The local Walmart was convenient so I loaded up on some supplies and shot some pics:
Within an hour I had reached Aurora and swapped my empty van for a full one. The scale at the shipper was broken (again -- thanks Werner drivers!) so I had to head back to the interstate and scale out at a Loves. Payload was over 43,000 but it is in a van so even with mostly-full tanks I was only at 77,000 gross.
I noticed that the outside air temperature hadn't budged since I started rolling, staying within a narrow band of 28-30 degrees. The sky was overcast and there was a constant drizzle of rain that turned to ice once it made contact with the cold exterior of my truck:
The drive south made me a bit nervous with a thin layer of ice along the roads in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It never stopped drizzling the entire way to Dalhart, Texas where I spent the night and the temperature never rose above 30 or dipped below 28. Considering this was about 400 miles of southerly movement and another hundred or so to the west, this was one huge air mass.
When I awoke this morning the temps were the same, it was still overcast and drizzling and the exterior of my truck had a pretty good accumulation of ice. I knocked as much of it off as I could reach and hit the road.
The mercury didn't rise above 30 degrees until I was a few minutes away from Tucumcari, New Mexico! Less than an hour later I was surprised by a huge sheet of 1/3" thick ice that covered the entire top of my truck's superstructure came crashing down, shattering into huge chunks and making a loud bang on my windshield.
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I stopped in Winslow, Arizona to use the facilities and didn't have enough gumption to get rolling again.
