In God's Country

Driving cross- country was an amazing experience. Our last day in NYC was very sad as we had to put our dog to sleep. After much agonizing, we had decided that it was in everyone's best interest for him to be put down. With most of our things (but not all by far) in the truck, we set off to a very nice vet in Long Beach-- where we lived for one glorious year. The last I saw of Buddha, he was wagging his tail, walking down the white corridor with a pretty, young, tech.

So as not to wallow in the sadness of his absense, we took off that afternoon. Our first stop was a cabin in Pennsylvania where our friend Ray's mom made us amazing home- cooked Italian food. I've never had homemade eggplant parmisan. The next day we hit the road and drove 750 miles to about Nashville. Tennessee was beautiful. I've always missed the plants and grasses of California during my time in New York, but I cold see myself falling in love with Tennessee.

Arkansas wasn't bad either, but the weather got a little scary. BitterNewYorker was a weatheman in the service and he was showing me how thunderheads form. We drove under some pretty scary skies.(I'm gonna try to post those pictures.) We also passed a nuclear power plant and tons of soybean fields that are pretty strange nad marshy looking. I think we nominated Arkansas best smelling state.

Texas was quick and I didn't get to see a tumbling tumble weed.

New Mexico had lots of amazing mesas and rock formations as did Arizona. Both had so many little towns i nthe middle of nowhere. I wonder how people can get all of the basics out there. I guess lots of trucks pass through, but seems like life out there in those towns would be pretty expensive these days. We also got to drive through a lightening storm on a really flat stretch of land so that we could see all the lightening as well as the separate little thunderhead clusters causing all sorts of bad weather.

We did have some time to enjoy the scenery, but mostly we saw truckstops. Our huge truck hada slow leak. Kinda freaked me out- on the one hand, a flat tire is not good to drive on and on the other hand, I wasalways afraid that BNY would blow up the tire while filling it. I'm actually no longer afraid of tires -- it's really hard to get the right PSI for a big truck unless you have the proper type of compressor. So its like pushing cooked spaghetti to fill a tire with a crappy compressor.