I cannot tell you what little Texas town we were in when we bought these donuts, but these were the most amazing creations EVAH
After another four-hour night of sleep after crossing the
Texas, we promise not to mess with ya (too much)
Louisiana-Texas border we were singin’ “On The Road Again” by 7:00am, on our way to our final destination on our Chevy Road Trip Challenge.
Southern Maid donut lady, we love you.
After stopping in a tiny little Texas town, pulling into a drive-through that looked remarkably like a huge horizontal window was installed in someone’s residence we bought the most delectable dozen donuts our taste buds ever had the good fortune of tasting. As we were chatting with the cashier (our car magnets literally made us a magnet for conversation) the woman in the car behind us started yelling at us, so we bought her a dozen donuts, too.
We’re pretty confident angry-car-lady transformed into a nicer person the rest of the day because of this act of kindness, or at least her belly was happier.
We're lookin' forward to findin' out how weird this city really is
The rain could not get us down as we trekked the last 400 miles into Austin, which didn’t appear very weird (see classic Austin t-shirt on the left).
Laptops blazing, we tweeted with our Chevy Road Trip partners from the Traverse,
Monica had the fastest laptop. We were all jealous. Luckily, she shared with us.
following our OnStar map to see each of our teams converging on Austin.
Pulling in front of our final classroom stop at Blanton Elementary School we felt the exhaustion and adrenaline rush concurrently.
Our third-graders were fascinated with our trip details, the fact that we had driven 1505 miles in 44 hours (including stops of course), and that we were raising money for their classroom in addition to our Richmond and Tuscaloosa classes. Leaving the school, all four of us breathed a little collective sigh and realized that we actually had a few hours of free time until our Chevy welcome party.
just some of our "essentials"
We checked into the hotel with not one but TWO carts full of our luggage, laptops, iPads and power cords, confirming that being social media geeks is a lot easier with the help of a nice young bellhop.
Our team at the Chevy SXSW Welcome Party, tired but accomplished!
After a few hours of downtime we were picked up by Chevy Marketing folks in a sweet Tahoe and landed at Lanai in downtown Austin for a welcome party.
There, we met the other teams representing Salt Lake City, Nashville, Chicago, and three cities in Florida in the Orlando-area. It was amazing to finally connect with our brethren road-trippers and share war stories. It was fun to share that we knew of at least $1500 raised through our efforts for our three classrooms, and a little spooky to know that the Chevy execs had been following our blog posts, tweets, and Facebook entries closely (good thing we kept it clean lol).
Climbing under the sheets for the first full night of sleep in three days, thoughts of thankfulness, amazement and happiness filled me. How we were selected for this trip is beyond me, and even with the crazy amount of planning involved it was worth every single mile.
Thank you, Ted Linhart & The Dominion Auto Group for sponsoring our team. Ya’ll rock.
