XCD Day 4: FNL & Busy OK

I've never watched Friday Night Lights, but Annie swears that we drove through the non-fictional town it was based off.  No, not Odessa, TX.  Panhandle, TX.  One of my closest high school friends now lives there with his wife, his two-year-old, and a baby on the way.  (If you read yesterday's post, you may notice a trend.)  I went to school with only 2 Hispanic families, all of them were close friends, and I just visited them both in the Southwest in consecutive days.  During high school, I had no clue I was 25% Mexican, but it's interesting to think about now.  Apparently I should move to Albuquerque and quickly pop out a toddler and get another one in the oven.

This close friend has two great stories that immediately come to mind:  1) the time that we were hopped up on No-Doz for most of a weekend until I crashed in his car in the driveway of some good friend's clutched furiously to a water dildo, and 2) rolling his drunken ass out of the back of his van and down to the beach at some god-awful hour so that he could continue throwing up, and then leaving him there when it started to rain, convincing myself that I'd be back in an hour or so.  I woke up about 4 hours later and drove down to see if he was alive still.  He was missing.  So I drove to his house where he had apparently ended up.  Some neighbors called the cops thinking that we murdered someone and left the body to float away in Lake Erie.  Turns out that his mother would have been much happier with a drunken mess of a son, as opposed to one brought back by the cops half-dead from being drunk and soaked in rain and left outside.  Not my brightest moment.  (Btw, you still owe me like $70 for all those football tix you ditched on.  And where are my band CDs?)

Day #4

The town of Panhandle, TX, was both comically small and desolate.  There were streamers hanging from store windows celebrating the local high school football team.  It was almost spooky, in a ghost town kind of way.  As far as I can tell, this is the only road aside from the surrounding neighborhood:

Brick road is kind of cool, but that is literally all there is to this town.

When I picture Texas, I picture oil, steer, and San Antonio.  I do not picture cotton agriculture, which is apparently what this region survives on.  Craziness.  It had almost an air of New Mexico to it, but I still felt like some tall, shadowy figure was about to bound around the corner with a giant belt buckle and an even larger cowboy hat.

The rest of that day's drive was uneventful, until we decided to stop.  We typically have an idea in our head where we are going to stop that day.  You have to have some idea in the southwest, or you'll end up driving sleepily in one large span of highway between two 'cities'.  We had decided we would stop in Weatherford, OK.  Not quite to OK City, but close enough.  Plus, I have a good friend from Michigan whose last name is Weatherford.  It seemed like a sign.  Well, Weatherford had one hotel that took dogs, they had only one room left, and it was kind of expensive.  So we pushed on.

But then the next city didn't have anything either.  So we started making phone calls.  Nothing in Bridgeport, Hinton, or Geary.  So we pushed on to El Reno, OK.  As we were driving there, I thought about how I would be able to update my Facebook status with something witty like "Driving for 4 days, still in Reno!".  (There's a Reno, NV, where we started.)  I didn't get the chance to, though, because El Reno was also booked up.  Annie started to freak a little, but I told her that we could just stay in OK City, since I heard it was kind of cool.  I made it up, but it helped a little.

We finally found a place in Yukon, OK.  It is just on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, and we couldn't believe how much further we had traveled than we originally intended.  Just because no rooms were available.  This leads to the biggest question of the whole trip:  why the fuck was Oklahoma so busy?  There's nothing there.  Nothing.  Maybe OK sucks worse than NM.  Fucking Oklahoma.  (Your saving grace is that you have a musical named after you.  Count your blessings.)

And Bdubs (#3 if you're counting) for dinner in Oklahoma City to watch Michigan Basketball,
~RoB