One Hundred Seven Degrees in Nebraska
Makes you wish you were me, huh? Well, just add 107 degrees to your long list of reasons not to visit Nebraska.
After a pre-dawn smack-down with the snooze button, The PA Train drove East into an awesome sunrise. Awesome. It was all downhill from there.
One lowlight was my time-consuming effort to have a sanitary bowel movement in a non-toxic environment in the late morning hours. Think of all the truckers on Interstate 80. Now think of each of them drinking a Refillable Bladder Buster Big Gulp of coffee, the equivalent of 421 cups of fresh-brewed columbian diuretic/laxative. There aren't enough toilets in the northern hemisphere for this daily teamster bum-rush. Now imagine a large, bald-but-surprisingly attractive man, driving from truck stop to truck stop with intensely clenched buttocks and cursing with increasing volume at every stop. Ultimately I gave up on finding places that I could park, and just started walking (quickly, in full clench) from fast food place to gas station to whatever was adjacent to the truckstop. Sheesh. I just looked it up and Mapquest says todays trip should take 8.5 hours, I guess I shouldn't be surprised it took me about 12.
Lowlight two was an indirect result of my mid-morning poopventures. Because I'd wasted so much time NOT driving in the planned direction, I chose to eat my lunch wherever I could get gas. I considered myself fortunate to find a truckstop with a Wendys in it, and didn't even cringe as I paid 26.94 for a double-burger and large diet coke. Well, that was the slippiest, slidiest, shiny-with-grease Wendys double I've ever seen. It came back to haunt me as I passed through Omaha. Every mile of Omaha's freeway is constructed with concrete plates that are held together with joists like a bridge. While any modern car's suspension will gobble this up, my covered wagon's buckboard shot me into the cab's ceiling about 90 times a minute. This is not unusual, it happens on several different road surfaces. But Today it had the effect of darn near sending that Wendys Double onto the dashboard.
Which brings me here to Des Moines, where I will camp until tomorrow's short drive to Chicago. Mapquest says it's a 5 hour drive. It will probably take me 20 hours at this rate. I'll get up at 2am for an early afternoon ETA and hope for the best.
I didn't take any photos today, because getting out of the truck's air-conditioned cab was tantamount to taking a stroll on the surface of the sun. I would have been instantly incinerated. So here is another Sparksian Feral Equine. . .
After a pre-dawn smack-down with the snooze button, The PA Train drove East into an awesome sunrise. Awesome. It was all downhill from there.
One lowlight was my time-consuming effort to have a sanitary bowel movement in a non-toxic environment in the late morning hours. Think of all the truckers on Interstate 80. Now think of each of them drinking a Refillable Bladder Buster Big Gulp of coffee, the equivalent of 421 cups of fresh-brewed columbian diuretic/laxative. There aren't enough toilets in the northern hemisphere for this daily teamster bum-rush. Now imagine a large, bald-but-surprisingly attractive man, driving from truck stop to truck stop with intensely clenched buttocks and cursing with increasing volume at every stop. Ultimately I gave up on finding places that I could park, and just started walking (quickly, in full clench) from fast food place to gas station to whatever was adjacent to the truckstop. Sheesh. I just looked it up and Mapquest says todays trip should take 8.5 hours, I guess I shouldn't be surprised it took me about 12.
Lowlight two was an indirect result of my mid-morning poopventures. Because I'd wasted so much time NOT driving in the planned direction, I chose to eat my lunch wherever I could get gas. I considered myself fortunate to find a truckstop with a Wendys in it, and didn't even cringe as I paid 26.94 for a double-burger and large diet coke. Well, that was the slippiest, slidiest, shiny-with-grease Wendys double I've ever seen. It came back to haunt me as I passed through Omaha. Every mile of Omaha's freeway is constructed with concrete plates that are held together with joists like a bridge. While any modern car's suspension will gobble this up, my covered wagon's buckboard shot me into the cab's ceiling about 90 times a minute. This is not unusual, it happens on several different road surfaces. But Today it had the effect of darn near sending that Wendys Double onto the dashboard.
Which brings me here to Des Moines, where I will camp until tomorrow's short drive to Chicago. Mapquest says it's a 5 hour drive. It will probably take me 20 hours at this rate. I'll get up at 2am for an early afternoon ETA and hope for the best.
I didn't take any photos today, because getting out of the truck's air-conditioned cab was tantamount to taking a stroll on the surface of the sun. I would have been instantly incinerated. So here is another Sparksian Feral Equine. . .
posted by Chris at
8:18 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home