final tally:
- 2841 miles
- 45 hours, 7 minutes moving
- Average speed, 63 mph
- Average mileage, 32.3 mpg
- Seven tanks of gas
- Twelve states (IL, IN, OH, KY, TN, GA, AL, MS, LA, TX, AR, MO)
- Ten interstate highways (90, 94, 80, 71, 65, 24, 20, 30, 40, 57)
- 22 bottles of water drunk while driving
- Three states on my shit list for not giving free road maps out at rest areas (KY, TX, AR)
- Two states where I would actually have had use for said free road maps (TX, AR)
- Skankiest rest areas: Louisiana
- Best rest areas: Illinois and Alabama
- Most road construction: Illinois (surprise, surprise)
- Speeding tickets: None! Hah!
- Shortest day: Friday, 13 August (Rusk, TX – Malvern, AR), approximately 4.5 hours
- Longest day: Saturday, 14 August (Malvern, AR – Chicago), approximately 11 hours.
- Wrongest turn: Took US 69 northwest out of Tyler, TX, to I-30, when I needed to turn off on US 270 north. My mistake; I had thought I was supposed to stay on 69. Should have read the map better (that segment of US 270 was unmarked on the map, and it lined up with the previous segment of US 69, so I thought it was still 69.) Took me about 100 miles out of my way, west, which would have made the trip to Malvern much shorter. Actually, that was really my only navigational error, but it certainly made up for not having any others.
had the weirdest damn quesadillas in texas. kid you not. they were grilled chicken rolled in flour tortillas, then doused in melted cheese. and not like real cheese, either, it was like ballpark nacho cheese sauce.
i’m pretty sure that those do not technically qualify as quesadillas. more later. i’m too busy singing “home, home, home, home-home, home, home home!” to write.
