Editor’s note: pictures are finally posted! Yay!

We avoided getting kicked out of the hotel in Wyoming, and left early on Sunday morning. We had noticed somewhere back in Missouri that the windshield wiper fluid in Kris’s car wasn’t working, but it hadn’t mattered because the roads had been totally dry. Sunday, however, the interstate was a bit damp, and when all the truckers were throwing wet dirt and road salt up onto the windshield, the need for wiper fluid became sort of critically important.

We were in Utah when we had to pull over and clean the windshield by hand, and we decided then that we had to do something because we were not going to be pulling over every five miles for the rest of the trip. The next city was Ogden, Utah, so we made it there and then stopped to try to find a service station. We found a gas station, and asked a man there where the nearest Jiffy Lube or something of that nature was located. He actually said to me, “In Utah? On a Sunday?” And then proceeded to laugh in my face. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to cry or punch him. (For the record, I did neither.)

We found one of those super Wal-Marts that has a service station, and tried there. They said it was out of their range of expertise, and they wouldn’t even touch it. They referred us to Pep Boys down the street. So we went there, and Kris stayed in the car with Lucky while I went to go ask if they could help us. The guy behind the counter said that he only had two mechanics working, and they were both going to be booked for the rest of the day, so they wouldn’t be able to look at Kris’s car until the next day.

I went back outside, and Kris and I each called our parents to get an idea of what we should do next. (One of my laws of crisis management: when in doubt, call Mom.) While we were each on our cell phones, a very cute mechanic named Brett came over to see what the problem was. Hooray for being cute white girls looking pathetic and distressed in a car with its hood up. (But seriously, if you ever have car trouble in Ogden, Utah, go to Pep Boys and ask for Brett. Or Jason, the manager. They both rocked.) He said that he had finished working on his last car of the day earlier than expected, so he had time to look at ours. Yay! Brett saves the day!

He had to bring the car into the garage and put it on a lift, which meant we had to take Lucky out of the car. We couldn’t take her into the nice heated waiting room since she barks at everyone, so… we waited outside. In the freezing cold. We found a piece of sidewalk in the sun, and we sat there. We both had to keep getting up because our butts were freezing on the concrete, but we survived. (And Lucky had a blast. She got to dive headfirst into clean snow, play with branches that were longer than her entire body and all kinds of fun stuff.)

It turns out? When Kris took her car in to be serviced before we left Memphis, she told the guys there (multiple times) that she was going to be driving way up north, and that she needed the washer fluid with de-icer in it. Well, they topped her off with de-icer fluid, but they didn’t drain out the old stuff first. So the first night in Missouri, when it dropped to about 8 degrees, the fluid in the line froze and cracked the pump. Great.

So, Jason the manager (he was pretty darn cute too, for the record – who knew I’d ever find Mormon boys attractive?) came outside and told us that the pump was broken but he had no way to get a replacement pump on a Sunday. My reaction was pretty much that ok, it sucks, but at least we have a diagnosis of exactly what the problem is, so we can get it fixed tomorrow in Idaho. He even told us that a new pump should cost about $20, so we’d know if we were getting screwed. I joked around with him that we were going to put the dog on the hood of the car with a roll of paper towels and some windex and make her clean the windshield while we drove.

Kris went inside to pay while I kept the dog entertained, and when she came back, she said, “Umm… all of your flirting and joking around must have paid off, because he just called AutoZone and found us a new pump. It’ll be installed in less than an hour.” Do you see why we loved these guys? So, another hour freezing our butts (literally) outside of Pep Boys, then the car was all fixed and ready to go. And it only cost about $100 for everything. Woo!

Also, I found out later that apparently all of the mechanics there get paid on commission, so money was probably the reason Brett came over to help us, and not because he thought we were cute. Although I’d like to think that we lured him over to us with our beauty, sort of like the Sirens did with the sailors.

The rest of the drive was uneventful. We stopped for the night at a Best Western in Mountain Home, Idaho. Kris was exhausted to the point of being delirious by the time we stopped. After we checked in, Kris remembered something she left in the car, and she flipped the security bolt on the door out, so the door wouldn’t close all the way and she wouldn’t have to use her key to get back in the room. I was in the room with Lucky, and she followed me around while I talked to her. “Ok, Lucky-loo, we’re going to get you some water for your bowl,” that kind of thing. I turned around to fill up a cup with water, and I swear the dog was right next to me. When I turned back around, she was gone and the door to the room was wide open.

