Road trip to Texas, round 2

I just got home from a road trip to Texas. It was ideal: drive out and fly back. That way, I got my "driving detox time" after summer term ended and before fall semester started, but I didn't go insane from too much time spent in the car by myself. It was much more chill (and safer!) than Road Trip to Texas, round 1 And best of all, I placed the trip under the guise of being incredibly kind and altruistic and driving a car out for my sister and brother-in-law, so I didn't even have to pay for gas. It was a dream.

A few highlights:

*Two days before I was supposed to leave and only a few hours after I had picked the car up, it started making a horrible screaming-clicking-knocking-thumping sound and broke down. Don't worry, after 4 hours Monday morning and a horrible experience at Certified Auto Repair in Provo (those guys are real jerks. I would only recommend them if you are looking for overpriced, shoddy service, and an encounter with certified jerks. But I might have been influenced by their motto, painted on the wall, which was, "Our desire is for your auto repair experience to be friendly and successful." How can you have a friendly experience? It was awkward grammar), I finally got out of Provo at 12 noon, only 6 hours later than I had planned.

*For some reason (involving a forgotten number password and a recent car repair), the radio and tape player do not work in the Saturn, the car I drove to Texas. 26 hours in the car with no music? I can barely even do 26 minutes in a car with no music! So we got an inverter and I brought along my cd player. I was listening to a book on tape, O Jerusalem (which is awesome, by the way), and in order that I might hear it over the roar of the car and the road and to keep it from continually skipping, I held the cd player on my lap. It was a thrill.

*I finally saw the Monticello temple.

*I stopped at a posh 2-star hotel in Albuquerque (Super 8) with free wi-fi. I walked into the hotel and said I needed to check in and the desk clerk said, "You're Breanne, right?" Shocked, I asked her how she knew, and she said, "You're the only one to check in tonight!" I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. They also put me in the handicapped room, which meant I had a bigger bathroom and a shower instead of a tub. The hotel, trying to be chic and up-to-date, had one of those curved shower curtain rods in the bathroom. (This is not THE shower curtain rod, but just an example I found on the internet. Of it installed correctly.)

However, they must have forgotten to read the installation instructions, because instead of the curve going out, allowing for more room and light in the shower, it went in. It was really awkward to try and avoid brushing against the shower curtain when it took up half of the shower. And I was going to take a picture, but I had left my camera in the car. So just try to imagine, and laugh.

*New Mexico is so much better to drive through late at night and early in the morning. I really timed it perfectly and instead of having to see hours of sun-baked ground for miles and miles, with nothing to disturb it except some trailers and an overturned car in a field, I drove through most of it at night and so didn't see anything but the freeway anyway. It was much more pleasant than last time, when I drove through NM in the middle of the day.

*Somewhere before Albuquerque, I drove around a bend in the freeway and saw, to my horror, a huge glowing-red building that looked, in the darkness, as though it was floating on nothing. It looked like the house of the devil himself, but was actually a casino. Or are those the same thing? Anyway, no picture, but know that after creeping me out just a little, it reminded me of this building in Jordan that I affectionately called the "Tower of Babel." It was actually a hotel, but looks like the real thing.


*Apparently in Texas it is entirely kosher to use the passing lane if you are going no more than one-mile-an-hour faster than the car in the right lane. And if it takes 5 minutes to pass three cars that's ok too, even if you have a line of cars behind you on a two-lane road.

*Remember my story about washing my car with the window-washing squeegees provided at gas stations? I found the perfect contraption for this somewhere in Texas.


Like I said, it was a dream. And I didn't feel once like I was about to die. More details about my time in Texas, including an exciting "17 minutes at the Alamo," to come.