Our time in Houston was over. It had been a good trip, but it was time for us to head back to Ann Arbor. We planned on leaving around 8am, however we needed to make sure 3 of our team members got to the airports. One of them was flying out of the airport near the hotel so we drove him over there. The other two however were flying out of the airport on the opposite side of Houston. It was too far to drive them there so we ended up getting them a taxi. The taxi took about an hour to get there. We left shortly after they were all sent on their way.
It was already hot outside. The AC felt great. I drove the first shift out of Houston. We rotated drivers as we did on the way down to Houston. Everything went smoothly until about noon when we missed our exit. I noticed the exit as we passed it but it wasn't clear if that was the right way to go. We kept driving as I pulled out the map to figure out what to do. The map wasn't much help so we decided we may be on the right road after all. About 15 minutes later we were back in the same place where we missed the exit. It turned out the highway looped back around. Fortunately it worked out that the chicken place we had wanted to stop at was right there so we stopped for lunch. After lunch we switched out drivers.
We charged on. The trip did not go perfect though. Later on we discovered we had missed another exit and were 40 miles off course. We were able to get back on course though without losing much time. We drove through the night and arrived back in Ann Arbor early Sunday morning. We unpacked the van and went home. It had been 23 hours in the car driving straight. We were all ready for a little sleep. We would need to start working on our papers for the AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference which were due in a week.
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