The Road Chronicles: Day 3

So now we're in Tulsa, safe and sound at our friend William's house for the night. It's ridiculously hot here, and muggy, and icky, but it's nice to be at our (semi) destination. I'm really looking forward to not driving for the next two days. I'm going to bed without setting an alarm and waking up whenever I wake up tomorrow! How exciting. William said "I have to work a shift tomorrow, from 8am to noon" and I said "Don't worry, we probably won't even be awake until you get home anyways". Hurray!

Today was an interesting day. The driving wasn't horrible but because we had such a long day yesterday we were already a bit tired. And we got lost a few times trying to get back on highways that we left to take a break or get food or switch drivers.

We left at about 7:30am after eating a continental breakfast in our Super 8 motel (er, some toast and juice). At some point we crossed into Texas. At some point we then crossed into Oklahoma. It was rather uneventful overall.

Though, I did have a huge scare about almost hitting a deer! We were in Oklahoma on a four lane highway that had a large grassy divide between the two lanes going the different directions. There were no other cars in sight so I had the cruise control on at 75mph. About 100ft ahead of us we saw a frantic doe sprinting across the two lanes of our side of the highway and into the grassy divide. It was far enough in front of us that I wasn't worried, and I was more thinking "Ooh, a deer! Oh no deer, don't run into the lanes on the other side of the highway, you'll get run over!" But apparently the deer had the same thought and it whipped around in a quick U turn right before reaching the other two lanes and headed back towards our side of the highway. So I was like "Ok, slow down, I'll let it run back across and we'll be fine". But the deer didn't run straight across the road, so I had slowed down, and the deer slowed down a bit, but we were both still going about 60mph (I swear that deer was fast!) and the deer was RIGHT NEXT TO US. The deer and I were trying to figure out "Do I go in front? slow down? go in back? aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!" and neither of us could decide, but the deer had all of this forward momentum, which was taking it straight into the driver's side of my van! It was right next to my driver's side door; if I'd had the window down (and the car and the deer hadn't been almost hitting each other at 60mph) I could have reached out and patted it's head.

Well finally I just hit the gas and managed to pull right in front of it. We didn't hit the deer, and it didn't hit us, but when we looked in the rearview mirror the deer had completely fallen over itself in the lane behind us because of trying to turn and avoid us and because of the slipstream from the giant van. Poor deer. But it's still alive to frantically run around the highway and give someone else a heart attack another day.

The rest of today was fairly uneventful, and like I said, I'm looking forward to going to sleep and not waking up until my body is good and ready to!