Just chillin' here with Laury and Curly in the surrey with the fringe on top
in OHHHHH-klahoma. We spent most of yesterday driving through Missouri. Why is
Kansas City in Missouri? There are so many retread city names -- there must be
an Arnold, Woodlawn, Springfield, and Columbia in *every* state -- did they
finally run out of ideas and start poaching from the neighboring states?
There was a Jesse James Wax (whacks?) Museum in Missouri, which has to make you
wonder...why do we have museums devoted to glorifying criminals? Will there be
an Osama Bin Laden Wax Museum one day in New York? If there is, will he be a
piņata, and will we rent sticks to hit him with, right next to one of those
machines which presses a penny into an oval shape with the Twin Towers on it?
Favorite signs on the road:
1. Big Louie's Nightclub (at the border, of course, probably the "bad" twin of
"Saint" Louis)
2. PAWNMART (where, unsurprisingly, you can also buy a gun)
3. THe Dickey Bub Plaza Shopping Center
4. Du Kum Inn Restaurant (Chinese? Ironic?)
5. Knife City! USA Southwest Design
6. Tiny's Bar-B-Q and Hillbilly Breakfast (how much do you want to bet that
"Tiny" is the same size dude as Louie?
7. Black Market Beer Stop Smoke Shop Fireworks
8. Truckomat Truck Wash
9. Fag Bearings (a metal bearing factory...but do we really want to know???)
Actually, all those ADULTWORLD and strip club signs near the borders make you
realize that their market must be lonely, lonely truckers. It must be a
shorthand of the equivalent of the "next rest stop 60 miles" signs...LAST CHANCE
to get some strange here in Good Ol' Missouri....!
In Missouri, they use a lot of letter designators instead of numbers for roads
-- you take the M or the AB road instead of 95 or 495. The speed limit is 70 mph
most of the way, and uncoincidentally, we saw the remains of two spectacular
wipeouts on the way...one completely mangled red sports car, and another later
on of a jacknifed horse trailer facing the wrong way on the median strip. The
mighty McDonalds "M" pokes up into the sky everywhere, and one overpass was,
literally, a McDonalds overpass, in case you'd forgotten to think about french
fries for a second. Signs once you got into Oklahoma reminded you, alarmingly,
Do Not Drive Into Smoke (what does that mean???)
Farmland goes right up to the edge of the interstate. I'm attaching a picture of
one of a zillion cows -- not because you've never seen cows...you can see them
every day on rural roads like 108...but can you imagine farmland and cows along
I-95 instead of all those PopUp CheapO apartment blocks and sound barriers?
The Midwest is VERY fond of the odd spelling and funky punctuation you see on
every produce stand back home -- Drury Inn -- Free Hot! Breakfast, and "No"
Lottery Tickets Sold With Credit Card. We stopped at the "ZipStop Gas Station"
where diesel was $1.53/gallon and Mom's fave cigs were $19/carton -- as opposed
to $1.90/gallon and $27/carton back home. Regional snacks (someone tell me if we
have them back home now or not): roasted garlic potato chips (stinky!
delicious!), triple chocolate Kit Kats, and chocolate truffle York peppermint
patties. Incidentally, if anybody is interested, it costs about $25-30 per night
to camp at a campground with water and electric hookup.
Following our trusty GPS coordinates put us in a cornfield, and after consulting
the campground's map (and NOT what they SAID was their address) got us there in
time for all of us to go swimming until we were so tired I laid on the couch as
if snakebit and watched the fourth of July fireworks on fuzzy broadcast TV with
the ghost of another channel wafting in the background, and then watched a
Danish movie I'd gotten from Netflix before we left (Mifune...weird...!) through
looooonnnnnggggg blinks (deadly when you have to follow the subtitles).
Next stop: Amarillo, TX. It keeps getting hotter and hotter...! Pretty soon I
think we'll actually be looking directly AT the hinges on the back door of hell.