Drive Day #1

Well, drive day #1 came to a close around 8:00 p.m. last night. It was an interesting, amusing and seriously boring day to say the least.

Dad pulled out about an hour after estimated departure time at 9:00 a.m. (yes, we were planning to leave at 8:00 a.m.... rrriiiggghhhttt). Mom and I, on the other hand, didn't make it out until 10:30 a.m. It's not my fault we packed all my nightclothes and didn't account for a trip! So, rush to Target we did (fastest Target trip of my life!).

Mama started out as, I'll admit it, I couldn't afford a California speeding ticket - I've already gotten one recently. Whoops. I'll risk one in another state as it just might not follow me back to CA. She did an excellent job starting out and then I took over for a while. In the period of time in which I drove, I had two lovely truck incidences.

The first being: I look in my rearview mirror and see a truck coming up. I'm in the left lane, behind another car, passing a truck, so not entirely certain why this truck is hauling some serious rear-end. And then there's the grill filling my entire rearview mirror, this guy is seriously about an inch away from shooting me up the highway. I start tailing the guy in front of me, who sees what's going on and is speeding up, the FedEx truck next to us slows down and both the other car and I get over real quickly. Mama and I took down his trucking company and his plates to report as that was just freaky!!!

The second incidence was quite scary as well, but normal and it was not malicious in any way - he simply didn't look down to see dinky me. We're driving along when it tells us that in a mile, we're moving down to one lane as they're ostensibly doing road work (um, haven't seen evidence of road work yet, although there have been a whole lot of signs with nothing to show for it), so the truck decides to get over... while I'm right next to him. I literally had to pull onto the shoulder, honk my horn and slow down. I scared the living daylights out of him with the horn honk, but what can you do? I didn't want him to finish coming over when half my car is still in the lane!

So that's that. We went through a chunk of California, through Arizona and stopped for the night in New Mexico - Gallup, New Mexico to be exact. On this route I discovered that there are some armpits to this country - meaning absolute wastes of space that are simply butt-ugly.

Mama and I continue to try to figure out what these folks do on a daily basis. The best I can come up with is that they sit on their booties at night (maybe they work?) and drink - what else would you WANT to do in an armpit?

Back to drive day #2 where we'll finish out New Mexico, go through the panhandle of Texas and into Oklahoma. I'm sure there'll be a story or two for you then.