DAY 3: Friday, 4 August

"Welcome to New Mexico"

We leave Gallup, New Mexico somewhat on schedule--sometime before noon. Like Arizona the day before, New Mexico appears grumpy and splatters us randomly with light rain throughout our drive.

Land of enchanting storm fronts

We enter Texas sometime that afternoon, determined not to stop at any cost. Last time through we stopped to eat at Logan's Roadhouse, a chain restaurant of reputably reliable mediocrity, only to discover a pick-up parked twenty feet from the entrance with an open trailer full of squealing swine attached to the back. I went back to the car for my video camera, so somewhere we have footage of a dozen piglets screeching as they pummeled each other and tried to escape through the cracks in the trailer's metal gate. I remember ordering salad for lunch that day.

Welcome to Texas

Sadly, Texas is just as exciting as we remember it.

We watch for mileage signs to Groom, Texas, home of the second largest cross in the western hemisphere. We are not disappointed. Several miles out we're able to spot it in the distance, looming damningly on the horizon.

We consider stopping to visit the 190 foot structure and the surrounding cross sculptures but decide against it. A website has warned us not to take our under eight-year-olds to the site due to some graphic anti-abortion propaganda, and we're in no mood for fanaticism. Especially in Texas. Texas is like the Afghanistan of the United States. The people might be friendly, but it's not really a place you want to visit. Not when Iraq is just down the way.

For a while we are distracted with taking pictures of clouds shaped like stuff. Here's an alligator eating a fish:

And a chicken:

We are so obsessed with clouds and getting out of the state that we fail to notice the cruiser parked in the median's grassy ditch. It zooms after us and the trooper informs us that we were going 14 miles over the speed limit. As I've never been in a car while it's been pulled over before, I don't really know what to expect. I'm filled with the irrational fear that my California plates and nervous demeanor will land me in a hail of gunfire and I will bleed to death five miles from the Oklahoma border, groping for my car registration. But instead he just gives us a ticket for $175. Once administration fees are added on, we may well end up paying more in speeding fees than gasoline for the entire trip. Fucking Texas. We drive eagerly, yet cautiously, into Oklahoma. I miss taking a picture of its welcome sign because I'm too busy moping.

It's late so we stop at one of the only open restaurants near Oklahoma City--Chili's. Our waitress cautions us not to speed until we reach the Missouri border, lest we suffer a similar fate to our Texas one. We order a giant girly margarita and check into a nearby Clarion hotel--our third lodging attempt that night. We are informed that we're lucky to find a room in the city at all, what with the rodeo convention in town that weekend. We don't understand what a rodeo convention would be, and how exactly it would differ from an actual rodeo, but we're too tired to ask. We lug our suitcase up to our room and summon enough energy to wallow contentedly on the king-sized bed and watch a re-run of Frasier before passing out.

To my surprise Oklahoma is kind of pleasant, especially at night. Warmly breezy and almost pretty.

But still retarded: