6/13/09

Super Bowl? Bah. Stanley Cup? Humbug. The Pirates beat the hell out of the Tigers tonight? Phooey. My baseball team is still in first (for now) and theirs is in last (for now). Yeah, so I'm reaching at this point. After seeing so many 'For Sale' signs in the neighborhoods and business districts back home during the past week, and after hearing Mister "I don't know anything about cars" on the radio, there has to be something left to which we can cling. I don't know. Whatever. I would have to say that, over the course of the seven games, the better hockey team definitely won this time around.

I think I'm about halfway back to a drive by day and sleep by night schedule. I'm not sure exactly when I fell asleep last night but I managed to get out to the highway around noon today. I'm still not setting an alarm for tomorrow but I think I'll probably be up and moving at some point in the morning. Today's drive was a solid 600 miles across Kentucky, then down through Memphis and into Arkansas. As has become my default practice, I stayed away from the route into Nashville and over to Memphis, instead taking the parkway over to US-51.

The drive was largely uneventful, with light weekend traffic and nice weather along the entire route. There was one stretch that brought a few extra prayers to St. Christopher along the way though. On I-30 in Benton, Arkansas there was a pretty grizzly scene. Both sides of the freeway were being diverted onto the frontage road and a truck was burning on the eastbound side. Nothing is showing up on the local news sites at this point so we can only hope that the driver managed to escape with his life. It didn't look too freaking good.

My abbreviated pay week will wrap up with 1,769 miles. When I'm home until Thursday night, we have to take this as a pretty solid outcome. I'll have around 650 miles or so left to reach Laredo tomorrow night. At this point I'm leaning toward dropping down on US-59 through Houston. Satan's Driveway is what it is and I don't really feel like going twenty miles out of the way to catch US-287 this time around. As long as there are no major snafus, I think I should make pretty decent time through the eastern part of Texas.

I left Taylor on Thursday and I stopped for fuel in West Memphis today. Neither of those terminals appeared to be terribly crowded, so it would be tempting to hope for a similar scene in Laredo. Now that I've said that, we should expect that I'll find a hundred trucks on the board and I'll sit there eating fajitas for a day or two. Time will tell.