That's the little goofball taking up residence in the backseat with her head pressed between the driver and passenger's seat - the observant among you will note one, her stylish backseat hammock, an attempt by the beck at keeping the Wrigley from falling into the seatwell, and two, the fact that the car is so packed that Sparkle's food bowl is resting right under her chin. Awesome. You'll also notice that in order to be in such a position, Sparkle had to sit directly in the middle of the back seat, shoving Wrigley way into one corner and directly ignoring all such "this is my half of the car" - "touch, touch, touch" arrangements of children. Sparkle is a bully. We tried to keep this to a minimum, and hopefully Wrigley didn't suffer too much - in fact, if I try not hard at all, maybe I can find a pic of Wrigley expressing her love of car rides...
So confident, that one! Anyhoo, after a scrambling Monday where Beck and I packed and shipped stuff and generally got everything ready to go, we headed out early early Tuesday morning. Beck and I, being stupid, naturally forgot about the hour we gained as headed west - there were many conniptions generating from the general San Antonio / Nyet's mom area about when we would arrive at my Uncle Randy / Aunt Luanne's house in O'Fallon, MO, though these were mostly smoothed over by Luanne herself. We ended up getting here right about 7 at night, a solid and thoroughly uninteresting day of driving (except for the fact that it caused us to hear the best song ever for the first five of what would turn out to be ten total times on the trip.
We had a total blast hanging out with Randy & Luanne for the evening - fed their coy, drank some beer (Sam Adams for me, cleverly beck's for beck), ate some pizza and played with Kelsey. Great to see them, even if did Randy did seem to laugh a little too much at the coy trying to eat my fingers off... "girl's yelp" was Beck's description of my response. Yikes. Though rumor has it that coy can skeletonize a cow in something like `8 months, so i didn't want to mess around. Anyhoo, a pic of the pond and a trio of Kelsey shots:
So we got out the next morning early early and headed for the old homestead, SA. While I'm thinking of it, I shouldn't forget some of the glories of the Midwest: a gigantic candle factory, an even bigger Barrel factory***, the biggest cross I have ever seen in my life, and a full sized billboard with a picture of a five year old giurl thumbing through a Playboy with the simple caption "Pornography Destroys." There was a R = -0.99 correlation between the number of Country, Latino and Gospel stations in a given region and our latitude as we headed south. The river water in Oklahoma had an eerie blood tinge to it. These are not things that surprise, just things we encountered as we traipsed our way.
*** - The definitive highlight of the trip was when Beck spotted the barrel factory sign, leading to this... um, exchanges happen between people, yeah? So it led to this soliloquy...
"Ooh! Sweet! Bagel Factory! Let's... oh, it's not a bagel factory. BUT WAIT! YAY! It's a Barrel Factory! Wahoo! Even better!"
From the height of disappointment to the throes of barrel-ridden ecstasy... crazy, Beck. I do like the idea that she thought that there would be a giant Bagel Factory in rural Missouri. No, no, Beck, the jews are found in a state of Misery...
So we made another 14 hour day of it, getting no time bonus this time but managing to hit San Antonio at 9 and then enduring another 20 minutes as we circled 1604. That's 1604, not "The 1604" or "The Loop." I refuse to let these crazy Phoenicians dissuade me. So we made it, and glady anticipated a day of not driving. The dogs, too, were SUPER-PSYCHED to be back in Texas and to run the Wrigley 500 around my parents' ginormous back yard.
I've been skipping over it a bit, but the drive itself was merely okay. The first two days, beck drove the first 7 hours and I drove the second. We stopped roughly every 3 hours or so to bathroom / eat / take the dogs for a walk, probably for a total of about an hour's delay each day. So not too bad. The radio was full of the aforementioned bad pop and we actually listened to a fair amount of country, so I can now identify George Strait a little more efficiently. We ate up a few hours with my games (the movie to actor game, the name all of the Simpsons characters game) and ate up about ten minutes with Beck's lamest game ever, the "name animals that start with each letter of the alphabet game." We will NOT be patenting that one.
I'm going to head down and play some disc now, so stay tuned for the day in SA and the final leg of the grand trip...
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