Jessica's alarm went off at 8:00 this morning, but we didn't make it out of the house until 9:30. Jeri's mom made us pancakes and ham, so we had an awesome breakfast and played dinosaur with Ayden before heading out to the car. Bryce called right as we were leaving, but unfortunately Missouri isn't the best place for Verizon service, and I lost the call shortly thereafter.
From there, we drove straight through to Oklahoma, stopping only for gas and for lunch at Chili's. I haven't had Chili's since the day Bryce left (when a few of us girls went out for lunch/drinks and pedicures). He introduced me to their queso, which is probably the best dip ever. Well, with the exception of Catherine's chili dip and the Turner family clam dip. So maybe it is the best dip you can buy at a restaurant, yeah, that's about right. We drove around the boonies of Oklahoma City for about an hour (45 MPH feels like crawling after the 75 MPH limits on the turnpikes. Did I mention that we passed back into toll road country? Well we did, I'm not sure where the logic for bringing aforementioned 75 (plus) MPH traffic to a standstill to pay $4 comes from, but whatever, at least I don't live here and have to do it everyday. Back to the timeline at hand, we made it to the KOA by 6:00, checked in and set about putting our campsite together. Somewhere between Ohio (the last time we used the tent) and here, one of the tent poles lost an end, you know, the ones that the keys of the actual tent hook into...the important ones? We dug the pole into the ground and tried to secure it with a stake, so I'll let you know tomorrow if it collapses on us tonight or not.
For now, we are sitting inside a lodge thing, waiting on our clothes to finish drying. Word to the wise for anyone planning on taking a road trip (or moving to a college dorm for that matter), pack quarters. And then don't spend them on anything else but laundry. Fortunately the camp stores have been open whenever we've needed to get change for dollars, otherwise we'd be stuck.
I didn't get a chance to write down many observations over the past couple days when we have been in the (not deep) south, but I've made a couple. First, and most obviously, accents. Where I'm from (Jess too) people do not have accents, or if you have to call it an accent, it is a neutral one. I was chatting with someone from Arkansas a night or two ago and debating this. He called it a "proper" accent (I'm pretty sure he was making fun, but eh). I had to ask him to repeat half of our conversation because I couldn't always catch what was being said. I do love southern accents, but I am excited to be around people whose speaking I can clearly understand. :)
Further on in this conversation I was referred to as a Yankee (again, I'm pretty sure this wasn't a compliment). I can't agree with this at all. Washington wasn't anywhere near being a state during the Civil War. If anything, we should be frontiers(wo)men or pioneers or something. I came closer to winning this argument when I suggested that grouping all northerners together would mean that we could put all southerners together, thereby grouping him (a conservative if I ever met one) with liberals in California.
On another note, I was shocked in Nashville when the people we were talking with did not know who Chris LeDoux was. We were headed to a bar called the Cadillac Ranch (which I would think is named after the song, but I'm not positive) and they had never heard of him, either as a singer or as a rodeo rider. I was quizzed in Missouri to see if I knew who John Wayne was (I would think everyone would know that...).
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