The Road Trip Chronicles: Day One

I had planned to write this yesterday, however I was way too sick, stressed, and busy to do so. Exactly one year ago yesterday (Monday) was when Cousin, Nurse, and I left out on our road trip. The mission was to get three girls, one Mustang, and one old truck from Athens, Alabama to San Diego, California. We should have known...

I spent the night with Cousin on Sunday night, thinking I would need her help to get me up and going. There was of course no need for that ~ I was so excited I could barely sleep. We left Nurse's home in Athens around 7:30a.m., filled up with gas, grabbed a drive-thru breakfast, and were on our way. The funnest parts of the trip are the things we forget to tell people. For instance, we were in Decatur, and nearly ran over roadkill. But not just any road-kill; it was a cow, just smashed all to pieces right on the side of the highway, in town. Then when we were in Sheffield, we saw the "coon dog cemetary." How is it that I spent four years of my life right across the river from Sheffield and never knew that such a cemetary existed? Only in Alabama... We made a pit-stop in Tupelo, MS, then headed towards Memphis. We stopped at the Mississippi and Tennessee state lines to take our picture with the state signs... always a special moment in doing that. We then crossed the state line into Arkansas. We couldn't take a picture with the actual "Welcome to Arkansas" sign because it was hanging from the bridgeover the Mississippi River. The next best thing... we stopped at a near-by Cracker Barrell so Nurse could buy a Boyd's Bear and we had some unsuspecting man take our picture with the Cracker Barrell sign in the background.

It was 100+ degrees in Arkansas that day. We stopped for lunch at an A&W in a gas station and kept trucking. Arkansas is a pretty place. It looks a lot like Alabama, only with more hills. At about 3pm, we were traveling on I-40-W, and entering Clarksville, AR, when I got a phone call from Ex asking how the trip was going. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you," was my reply. Only two seconds before my phone rang, Nurse had pulled her car into the emergency lane. We pulled the truck over in front of her and went to see what was up. Oh Lord... her car had just quit running! After a few tries, it cranked up again and we drove to a gas station. Then to the auto-center at Wal-Mart where the nice man called his friend Danny, who owns a auto-shop. Off to Danny's we went, but of course Danny couldn't figure out what was wrong with the car. So we were off again. By 5 or 5:30 we were taking our picture with the "Welcome to Oklahoma" sign. We stopped off for supper and kept trucking across the flat, green land. The plan was that we were not stopping to sleep until we reached Amarillo, TX, a meager six hours from where we broke down in Clarksville. Fat chance. Just around 9pm, still on I-40-W, about 100 miles east of Oklahoma City, nothing in site except for the distant lights of a gas-station stop, we drove across a bridge and all Hell broke loose! More specifically, the drive-shaft on the truck broke loose. For a moment I thought we were having a flat, but flats aren't that major. We pulled over, and I totally freaked out. I called Ex and begged him to come get me (thankfully, he offered to do so, but eventually talked me out of that) and I refused to get out of the truck. I was certain that we were all three about to be raped and slaughtered. The tow-truck rescued us, and we followed that nice man, Dewayne (of course), to a little town called Okmulgee. We were forced to stay the night and half the next day there. Of course, they didn't have all the parts to fix the truck, so we had to leave it behind and pile into the Pony with Nurse. Three good-sized girls, their luggage, and all the crap Nurse was moving to California - in a Mustang. You can picture it...