1 More Day before I leave for Wisconsin and "The Lake"

I'm leaving for Wisconsin tomorrow. I'm going to try and blog along the way but I'm not sure if I'll be allowed to get near our laptop computer enroute. I'll be traveling with two male techies and I may end up "low man (woman) on the totem pole". That's a cliche but I'm not up to the L's yet so it'll have to wait for another day.

We're not going to try to make the trip in one day. It has been done. Once...well almost. My daughter and I team drove the return, Wisconsin to Arizona, route in 28 hours. Since my daughter was a novice driver, when I was supposed to be sleeping...I wasn't. We got as far as Gallup before we had to stop because Mom really needed a nap. I don't do naps well....but the coffee wasn't working and my stomach was on strike and my eyelids were trying to glue themselves to my lower lashes. I napped...for 1/2 hour while the kids went into a restaurant to eat. I don't think I'm all that anxious to try the 28 hour trick again....especially with a novice driver.

One of the tricks of cross-country driving is to always start looking for a viable gas station when your gauge is reading a little under 1/2 full. This actually means that your tank is 1/2 empty and you need to find gas because you're probably in the middle of nowhere and it may take a while to find a viable gas station. Ever try to find a viable gas station at 2 AM when you don't know where you are exactly but you're either in Texas or Oklahoma? I have. When I took over driving from my novice driver (ever the optimist...the glass 1/2 full), I was left with less then a 1/4 tank of gas. I'll never forget the one gas station I was finally able to find that was open. Actually, it's the guy who ran the gas station that I'll never forget. Amazing! I didn't think that this stereotypical, overall and plaid shirt wearing, "Cleetus"-type person existed outside of the covers of some book titled "You know You're a Red-Neck When....". I know that I had a heck of a time understanding what he was saying but I'm pretty sure he was speaking Texan because we were in a narrow strip of the pan-handle of Texas. Have you ever had to stop yourself from staring at someone and you can because you're an adult and you have that kind of control? Have you ever tried to stop your young children from staring at someone with their mouths agape and you know for a fact that they just don't have that kind of control....and you don't have that kind of control over them at the best of times and 2 AM just isn't the best of times? Oh well. Someday they may let me visit Texas again. Maybe.

Cliche of the Day

Here Today and Gone Tomorrow. Transient; unreliable. This way of saying that things are fleeting was well known in the 16th century, when John Clavin wrote of the "prouerbe that man is here to-day and gone to morow."