Feeling Grown and Technology is Crazy

Day 2: Driving to Oklahoma City:
I woke up this morning at my crazy nice hotel. I used Hotwire for this trip and I paid less for the hotels for the past two days than the mid-priced hotels that I've stayed in for work. Last night I stayed in a Sheraton (this is funny to me because I accidentally told my family and few friends - that I stayed at a Radisson... I wonder why I shifted that in my head... or maybe that's just funny because I'm tired). And tonight I'm staying at a Hilton Garden Inn.

Anyways I packed up the car and in my readjusting of some of the boxes that shifted I jammed my finger up against my hope chest in the car and nicked it. It started to bleed like crazy and so I ended up actually using the emergency car kit that I bought for the trip. I then started driving out of Albuquerque.

Once past the city New Mexico and into northern Texas is a flat land that led me to lots of thoughts
 about what I was doing.

Look nothing!

 

I am driving cross country on my own! Its funny the things that make me feel my age. I for the most part go around still feeling like I'm 16 years old. I mean emotionally and physically I don't feel like a teenager. And for the most part mentally I normally feel like an adult. Especially when it comes to working, paying bills and caring for myself. But there are a lot of times where, for lack of a better way to describe it, I just don't feel like a grown up. This is something that I wonder if I'll ever get over - feeling younger than I am. I once asked my mother how old she felt and she said 25 so maybe someday I'll get to the point of feeling that age. Maybe after I've had kids and am in my 40-50s.

Anyways driving across the country on my own has made me feel very grown up! Its crazy how much of an adult I feel through all of this. From doctoring my finger calmly to driving very long hours cross flat land that's almost as bad as the deserts I had came from. With my job in Arizona I drove all over the state and there are huge sections of the state that is just numbing desert. Which is another thing that made me feel like an adult. This driving thing has been actually pretty easy. Almost like my "blinking" I've mentioned driving has been a breeze. But more than being an adult I think that more or less has to do with the training I've received over the last 7 years. My job basically took me from one end of the state to the other so I think I've just gotten used to it.

Along the way I saw fields of windmills that generate electricity. It was interesting to see. I tried to take a picture but I'm not sure they really came out.  Because they are white and the sky in the distance looks white they blend pretty well.

It was actually pretty amazing to see the windmills. And I continued to see them in patches throughout Texas. And in the meantime my phone chirped out how many miles I had to Amarillo and then later to Oklahoma. I used my navigation on my phone (in assistance of the printed out MapQuest) to assist me in getting to different stops along the way. In particularly the Cracker Barrels along the way. One of the things I learned in driving all over Arizona was that one of the easiest and cleanest places to use the restroom is in a Cracker Barrel. They inevitably are super busy in their front store areas so slipping in and not buying anything is pretty easy. And considering I liked getting the books on CD to use while driving this was always an easy stop for me and so I've continued to use this concept for this trip. Not to mention that since I packed my lunches for the trip it was super easy to eat them in their overly large parking lots. I also used the phones to get me to the hotels because having the phone tell me where to turn instead of trying to read the instructions (especially at night) helped a lot. And as I thought about it tonight I thought it was really quite extraordinary - this technology we have from the electricity making windmills to phones that are essentially talking maps. And I can't imagine living without these advances anymore.

I'm getting pretty tired. And considering I'm now on central time I've lost another hour! So I'll post this.  Oh but first a couple other photos of my journey.

TEXAS!

This is actually a HUGE cross. I think its supposed to be the largest cross in the US. I know it was supposed to be on this route (when I looked online for interesting things to see along the way this was one of the sites that was supposed to be directly off of the highway).

I just missed the Oklahoma sign! :)