To quote the late great Kenny Hinson, "I've been called an awful lot of things in my life and to be honest with you, smart wasn't often one of them." Probably one of the least smart things I have done in a long time was trade El Mirage, Arizona with day time temperatures in the 70's for Waynesville Ohio and daytime temperatures yesterday at noon of 9!
Davy, you are dumber than a box of rocks! Yep, that is what I am talking about!
This was yesterday morning at in Waynesville.
It was supposed to get to 15 or 16 Wednesday evening but if it did, you can not prove it by my testimony.
The rest of the week does nothing for my self esteem.
That is why I say leaving this below was not one of the smartest things that I have ever done.
Contrast the picture above with these two pictures from yesterday below. Do not let the sun fool you. The temperature difference between the pictures above and below was 60 degrees!
Wednesday morning at 10:00 Mountain Time and 12:00 Eastern Time we were ready to go and it was pure sunshine.
We knew that some of our drive would be at night and much of it would be in the rain, but we did not want to miss southeast Arizona. We love that stretch of interstate.
We have written before about an area in eastern Arizona called Texas Canyon. The landscape changes dramatically within a mile and then changes again just as quickly a few miles later. I have posted about it repeatedly and HERE and HERE are a few pictures from other stops.
I took this pictures within 2-3 miles of the Texan Canyon rest area. Notice, no big rocks.
Suddenly the rocks appear out of no where.
Within 2 miles or so of the rest area the rocks are gone!
We drove about 580 miles and stopped to sleep a while in a rest area in west Texas. We were back on the road before 4:00 AM the next morning.
We had a couple of hours of very peaceful driving and a memorable sunrise.
I was trying to time our drive through Dallas so that we would miss bad traffic. We had a few minutes of slow down when we went through about noon, but for Dallas it was not bad.
There was a Flying J on I-20 in the Dallas area and it was perfectly placed for our first fuel stop.
We drove a couple more hours to a rest area near Mt. Vernon, Texas. It was still daylight, but I had already driven 620 miles so it was time for some sleep. I think I laid right down on the couch to rest and slept good about 2 1/2 hours.
Then KJ prepared us a bite to eat and we tried to rest some more. I was hoping to sleep all night but was not successful. We finally got up and hit the road in the rain. We were 900 miles from home at that point and every one of those 900 miles was driven in the rain.
After 430 miles we stopped at a rest area west of Jackson, Mississippi to sleep a little. The traffic from the south side of Little Rock until way east of Memphis was horrible and the rain made it doubly stressful. I did not want to go around or through Nashville for more of that.
We timed our departure from the Jackson rest area so that we could hit Nashville about 9:00 PM or so and the plan worked perfectly. There were no major traffic slowdowns at all other than slow going because of the heavy rain.
I had considered driving the rest of the way home but about 75 miles north of the Kentucky state line Kelly Jo decided we had enough. She was correct. Thankfully the rest area had a few places open and we stopped again.
We had only driven 233 miles that rainy night but add that to the 430 miles earlier in the day and that was plenty to do me in. I actually slept pretty good that night.
The next morning we hit the road and almost immediately lost an hour by driving into the eastern time zone. Traffic around Louisville and Cincinnati was relatively light and soon we were pulling into the Flying J 10 miles from the barn.
As we exited the interstate great big flakes of snow begin to fall and driving became treacherous.
30 minutes or so later we were backing into the barn and breathing a sigh of relief!
30 minutes after that we were inhaling salsa!
That wraps up about 2070 miles on the road between El Mirage, Arizona and the Lazy OD Ranch near Waynesville, Ohio. Thank you for riding along with us.
Davy
