Saturday, September 16
Somehow this post was still in draft. It’s out of order but I think I should still post it. Consider it another of my Time Lord moments.
Today was a driving day, around 400 miles, and not a lot else. The driving was pretty smooth, we didn't do a lot of stopping, so there isn't a lot to talk about - but there were a couple things...
Steve had breakfast from our leftover fish from last night - there was that much food! He zapped it in the microwave, and declared it good. We packed up and hauled our stuff out to the car, which is when it got interesting.
There was a moment of panic when we tried to drain the cooler. Our zip-lock bags with our various pills were in the cooler to keep them from over-heating, and when we opened the cooler one of the zip-locks had water in it - with a pillbox full of a week's meds AND all the bottles with the rest of my meds. Steve's, fortunately, were in other bags.
I tore everything out of the cooler, emptied the bag, and checked that none of the other bags had been damaged. Nope, no other damage, and when I checked the one bag all the pill bottles were fine even though there was water in the bag. Kudos to the people making pill bottles water-tight! I haven't looked at the pills in the box, but I'm pretty sure I lost a week's worth of pills. I still have plenty of meds though, and as trouble goes, this was pretty minor.
We were only about 50 miles from Oklahoma City, but we had more excitement almost immediately. Just a few miles down the road , just as traffic narrowed to one lane for construction, we came to a dead stop before starting to creep forward very slowly.
This is where technology once again made our lives easier. Remember the "old days" when a backup meant sitting in traffic and wondering how long you'd be stuck? Thanks to Google Maps (and similar applications) we were able to see that there was a "crash on I40" and that the backup was just a few miles and then cleared out.
We were stuck, true, but we knew it wasn't forever, and that it did clear up ahead of us. Reassured, we were able to relax a little. Yes, it took about half an hour, but it wasn't nearly as nerve-wracking as it used to be.
We eventually reached the crash site, where a large tractor-trailer rig was on its side on the shoulder of the westbound lanes, all the way across the divided highway from us. Still, the combination of "lookie lous" and a one-lane road through the construction zone had backed up traffic for several miles.
Once free of the traffic we drove on into Oklahoma City, and made a stop at the Owl Court on West Britton Road. I have written about this before, when we made this trip in 2021, so I won't repeat the story, but we found the place still standing, and got some current pictures.
Owl Court still stands! If you follow the link above, there's the whole story of why this place is significant.
There was another bright spot this afternoon - the presence of Dutch Bros in Oklahoma. I was pleased!
I did a good deal of the driving this afternoon, so there aren't many pictures from the road, but a good deal of the scenery was the same: surprisingly green and beautiful. I knew from our last trip that Arkansas and Oklahoma had a lot of trees, and a lot of green. Even more so this time, as it has clearly been raining over this part of the world, even if we have managed to miss driving in it.
Typical of what we saw on the road today, except that in Arkansas the trees were much thicker.
We grabbed a sandwich about 5, just short of the Arkansas border, then continued on I-40 through Little Rock. We stopped tonight in Lonoke, Arkansas, about 25 miles east of Little Rock.
Today's listening:
We started with the end of How Did This Get Made, about The Secret with David Duchovny. I still don't want to see this movie;
We followed that with another architecture podcast, this one from Creative Culture with Steve Ramsey. His guest was Stewart Hicks, and they discussed how building design tells a story;
We finished with a Fresh Air episode about the influence of China on Hollywood productions, and the financial cudgel the Chinese government uses to enforce their ideas.
In creative news today there was a press release from Bill Willingham (posted on Substack) that details his decision to release his series Fables into the public domain. It's a developing story, and there will be, I am sure, much drama to come. We read the initial release, and the Cory Doctorow response. There is also a response from DC, which I have not had time to read yet, but I am told that DC - predictably - disputes Willingham's claim. This is going to get interesting!
That's it for tonight. Lots of driving, but not too many pictures. Tomorrow will be more of Arkansas, then Tennessee and across the Mississippi at Memphis, across the corner of Mississippi and through Tupelo, on to Birmingham - our projected stop for tomorrow night.
And it looks like I will get this up before the wee hours of the morning. Hooray!