first day on the road

Quite the day. Left home pretty much on schedule, very cold -29C but warm in the car. Got to the border with only a couple of cars ahead of us in line, one or two got pulled into the garage for a good search, but my honest face and excellent ability to lie about the 4 bananas we had in the car...and we sailed right through.

Seems odd to me that the US allows millions of products including fish and food stuffs to be imported from all sorts of countries especially China, with not enough inspectors, but for many years you always get the question at the border about whether you have any fruit in the car...but I digress.

Not that much snow around Grand Forks and Fargo, but in South Dakota...much more. Roads were great, but strange weather with light snow sometimes, sun sometimes, very overcast sometimes. When we got about 45 miles from Omaha, snow started heavier, visibility somewhat restricted but no real problem for us. Mostly slush by the time we got near our hotel.

Tom (tomtom)took us right to the hotel no problem, good thing too, kind of tricky set of exits from the freeway. We checked in with our Air Miles Best Western Travel Cards, the desk clerk was able to make a conversion from Cdn $100 value on the card to US dollars so we ended up with a card being worth $101.78. Hotel was $78 so we end up with a credit on the card.

Up to the room, really nice room, new, large, and clean. After our preliminary search for bedbugs...I know many of you will not care or are willing to take a chance with this new nationwide real problem...we are not...the worse thing that can happen is that you take them home with you. This is a serious problem and expensive to try and deal with. So we inspected the bed, and lifted off the headboard which is easy and only takes a few minutes. No signs were found.

If any of you are unaware and want to educate yourselves...look here

http://bedbugregistry.com and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kk7i2eiufA....just because it is a 5 star hotel means nothing.

Now to try and get the Live Services working on the GPS....oops we try and dial the 1-800 number for TomTom, but it won't work on the phone, so the front desk sends a maintenance man to change the phone...he does with some strange comments...and still doesn't work. So we change rooms...still doesn't work...pain in the A...So we tell the front desk they should contact the phone company. They do...and after half hour or so..the phone company reboots something and fixes it for the whole hotel.

Now to make a long story short...and leaving out many frustrating details...I finally get Live services up and running.

Now we find out there is no wireless in the room, so you have to be hard wired. That means that one of us at a time can use the computer, not Katie on hers and me on mine....grrrrr. Never seen this before, virtually all chains have wireless in the room.

I bought a Tracfone...what a deal $15 with double minutes for life...bluetooth and a free bluetooth ear device. So a 60 minute purchase with 90 day expiry turned out to be 120 minutes. We are going to waste minutes but want it for emergencies on the road mainly. We activated that on the net once we got hooked up, with little difficulty.

We were going to go the Casinos in Council Bluffs across the river, but by the time we finished with all the problems we were having it was too late, and we were too tired...bummer.

We went downstairs to eat, there is a Perkins actually attached to the hotel and you get 10 percent off because you are a hotel desk. So no continental breakfast at the hotel on account of Perkins being there.

Gas prices on the way down ranged from $3.19 to $3.35...certainly way up from our trip last year by about $2.00/gal.

Even though the bed was good, king size with lots of pillows and quality bedding, it was hot in the room and could not get it cooled off. It has a central unit not the normal, noisy, through the wall kind. Don't know why it wouldn't get cooler but made for a very restless sleep, lots of awake asleep time, so I am really tired and not so much looking forward to 10 hour drive. Just glad we made it 10 and not try and push it and make it 13.

Used Google phone, which is part of google email to phone home last night. It is free works over the internet, is extremely clear with no delay between talking and receiving...I will use it instead of Skype because you can dial any phone directly without having to have money in an account like you do with Skype. Of course with Skype you can do it free computer to computer, but the other person has to be at the computer...this way, you just dial the phone with google's dialer and you are in business. It is excellent. It is free for calls to Canada for the next year, then they may start charging for it.

Forecast for Omaha...Cloudy. Snow likely and chance of light freezing drizzle in the morning...then snow likely in the afternoon. Snow accumulation up to 1 inch. Highs in the upper 20s. East winds around 10 mph. Chance of precipitation 60 percent....but we will be in Texas tonight so looking forward to warmer temperatures and no snow.

more later...

Just had to add this...when we were getting ready this morning...Katie went to have a shower...oh joy!!! no water. We had to phone the front desk and they sent up a key so we could shower in the room next door.

When we checked out, they bought us breakfast as Perkins which was fine with us and we enjoyed it.