BEA or bust - Part 2

BEA or bust -
The trip to Book Expo 2008

Day 2 - Dallas to Phoenix - 4:03 am

I started the second day of my trip half an hour late due to a faulty alarm clock. Or perhaps a faulty alarm clock setter? Eli? Really, though, thank you Eli. This gave me four and a half hours of sleep instead of just four. I re-packed my bags (oh joy!) and graciously allowed someone else to load them into the trunk.

Eli and I hit the road, but we didn’t go far. My mother, stepfather and brother live a mile down the street so we had to stop in for me to say ‘hi’. Eli, being their nearby adult child, has a key, and popped open the front door yelling “Pants! Pants!” at full volume.

Apparently, this is the new form of greeting at my mother’s. Apparently, there was a problem with this recently. I didn’t ask for more details.

We give hugs and are told for the umpteenth time to ‘drive safely’ and, at last, we are on the road with 962 miles to go to our hotel in Phoenix. Within half an hour we have already stopped twice - once at Sonic for limeades (a road trip necessity) and once to unpack my luggage to find the antennae to the GPS (which makes it work remarkably better.)

It’s going to be a long day.

The Texas read system has done a brilliant thing and upped their middle-of-nowhere freeway speed to 80. But since Eli has gone to sleep and the landscape is so monotonous, 80 just feels . . . so . . . slow.

And even at 80, you can just drive and drive and never get anywhere. (Don’t zoom out on the GPS on long trips, it’s really depressing to watch your car not move forward on the map.) But I know we haven’t left Texas because a beer billboard has called me treasonous if I drink anything else and there is a general foul smell lingering in the air. I know it’s manure, but I’m not sure what kind it is - prairie dog? Jackalope? What do they have out here that could possibly smell so bad? I try dot to breede for two huddred biles.

On an up note, we have named the kindly GPS ‘Maggie’. Every time we exit, she tells us to please make a legal U-turn. Apparently, Maggie never has to pee.

It turns out that Maggie, like me, is a savant. She’s fantastic with directions, but really slow on the uptake. You would think that after passing four possible U-turn spots at high speed, she’d figure out we don’t want to turn around. But she doesn’t. I don’t get mad, though, I treat her with the pity that savants deserve. I have also learned that if you hit the right buttons you can say, “Maggie, do you think you should shut up now?” and she’ll cheerfully reply, “Yes!”

We turned Maggie off after that pit stop for more limeades. Seriously, you can’t get lost in back-of-nowhere Texas. Just make sure you have a full tank of overpriced gas and follow the smell.