Road trips, coyotes, and more inventions.

I spent Sunday in the car for 19 hours. We ran over one fewer coyote than we did on the way down there last week, so that was nice. The ride TO Texas was somewhat traumatic: it was exciting to see my first coyote dash across the highway, then horrifying to feel the bumps as he turned back and ran right in front of our truck. Ick. But Friend-with-a-Truck was an excellent driver and managed not to swerve the vehicle, a move that would have tumbled us off the highway.

A few thoughts from the road trip:

-Oklahoma has horrible roads. Can't Garth Brooks do something about that already?

-Historic Route 66 isn't nearly as auspicious as I'd hoped.

-Louisville is the only city in the country with a radio station like WFPK.

-The Taco Cabana in Amarillo is as closed as WallyWorld, no matter what the internet says. Don't go out of your way to get to Amarillo in search of Taco Cabana.

-Oklahoma City has a Taco Cabana, and has a glorious large billboard advertising just that. DO go out of your way to hit the salsa bar there.

-Audiobooks nowadays are much better-produced than audiobooks from the 1980s. Another blog to follow about that. We checked out Books-on-Tape, yes cassette tape, from the library before the road trip. And boy, did we listen to some gems.

-It takes 17 hours and 12 minutes to drive to Lubbock from Louisville, and that includes several pit stops and one coyote stop.

-It takes 19 hours and 30 minutes to drive to Louisville from Lubock, and that includes several pit stops, as well as sitting on I-64 in Corydon for 90 minutes at midnight when you are 42 miles from home, in line with about 500 other people because the cops have closed the exits and everyone else has slid off the interstate.

-No one except Friend-with-a-Truck knows how to drive in inclement weather. All the truck drivers on the highway yesterday were clearly drunk.

-iPhones are excellent ways to occupy your time and to try to find out why you're sitting in traffic, EXCEPT when the news websites and 511 have absolutely zero information as to why the 90-minute backup on I-64.

-CB Radios would be much preferable to iPhones in a traffic jam. Can someone please work on the CB App? Twitter's "nearby tweet" function is not a good substitute. But thanks for the sympathy tweets anyway, friends.

-If we have Twitter and CB Radio and iPhones, why the hell do we STILL not have flying cars?

Or in all seriousness, how is it possible that our cars cannot drive themselves? The airplane I flew in a few weeks ago was twice as old as my car, and IT can fly itself. I absolutely do not understand why it is 2010 and we don't have autopilot in our vehicles, and sensors that avoid all accidents, including black ice and floods and other cars.

And why don't all cars emit a coyote-repellent sonar blast? Poor little coyote. We hardly knew ye.

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