I ran outside, and I saw that Kris was already running after the dog. I started to run after her, then I realized that Lucky was headed around the back of the motel, so instead I changed direction and ran the opposite way, figuring that we could cut her off behind the building. I didn’t bother to put shoes on, I just ran out in my socks. I was so panicked that I didn’t even feel the snow and ice on the ground until much later. It was terrifying because the motel was surrounded by 3 different truck stops, and there were all of these huge semi’s driving in and out of them. Kris said later that she was having visual images of the dog getting squashed by a truck, which is why she was screaming for the dog to STOP! And COME! Neither of which seem to be commands that the dog knows. (Yes, T, I know. The Dog Whisperer. We shall TiVo it, I swear.)

We caught up with her behind the hotel, but she almost wandered into the truck stop parking lot next door a few times. Every time the dog would start to come to us, she’d change her mind and run in the other direction instead. I finally got down on my knees (in the snow & ice, don’t forget!) and did the whole, “Come on, Lucky! Who’s a pretty girl? Come here, baby!” thing. It worked, she finally came to me. I picked her up and carried her back to the hotel room.

Incidentally, carrying a 35-pound dog over an icy parking lot while wearing socks is not as easy as you might think. That was when the adrenaline finally went away and I started to realize just how truly damn cold it was. And Kris was pissed that the dog came to me instead of to her. (My theory is that she came to me because Kris sounded angry and I didn’t. Again, being the fun aunt instead of the mommy has its payoff.)

We slept like rocks that night, and we were so happy that it was our last night in a hotel. Tomorrow, we’d be home!

I was going to post one of these per day, but I got bored and decided to give you a two-fer. (You’re welcome.) Also, I noticed that my site got hijacked last night, and apparently it happened a couple of times while I was out of town. I’m currently communicating with my domain registrar to find out what’s up with that. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime. Just know that if you accidentally wind up on some kind of “buy drugs online” spam web page, honestly and truly, I didn’t do it on purpose.

Ok, so! We finally got out of Missouri, and we were in Iowa for all of about 20 minutes before we crossed into Nebraska. (I’m not kidding, either, we just had to change freeways in Iowa. We made a quick pit stop there and I took a couple of photos since I made a rule that we had to take pictures in every state, but we couldn’t have possibly been there for longer than half an hour.) Nebraska really wasn’t as bad as I expected. Yes, it was pretty flat and boring, but it wasn’t quite the soul-crushingly dull drive that I had in mind. In fact, we made really good time across Nebraska, and since we gained an hour when we crossed into mountain time, we decided to keep driving into Wyoming before stopping for the night.

Cheyenne is pretty close to the Nebraska border, and we got there around 7:00 p.m. I felt like I could drive for at least another couple of hours, so we looked ahead on the map to see what towns were next. The closest city to Cheyenne is Laramie, which I have an irrational fear of since that whole Matthew Shepard thing. I’m sure that was a random act of violence and that most of the town isn’t like that at all, but I saw the movie about it, and… just, no. We kept driving as fast as possible through there. We finally stopped for the night in a town called Rawlins. We found a nice Comfort Inn that allowed dogs, so we checked in for the night.

Since we hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and it was nearly 10:00 at night, Kris asked the front desk people what restaurants were still open. The guy gave her a menu of a local take-out place. We spent a good ten minutes or so reading through it, picking out exactly what we wanted, and getting excited about it because we were starving and it sounded really good. I called them, and it turned out that although the bar was still open, the kitchen was closed for the night. Fantastic. I asked the woman on the phone who else was serving food at that time of night. She told me to try a place called “Michael’s Big City Bar & Grill.” Fine. We went back to the front desk, got directions, and loaded the dog in the car to head over there. (We learned our lesson the night before about leaving the dog in the hotel room alone, so we took her with us everywhere.)

The freeways we had been driving on earlier were totally clear, but the roads in the town of Rawlins obviously hadn’t been plowed yet, and they were very snowy and icy. I was scared of skidding, so I drove pretty slowly, and since there weren’t any other cars on the road, I drove sort of down the middle of the 2 lanes because it seemed to be the clearest part. Also, because my directions weren’t very specific, I kept slowing down to read street signs, and I made a couple of U-turns. So, there wasn’t anything really huge that I had done wrong, but I guess I must’ve seemed suspicious, because all of a sudden there were lights behind me, and we were getting pulled over. Kris has some bizarre irrational fear of cops, so she panicked and nearly hyperventilated in the passenger seat. Good thing I was driving. Also? Lucky is absolutely terrified of men (one of the drawbacks of getting a dog from the pound, you don’t know those behavioral problems in advance), so when the cop came up to the window, she freaked and barked her head off at him the whole time.

