Ruminations from The Road

These entries will be snippets and observations from the road trip I took with my brother last week. We covered 1600 miles, five states and every subject under the sun. I'll post these as long as I can remember them. Enjoy...

Entry Seven
Our goal on day two was to make it to Oklahoma City. Kyle wanted to spend the night in a decent hotel, eat a good steak and then smoke a cigar—all designed to give ourselves a reward for a hard day of driving. Naturally, I was on board with every aspect of his plan. As we approached Oklahoma City, we decided to get to the eastern side of town before we stopped so that we would not get stuck in any traffic on our way out the next morning. It was, unfortunately, one plan too many. As we looped around the city limits I noticed we had suddenly, with no warning, been dumped on to a toll road. This particular road was completely void of civilization: no restaurants, no hotels and no discernible exit for over 50 miles. When we finally transitioned from the toll road we were only thirty miles from Tulsa so we decided to wait and stop there. Adjusting our plans would prove our maturity and inner strength.

We spotted an intersection that seemed to have a lot going on so we pulled in to secure room and board. The only hotel option was a Super 8 Motel and they only had one room remaining—a non-smoking room with two beds. And they accepted dogs. It was soon clear why they there was only one room available—this particular motel seemed to be a very popular layover for truckers. The parking lot was full of tractor rigs (the kind that pull 18 wheel trailers) and we had trouble finding a place to park. Walking past all of the loitering truckers with two poodles in tow did not cause quite the stir I had anticipated. This was fortunate because our room was located next to the laundry room and there was a group of truckers doing laundry all night long, leaning on the fence overlooking the “pool” (don’t ask), drinking and smoking cigarettes.

Our room reeked of cigarettes proving that being surrounded by smoking rooms is the equivalent of being in a smoking room. By the time we got settled it was late and we were not real high on our prospects of finding a restaurant open at 10:30 p.m. Instead of a nice juicy steak and a glass of wine we enjoyed a hot meal at The Village Inn. Standing in front of our room to smoke a cigar seemed, well, dangerous, so we skipped that part of the plan as well. It was not the night we had anticipated but, frankly, living to check out the next day seemed like a monumental accomplishment so we took our victory as it was presented.

The hotel parking lot at night.