After some 3,200 miles to and fro’ Detroit and places here and there, big and small, I am home again. Saturday was a pretty long day. We left Muskogee and got to Ross’ home near Dallas just before noon. Then, I set out for the five or so rain-filled hours of driving back to Beaumont in Southeast Texas. Was I tired? Yes. Do I have good sense? No. Otherwise, I would not have gone out late last night with friends to briefly listen to a band at a local club. But I am feeling much better this afternoon although I still wonder what happened to my good sense as it is nowhere to be found.
It was all-in-all a trip devoid of a lot of weirdness which is kind of unusual for flying anywhere by air these days plus driving North-to-South in these US of A. Maybe this lack of strangeness was just because it was such a whirlwind trip that I didn’t have time to observe it.
Two strange sights do stick out in my mind, however. First, I don’t know what is up with Missouri naming their highways with letters. I kept seeing these road signs with just letters. “AW” or “K” or you would see “Route C — 2 miles.” I am sure some perfectly good reason exists why this is so because Missouri folks seem to put a lot of stock in that which is reasonable. Of course, there is John Ashcroft, who was our attorney general as well as a past Missouri governor and U.S. senator.
The second piece o’ weirdness was in — where else? — Oklahoma. Driving down U.S. 69 through one of the Native American countries, just off the turnpike to Tulsa, we saw these big truck trailers sitting on the side of the road going into and out of a little town named Big Cabin, Okla. Painted in incredibly large red letters on the side of the trailers was: “Speed Trap Ahead.” There were several of these trailers on the side of the road.
I looked up the town on Speedtrap.org and found quite a lot about the goings on there. Some subsequent articles I read such as this one fill in the blanks about how the truck stop owner felt the city of Big Cabin was getting the proverbial gold mine while his trucker clientele was getting the shaft. You’ll find in reading the speedtrap page and its comments about Big Cabin or any other speedtrap in the U.S. that one person’s speedtrap is another town’s crusade to save lives by enforcing the speed limits. Sometimes such motives are pure. Other times the motives are pure hogwash (TM? Hogwash — Spoil your swine in luxury.)
It was an interesting trip though. It’s always nice to get out of town for a little while just to see the world from a different perspective, see new sights, et cetera. But it’s also nice to be home, worrying about work I have pending and how I’m going to pay the bills. Yes, that’s really nice. It’s a blast. Sigh …