrected the white balance and then used various other tools to complete the colour correction. This is the procedure I use for every photo shot through our car windshield.

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”

Anita Desai