Well, I got up at 04:00 this morning, and I was on the road by 05:00, It was a pretty relaxing trip, mostly, with one exception, which I'll get to in a while...
I got mostly through Kansas before it started getting light, and when it did, it was beautiful... that salmon color fading into gray... there were some light clouds then. It got cloudier and cloudier the further south I went.
I stopped in Independence, KS (which is exactly like that other independence, except for Harry Truman was never there, and it's in an entirely different state...) at a McDonald's to get something to eat. I ordered two egg & sausage bisquits, but I just got sausage ones, so I took them back and had to explain the difference to the counter guy. Seems that he thought they were all the same.
Just as I crossed into Oklahoma, I noticed something new... about half of the billboards for local businesses had the fish (xian symbol) on them. Maybe I just hadn't noticed before...
And, speaking of "those guys"... I wonder if they're trying to jam NPR radio with their stations? I started getting the Stillwater, OK NPR as soon as I crossed the boarder, and it was getting interferred with frequently by the local xian stations. The FCC surely knows about this... but with the recent bills in congress regarding this sort of thing, it's doubtful that they'll do anything about it.
So I spent about an hour or two listening to xian talk radio... interesting. One snippet that I caught had two of them arguing about the Bible Code... you know, that numerological fantasy. Anyways, this one guy said that he couldn't prove that there weren't any pink elephants, but if someone told him specifically that there were, they would have to prove it. I kept waiting for him to apply the same situation to religion in general, but, alas, he didn't.
Once I got into Texas, I gave up and switched to a commercial country station. It was much more comfortable for me...
East Texas is a scary place... besides the fish being everywhere, there is a church every country mile... definitely not the place for this boy. And speaking of fish, I saw the store where my fishin' buddy Doug and I used to stop on our Lake Fork trips... memories of good old times...
Amyway, the trip was good except for going through Tyler, which is a tangled traffic nightmare. I must remember to avoid it... seems like I said that last time, too...
There are a lot oh historical markers in Texas... I must've passed a hundred or so. One stretch of highway, 910 I think it was, or some other number like that, had one every mile for 30 miloes. Not joking.
I pulled into Huntsville about 18:00... 13 hours for 666 miles. I'd not been pushing it at all, generally staying below the legal limit, plus I had a strong head wind through Oklahoma... speaking of Oklahoma, the Indian hill counrty is really beautiful this time of year... forests of deciduous and carniferous trees mixed, the fir a dark green, the carniferous ones just getting light green leaves... made the hills look pleasantly dappled...
I mentioned that I loved my split keyboard, now I have to say that I hate regular ones... most of my time is devoted to corrections... plus no spellchecker, I'm using notepad...
JD and I were glad to see each other wheb I finally arrived. We talked for a coupla hours, the went to the pizza hut and had supper. I'm really surprised that I'm up this late, actually... I'm getting pretty goofy, need to shower and get to bed. We've got at least one project lines up for tomorrow...