Aaargh, Houston!

Unfortunately, there is no way to drive east out of Texas on Interstate 10 without going through Houston. I had planned our route using the outer ring road around the city, but then realized it is a toll road and is open only to people who have a transponder to pay the toll fee. That's not us. And for some reason Cairn (our GPS, remember?) didn't choose the I-612 ring road either. This is the second time we have tried to drive into Houston on a Sunday and the traffic was terrible. The same thing happened three years ago. This is what traffic looked like yesterday as we were approaching I-10.



The closer we got to the ramp to I-10, the slower it was. We spent so much time stopped and creeping at 5 mph or less, our arrival time in Beaumont was 50 minutes later than what had originally been estimated. When we got close enough to the ramp to I-10 to see it was a parking lot as far as we could see, we finally pulled out into the through lanes and drove five miles to the northern part of I-612 and used that road to access I-10. We don't know what had been going on but we did merge into very light traffic on I-10. The traffic jam we had been in must have still been holding up those vehicles.

As we drove the last part of our journey on open roads. This is a crawfish farm. Who knew farmers raised crawfish?



A little further down the road we passed this complex. It looks like a refinery to me. The sign said it was a chemical plant. I guess that means it refines oil into chemicals.



We spent the night in Beaumont, today it is on to Louisiana.