Come Hell or High Water...... or BOTH?!

Well, I am back in Dallas. Rather, now Caleb, Scarlett AND I are all in Dallas. The semester finished up last week and neither of our summer internships start until the end of the month. Since my car is still registered in Texas, we were going to have to bring it back to Dallas sometime this summer for its inspection, and this seemed like the perfect time. I should back up and explain that the reason I was in town last weekend was to see my sister perform in her high school's performance of Les Miserables. It was REALLY amazing!

When I got to Dallas my sinus/allergies went a little crazy. I wasn't really surprised and took some Zyrtec, but when I got on the plane to fly home, my ears just completely stopped up. I hate to admit this but I pretty much cried most of my flight home to DC. Even once we had landed, my ears still wouldn't open up. Luckily I had gone ahead and made an appointment to go by the student health center the next day. When I got in there the doctor said that I was right, I had a sinus infection. Then she looked in my left ear and said it was definitely infected. She looked in my right ear and her immediate response was "oh my gosh." It's never a good sign when doctors say that. My ear was extremely infected and having flown with it, my eardrum had ruptured. Awesome. No wonder I couldn't hear anything!!! She gave me some awesome meds and sent me home to pack for the long drive home. I intended to pack and get to bed early, but I felt so bad things just moved in slow motion.

Our alarm clocks went off at 4:30 Wed. morning (3:30 Dallas time). We loaded up the car and we were off on what should have been a 1,000 mile, 14-15 hour trip. We drove for several hours to get away from DC traffic and then stopped for breakfast.

When people find out that we make the drive in one day they usually tell us we are crazy and ask how me manage it. It's really not that bad. Scarlett just sleeps in her crate in the back, Caleb and I listen to music, we discuss/argue about current events. We try to make as few stops as possible to slow up down. The path isn't all that bad either. You basically drive out of Virginia and then all the way across the state of Tennessee. If you leave early, you'll hit Knoxville about lunch time and Memphis for an early dinner. For this trip, my mom sent me an audiobook for us to enjoy. She's been trying to get me to read the new Pat Conroy book, My Reading Life. I never got to the actual book, so we listened to it (8 hours long) through the state of Tennessee. It was surprisingly good, especially if you like to read - he talks about classic books and what they meant to him at different stages of his life.

The other good part about our route is that just about lunchtime you re-enter the world of sonics. Corny dogs and cherry limeade never tasted so good! Unfortunately, the town we stopped in had a not so nice gas station that we had to use.... I'll give you one guess what the clientele was like based on these pics...

But then we were back on the road and didn't stop again until we hit Memphis. We like to try to stop there and visit with one of Caleb's best college friends Van and his wife Kristin. We don't get to see them very often, so it makes for a good quick visit. This trip was even MORE special because we got to meet their BEAUTIFUL baby girl that they just adopted. I thought she was precious in pictures, but she is sooooooo much more beautiful in real life, and TINY! We could not be more happy for both of them!

To make Caleb even MORE happy, they took us to have Barbeque for dinner. BBQ isn't my favorite food, but it was soooooooo good in Memphis! We were sad that we had to leave, but Scarlett was TERRIFIED of their lab and we were getting tired so we needed to finish the drive to LR for the evening. We were going to spend the night there before heading into Dallas the next morning.

I'm glad I took a picture of the time. 7:55 pm - this was the last moment of happiness on this roadtrip. We were leaving Memphis happy and excited.

And it all went downhill from there. As we drove across the Mississippi River, it should have taken us less than 2 hours to get to Little Rock. These were the first signs that things were not going to go our way.... We knew that the south had really bad storms the last few weeks, but we had no idea that the flooding was so bad. These may look like shrubs, but they are HUGE trees in the river...

We drove a ways and found that I-40, the road we needed to take into Little Rock had been closed down due to flooding and we were going to take a detour. It was 50 miles which seemed like a bummer, plus it would mean getting to Little Rock closer to 10:30 instead of 9:30, but we carried on. There was some pretty bad traffic trying to get off the highway when it closed and we sat for about 30 minutes. Not a little annoyed, but still going. We made it about another 8 miles and then we stopped. And when I say we stopped, I mean we sat there for 45 minutes. Now we were getting frustrated. We called Caleb's dad and he tried calling the State Troopers who basically gave him no information. He tried to reroute us, but the only other way to go (because of flooded roads) was an additional FOUR HOURS out of the way. No way. That was ridiculous. About this time we drove a few more miles, and stopped. And then a few more miles, and then we stopped. This time we sat for over an hour. Here is a picture of our view for a few hours... it obviously didn't bother Scarlett : )

People were turning their cars off, sleeping, hanging out in the road. It was awful. Caleb made a few new friends - the truck driver in front of us, the redneck guy in his truck behind us who gave up and went around a barricade down a flooded road (all I could think about when he told us that was what he was doing was that sign: Turn Around! Don't Drown! - we hope he is okay), and a lady and her small children in the car behind us trying to make their way to Texas. We could have turned around but the small town we went through only had a few tiny motels that looked pretty packed the couple of hours ago when we passed them. We decided we were just going to sit it out. We listened to music, listened to the bullfrogs outside and vented our frustration to each other. At one point I called the State Troopers myself to see if I could get any information out of them. I made up a sob story and used my saddest, most pitiful voice and even lied that we were almost out of gas and she told me that the reason we weren't moving was that a car had stalled and they were trying to get a wrecker in to move it out. Then, people had fallen asleep in their cars and they were slowing things down. Ugh! After a few hours we finally started crawling by. When we passed the stalled suburban, I was tempted to roll down the window and spit on it, but then I remembered we weren't in DC anymore and I was expected to be a lady in the south. Even though we started moving, we were basically moving at a crawl. It was us and all the big trucks out on the road.  FINALLY, at 2:30am, we pulled into Little Rock... 23 hours after we left DC. Talk about miserable. We had joked with each other about a country song that says "The Road goes on forever, but the party never ends." Well this party ended a LONG time ago... You can tell how mad I was that I stopped documenting our day in pictures haha.

We slept a bit at Caleb's parents' house and woke up to a DELICIOUS breakfast of monkey bread. I felt bad we couldn't stay and visit longer (we're going to visit next week) but we had made plans to meet my grandparents for lunch. They only live about an hour away from Caleb's parents' house so we like to stop and see them when we can. We couldn't stop at a restaurant because we had Scarlett, so we met out by Lake DeGray and had a picnic! The weather was sooooo nice. They brough fried chicken and potato salad and all sorts of other goodies. Scarlett LOVED it because my grandma fed her chicken AND brought her a toy. Spoiled little thing....

After lunch, it was my turn to drive. Cracked open a mountain dew for some caffeine, cranked up the tunes and we were off. 4 hours later we pulled into Dallas, so happy we don't have to make that drive again.... at least for 10 days or so! We've been home 24 hours, but it is so nice to be back in the land of Sonic Drinks, Jamba Juice, Mexican Food, Rangers games (without having to stream it on our computers), warm weather without the humidity, open roads that aren't the beltway, not having to ride the metro, no more school for the semester, being with our families..... I could go ON and ON! This means I should have LOTS of good blog posts over the next several days so stay tuned!