I leaned out of the window and said (imagine 10 times faster than a normal speaking pace), “Hi, officer, we’re from out of town which is probably obvious since we have Tennessee license plates and we’re staying at the Comfort Inn over near I-80, but we didn’t check in until late and we’re starving because we haven’t had dinner yet and we’re trying to find anywhere that’s still serving food at this time of night, can you tell me if this is the way to some place the hotel told us about called Michael’s Big City Bar & Grill?” Yeah, because talking like a ferret on speed is a surefire way to assure the policeman that you aren’t under the influence. Long story short: he was very nice and quickly figured out that we were pretty obviously not drunk, we were just out-of-towners who aren’t very good at driving in the snow. He did take both Kris’s and my driver’s licenses and run checks on them, but he didn’t give us a ticket. He also told us that we were on the right street, but the restaurant was about a mile farther down the road. Since he had been so nice, I even had the nerve to ask him if the food there was any good. WTF? I have no idea what I was thinking. And yet there I was, trying to make polite small talk with a cop in some podunk town in Wyoming where the wind chill was about -15 degrees and the dog was going ballistic about 3 feet behind me. He sent us on our way, and that was that.

We finally found the restaurant, and it turns out that Kris and I just might have been the hottest things in Rawlins on a Saturday night. The bar was about 90% male, and I noticed that we got the complete up-and-down check-out by at least half a dozen guys the minute we walked in the door. Kris was so shaken up by the cop experience that she immediately ordered a beer and told the bartender, “oh my god, we just got pulled over for drunk driving!!” Um, wait just a second there, hon. First of all, it was me who got pulled over, not “we”. And it’s called suspicion. Suspicion of drunk driving. We didn’t go to jail or anything. Let’s just be very clear about that.

Some rather adorable 22 year-old started talking to me while we were waiting for our dinner, but by that time, I was totally exhausted and grumpy, and the cigarette smoke that filled the entire bar was giving me a killer headache. I said something along the lines of, “I’m married, and I’m going to check on the dog,” and I left Kris alone with him. (I may have been slightly more polite than that, but not much.) By the time I got back inside, Kris was on her third beer, which had been bought for her by Michael himself (of Michael’s Big City Bar & Grill, naturally). Our food took forever to arrive, which I’m partially convinced was on purpose because Michael seemed very interested in talking to Kris and he didn’t seem at all anxious for us to leave anytime soon. Kris was confused about why anyone was hitting on her when she had no make-up on and her hair was falling out of a ponytail, and no matter how many times I tried to explain it, she just didn’t get the whole male-to-female ratio concept. We finally got back to our hotel room and ate dinner around midnight.

Oh, and did I mention that Lucky barks at all strangers? Around 1:00 a.m., Kris took her out for her last before-bedtime pee, and she barked at the hotel’s night manager. Probably because it was the middle of the night and most people were trying to sleep, the manager told Kris that if the dog barked one more time, she was going to have to ask us to leave. The thought of trying to find somewhere else to sleep in that tiny town in the middle of the night was pretty terrifying. So for the rest of the night, anytime Lucky made even the slightest noise, Kris or I would jump up, clamp her mouth shut with our hands and say, “NO BARK!” (She’s supposed to understand that command, but who knows if she actually does.) We both slept horribly, which didn’t bode well for our next day on the road.

On Friday morning, we got a bit of a late start because there was still a lot to do. We had to finish loading the car, make sure the last bits of Kris’s things had been moved to storage, all of that. I think we finally got on the road around 11 a.m. Lucky did pretty well in the car, although she didn’t want to lie down in the backseat, she seemed to like sitting up so she could look out the windows. She did very well with the potty thing, though. Apparently when she needs to go outside in the middle of the night, she’ll lick Kris’s face to wake her up. In the car, whenever she needed to go, she’d stick her head over the front seat and start licking the face of whoever was in the passenger seat (she couldn’t reach the driver’s seat because the car was packed to the gills). We got the message, and we’d stop to let her pee whenever she needed to go. Four days in the car and not a single accident, pretty impressive.

Speaking of the pup, I think Lucky pretty quickly developed a bit of a crush on me, and I must say that the feeling was mutual. For someone who wasn’t sure she was a dog person at all, it didn’t take long for me to be completely won over. All three nights that we stayed in hotels, she slept on my bed instead of Kris’s. I think Kris was a little jealous, but she said that she thinks that I must be like the fun aunt who never yells or has to discipline the child like the mommy does. She’s probably right. I even got to the point where I was kind of ok with the face licking, as long as she only did it on my chin. A couple of times she went for it while I was talking and ended up licking my teeth. That kind of grossed me out.

