stale, from the road

Our road to Joplin, MO began six days ago. An early morning at the shop where we grabbed the essentials out of the yard (baseball gloves, golf clubs, cellphone chargers) and took the non-essentials out (empty candy wrappers, crusty coffee cups, smelly work boots) and took to the open road.

Twelve hours later we arrived in St. Louise to drive past the Gateway, maneuver around Cardinal fans and shack up for the night.

Now, that might seem like a bit of a jump, the skip over the twelve hours in the truck without any mention of a funny thing that happened, but the reality is that nothing much did. Traveling, a lot of the time, consists mostly of boring, mundane details that provide little entertainment to anyone, especially those experiencing it.

There was a great deal of mp3 shuffling, some chatting with the boss man every couple of hours with nothing more to report than our new location (which could have been guessed at with a quick calculation and an online map) and cracking juvenile jokes about everything and anything.

I learned the trick to starting the truck after putting new fuel in it: turns out one has to hold the pedal down to the floor, turn it over for thirty seconds then let the RMPs hover around 4000 for ten seconds. That got us a lot of looks, even the odd cheer, from fellow roadsters.

We would pause every so often at chain sandwich shops, or coffee huts, or road side trees to change up the pace. Sometimes when the Boss man called we'd say we were in a completely different state.

He didn't like that and told us so.

I learned to use the messenger system on the work phone, however if you're not in the crackberry club then I can't get in touch with you in text form from that device.

In closing, we rested a moment in St. Louis, ate a burger and tried to chat with friendly wait staff who were in no mood to chat with anyone because they worked at a bar that was next to a hotel and got all kinds of crazy come in the door. We spent the basketball game nibling quietly on a burger and talking about the people around us in hushed voices.

Sweet is learning to use his inside voice quiet well.