Saturday, February 5, 2011
What was supposed to be about an 11 hour drive turned into 20. Yes, that’s right, 20 hours in the car, most of it driving on ice. After our slide off and back on the road in Oklahoma, we started getting a little bit silly. At a place we stopped for gas and something to eat, I commented that it looked like a set for a redneck comedy. Later, Ceecee noted that “I Spy” isn’t much fun on a dark highway.
The real sign that we had been driving too long with too much stress though, was when we started making up acrostic poems based on friends and family members’ names. We were posting them on Facebook and other people started adding their own, even using our names as subject material. I suppose it was around midnight by then, and we had left our house at about 8:00 that morning.
As we headed south through Texas, an ice storm began to develop that was making the highway so slick, semi trucks couldn’t get up some of the hills. It got to the point that we could only go about 30 miles an hour and then they closed down the highway and made everyone exit. Thank goodness for GPS and a front wheel drive car that handled things just fine. We finally got to our hotel and into our room at 4:00 AM yesterday morning.
We had to get up just a few hours later to go see Taylor. Some of the roads were still closed and we had to go around some detours and eventually broke the law by driving around some cones and just taking one of the roads that no one was supposed to be on. By that time, the sun was shining and it was no longer icy, so we figured we’d take our chances.
We got to take Taylor out for Chinese food after watching him inhale his cupcakes in the car. We spent part of the day with him, but turned him over to his Dad pretty early so we could go back to our room and try to catch up on some much needed sleep. We’ve actually got a really cool room here for three nights, so we did the tourist thing today and we’ll be making the drive home tomorrow.
The Restoration Tour 