Anyhow, we drove out of Memphis, up through Arkansas, and into Missouri. As much as I was worried about Nebraska, I think Missouri turned out to be the state that felt like it would never end. Here’s what we learned: the only form of industry in Missouri seems to be the anti-abortion movement. I grew up in the South and I thought I knew what kind of right-wing rhetoric to expect on billboards alongside the highway, but oh Missouri, how you have proven me wrong. I don’t think we ever managed to drive ten miles without passing some type of pro-life billboard. My favorite was the obviously photoshopped picture of a baby with its hands folded in prayer, and the line “Pray to end abortion.” Nice.

Oh, but wait, there’s more! There was also a field along the highway that had a larger-than-life statue of Jesus (a totally Caucasian with light brown hair Jesus, naturally) and a sign that said “Abortion kills 40,000 babies every day.” But see, since that message isn’t quite hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-lead-hammer enough, someone also bought the land so they could fill it in with 40,000 individual white crosses. I swear I’m not kidding. I wish I had gotten my camera out in time to take a photo of it, but instead we just whizzed by it at 75 mph and screamed about it after the fact.

I will say this, we had quite possibly the best lunch of the entire trip in Missouri. We ate at a place called Lambert’s, where they’re famous for their “throwed rolls” – literally, there’s a guy with a big tray of rolls who stands on one side of the room and he pitches them to you. Sounds kooky, I know, and it totally is. But they had fried catfish, and fried okra, and black-eyed peas, and all kinds of wonderful things that I only manage to eat when I’m visiting the south, so it made me incredibly happy. Of course, the greasiness of it all made me incredibly sick later, but it was worth it. (Although it’s probably a good thing that I don’t visit the south more often than I do.)

We only made it as far as Kansas City that first night. We checked into a Red Roof Inn (thanks for the suggestion, Angie!), brought in all of our stuff and left Lucky there while we went to find dinner. Kris and I were both so exhausted that neither of us had the presence of mind to think that maybe the dog might just wig the hell out when left alone in a strange place. That accounts for the one accident of the whole trip – Lucky peed in the hotel room while we were at dinner. When we got back and found her in a total panic, we both felt so bad that we didn’t have the heart to yell at her for making a mess. We just cleaned it up and gave her a couple of extra treats. Poor puppy. We didn’t make that mistake again – all future nights on the road, we left her in the car (where she seemed to feel safe) while we went into restaurants to order take-out, then we brought our food back to the hotel room to eat.

The next morning, we got up and had to drive through even more Missouri before we hit the state line. GOD. That state is way bigger than it needs to be.

I’m back, and I have so many stories to tell, I don’t know where to begin. I also have a lot of pictures, which I need to upload. It’s all sort of overwhelming, so I suppose I’ll try to recap each day of the trip separately. Here’s the story of day one.

The flight down was pretty uneventful. I flew from Seattle to Denver, and then from Denver to Little Rock. The second leg of the trip was more noteworthy because I had the misfortune of sitting next to a man who was quite possibly the biggest asshole I’ve ever encountered. Examples of his assholishness:

1. A couple and their toddler sat down across the aisle from us. The little boy was completely adorable, and I said something like, “oh, he’s so cute,” loud enough for the parents to hear, and they turned and smiled at me. Dude next to me said (also loud enough for the parents to hear), “I hate kids on planes.” I think it’s worth noting that the child hadn’t done anything at that point, except follow his parents and sit quietly in his seat. Um, ooookay.

2. The flight attendant asked him a couple of times to raise his seat back before take-off. Now, I’ve always thought that was kind of a stupid rule, but it’s an FAA regulation, so you just do it and shut up about it, right? And honestly, how much of a difference does lowering your seat back really make in your comfort level on a plane? It’s what, a difference of two inches? Anyway, dude ignored her requests to raise his seat back. Finally, the male flight attendant came over, pushed the button and raised the guy’s seat himself, and said, “Sir, I’m sorry, but we need you to keep your seat up while we take off.” As soon as the flight attendant walked away, he pushed the button and lowered it again. Argh.

3. He had a pack of Marlboro Reds sticking out of his shirt pocket, and he had a ginormous belt buckle to perfectly accessorize his Wrangler jeans. I’m just sayin’.

