Driving to Springfield

[Follow our road trip here using the tag Road Trip 2019 ]

Leaving the cen­tral Texas area turned out to be much more dif­fi­cult than we antic­i­pat­ed. It was as if we had been trapped in a grav­i­ta­tion­al well or some­thing. It took us an extra cou­ple of hours to get the car packed up, even though we had just packed it to stay at the con­do a few days ear­li­er. The plan was to stop by the house to pull some things out of the garage for our ten­ant; that took longer than antic­i­pat­ed. We did­n’t get far until I real­ized that I had lost my keys; we had to go back to the house to track them down.

Our clan final­ly got to the high­way around 4pm. I had hoped to be on the road by 11am. It meant a night dri­ve and a late night arrival in Springfield. The girls did­n’t want to sleep because they were wor­ried about miss­ing out on pass­ing into Missouri, even though that was hours away. We still had to get out of Texas and go through Oklahoma first! We had 9 and a half hours of road time, and every stop added at least 30 min­utes on top of that.

Entering Oklahoma

It took a while to get out of Texas and into Oklahoma. By the time we crossed the bor­der, it was dark. Kenieshiear had hoped to stop by a lit­tle Amish shop off the side of the road, but they were closed. We did get to see the casi­nos all lit up in their gar­ish fash­ion, though.

Driving through Oklahoma was long and bor­ing. Not much to look at dur­ing the day, and less at night. It did give me an oppor­tu­ni­ty to think and men­tal­ly com­pose this post. My fam­i­ly slept and I thought and drove. I think the worst part was the low speed lim­it. Whenever we drove through a small town, the lim­it would drop to 45 or less for a mile or two and that threw off pace by more than I expected.

There is an Interstate that would have avoid­ed these issues. That would have had us swing­ing out of the way and would­n’t have saved any time. We would­n’t have had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to laugh when the lady at Taco Bell com­ment­ed “Spending that FAFSA mon­ey, huh?” It would­n’t have been as much fun.

Finally, Missouri!

After sev­er­al hours in Oklahoma, we final­ly made it to a toll road with decent speed lim­its and were short­ly after that enter­ing Missouri. Just a cou­ple of hours to go! At this point, every­body was asleep, though Kenieshiear would wake up and ask me if I was okay every time we hit a bump in the road.

I was pret­ty tired, so I don’t remem­ber too much to add for this leg of the trip. We safe­ly made it to our airbnb around 3ish. By the time we got the chil­dren and dogs and stuff out of the car, it was 4ish. The chil­dren work us up at 7ish.

More updates to come.