United States Trip 2026

We were up early after a good sleep. The Country Inn and Suites wasn’t the newest place but the beds were very comfy (or we were super tired).

We had a decent continental breakfast and enjoyed making our own waffles.

Before we headed to mom’s house we stopped at the AT&T Dallas Cowboys stadium which we pre booked. Mom upgraded our tour to a private tour, where Tim took us around the stadium.

The stadium took 3 years to build, finished in 2009. It holds 80,000 people sitting and 110k standing room. The roof takes 10 min to open and the windows take 5 min.
The seats were imported from Australia and made from recycle practice.

The tour was a bit over an hour. We got to sit in the star suites at the 45 yard mark. We saw the cheerleading and players locker rooms, the grass rolled up in the basement, the practice field (outside in the rain) and of course the stadium. It is currently being worked on for the FIFA World Cup coming in June.

We headed off, and had a 5 hour drive to mom’s house, driving though Texas, Oklahoma and then Arkansas. We stopped at a large chain gas station called Buc-ees, which has the most random things for sale, and a great food section. We then ate at McAlister deli for a really nice and cheap late lunch. We were about 5 miles ( 8kms) from the turnoff when the Enterprise rent a car blew a tire.

If this happened 3 hours earlier we would not have been in the predicament that we were . We were in the middle of nowhere , 6 people and 4 big bags of luggage and a bunch of small bags at 530pm at night. The rental car did not have spare and the tow truck couldn’t bring the car to any place opened.

Uber was not allowed to pick up people on a highway for safety but also as there is no address. The 6 of us and the luggage was picked up by 3 different cop cars. Josh got to sit in the K9 car. They dropped us off at the local Flying J gas/petrol station where we ended up there for about 3 hours.

Enterprises plan was have a Uber take all of us and luggage to Tulsa international airport airport (hour and 20 min away, out of the way) to get another rental car and then head back to Arkansas.

Enterprise did not consider we were in whoop whoop (Checotah, Oklahoma) and large Ubers at 6pm are not available.

So our night at mom’s house turned into a night at Walnut Inn, a trucker motel with no car. The kids watched their screens and the 4 adults visited the only bar attached to the Inn.Read more