4. During landing, he said something about how he had to drive a long way after we got to Little Rock because he lived way out in the boonies of Arkansas. (Shocking!) I was trying to be polite, so I said yeah, me too, I have to rent a car and drive to Memphis. He asked why, so I explained that my best friend was moving to Seattle, so I was flying down to drive up with her so she wouldn’t have to drive 2400 miles by herself. He asked what route we were taking, and I gave him the rough draft – major cities and interstates we were going to hit, that kind of thing. This is the conversation that ensued:

Him (giving a disgusted look): Well, just make sure you avoid St. Louis.
Me: Why’s that?
Him: It’s a dark town.
Me: Um… sorry?
Him: You know what I mean.

I honestly had never heard that term before, so it confused me to no end. In my head, I was thinking, “What, there’s a big goth scene in St. Louis? Why would that be scary?” Then it hit me. Riiiiight. Because the trip wouldn’t have been complete without some kind of racist remark from that asshole. I tried to keep myself from calling him an ignorant moron, since I still had to sit next to him for at least another 15 minutes, so I explained that I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and I lived in Memphis for several years, so I’m really not scared of black people, and I don’t fear for my own personal safety or anything of that nature. I quickly went back to my book and ended the conversation. Afterward, my mom told me that I should’ve told him that I’m one quarter African-American just so I could’ve watched him squirm and backpedal. I so wish I had thought of that myself.

Driving to Memphis was uneventful. I took some pictures through the car windshield, some of which turned out halfway decent. (They’ll be online soon, I promise.) Finally I met up with Kris. We dropped off my rental car, picked up Lucky from the groomer’s, and headed back to her house. We hung out with her folks and a couple of our friends for the rest of the night. We ordered in food – barbeque, since it was Kris’s last dinner in Memphis and you can’t get decent BBQ here to save your life – and we all helped her finish up some last minute packing and cleaning. That’s about it.

Stay tuned for future posts, which will include stories such as: getting pulled over for suspicion of drunk driving (I wasn’t, I swear); chasing a dog through a truck stop parking lot with no shoes on, just socked feet on snow and ice; and pathetic attempts at flirting with Mormon mechanics in Utah. Good times.

In approximately 24 hours, my plane will have just touched down in Little Rock. (Yeah, I know, but it was cheaper than flying to Memphis. I’m renting a car to drive the hour & a half difference, and it’s still cheaper than a direct flight.) By this time on Friday, I’ll be in a car with my best friend and her dog as we start our fun-filled, 2,400-mile, cross-country journey.

Impressive, huh? Nebraska looks pretty daunting to me, like it just goes on forever. The last time I drove cross-country, Montana was the state where I started to get really cranky because it felt like we would never reach the opposite state line. On this trip, I’m predicting that I’ll feel the same way about Nebraska.

Back when I moved here in 2001, my mom and I drove through Wyoming, and I really dug it because we got to see Devil’s Tower, the mountain from “Close Encounters.” That was pretty darn cool. Apparently the Native Americans think that it has some kind of mystical, supernatural powers, and it might’ve just been a coincidence, but that was the only time in the entire 3,000-mile trip that Teenie went from quietly sleeping in the backseat to wigging the hell out. She was running all over the car, meowing her little head off, and trying to paw her way through the rolled-up car windows. It was quite bizarre. We tried to pretend that it was nothing supernatural or eerie, and probably just had to do with the fact that there were a lot of prairie dog fields around there, and she could probably smell them. That’s what I’d prefer to think, anyway. (Oh, and as soon as we left? She got in her little spot in the backseat and went back to sleep, just like she had done for the previous three days. Even my mom got kind of creeped out by her behavior.)

On this trip, we’re going to be on the wrong side of the state for Devil’s Tower, and I don’t think we’re going to be doing any several hundred mile detours just to see it. In fact, I’m dreading Wyoming because we’re going to have to drive through Laramie, and I’m pretty sure Kris’s car still has a PFLAG bumper sticker on it. I think we’ll just drive like hell through that general vicinity.

I won’t have Internet access while I’m on the road, since I’m trying to travel light and I don’t want to be schlepping (sp?) my laptop all across the United States. Plus, we’re going to be staying in pretty cheap motels, and most of them don’t have high-speed access. As much as I love this blog, I don’t see myself trying to post an entry over a dial-up connection. (I shudder to even imagine how slow that would be.) However, I bought a journal – the real kind, like with paper and everything – and some fancy colored pens, and I intend to keep a travel diary of sorts, so hopefully I can transcribe most of it when I get back, and who knows, some of it might even be interesting. I’m also bringing my camera, so if nothing else, there will be lots of pictures.