En Route - Second Stop

I'm kinda tired, so this will probably be a fairly short post. I wrote some things down in my little notebook to tell you about, but I'm too lazy to go find that now.

Missouri was beautiful. It's so cool watching the landscape change. Illinois was mostly just more of the same fields and forest that I've seen all throughout the Midwest. But then in Missouri it turned into hills, wonderful wooded hills, with the rock showing through sometimes. Eventually the hills flattened out for the most part, and the trees became a bit more sparse, batches of woods interspersed with fields of long grasses. That's when I noticed that the types of trees were changing, too. After the wooded hills ended, the trees no longer looked like oak or maple or whatever I'm used to. They were more...I dunno. I'm too tired to describe them now. As I moved further southwest, the fields grew more prevalent, and I soon realized I was in major cattle country, as there were cows EVERYWHERE. Brown cows, red cows, black cows, white cows, long-horned steers. And occasionally some horses. All munching on that long grassy stuff.

Okay, so, every so often on the highway there were signs that said "DO NOT DRIVE INTO SMOKE" and I had no idea why they were there, cuz there wasn't any smoke anywhere. Is there usually smoke? Why would there be smoke? What does it mean if there's smoke? If there's a bunch of smoke ahead of me, and I'm not supposed to drive into it, what do I do, just stop dead in the highway? I can't do that, the minimum speed is 50mph. But, as always, the internet has the answer. This is literally the first link on the results page when I typed "do not drive into smoke" into Google. I love the internet.

My hotel room is a lot better than the one last night. The door is on the inside of the building, the room was air-conditioned like a refrigerator when I walked in, I have a closet and a fridge and a microwave and a random extra comfy chair - a lot of hotel rooms that I've seen have this random comfy chair as if for some reason you'd rather sit in a chair than lie on the comfy bed - and that comfy chair has a FOOTREST. I've seen a lot of random comfy chairs, but I don't think I've ever seen a matching random comfy footrest. And, as far as I can tell, there are no evil giant spiders.

Another thing. This time regarding Walmarts. Now, people have differing opinions on Walmart, but if you've ever been to the Walmart in Saline, you know that it is ridiculously unorganized. For those of you who have no clue what I'm talking about, I'll give you a few examples. The chips are nowhere near the crackers. One series of aisle sides goes booze, drinks that are not water but are not juice (like Sobe lifewater), water, juice, more booze. It is impossible to find anything quickly, and more often than not you either get sucked into the electronics section at the back or lost in some maze of Miley Cyrus clothing. A short while ago, I ventured out to the Walmart just down the road here in Oklahoma to get a small bottle of milk. My god, they must've been here for years. There's organization. There's sections. It makes sense. More than that, the sections BLEND. Scarily. I was like "hey, this scheme actually makes sense. I feel like I'm in a Meijer, not a Walmart. Except why did they put the beach towels next to the shoe section - OMG they start the shoes on that end with FLIP FLOPS." and then I walked down to the end of the shoe section and as it ended with sneakers and tennis shoes, all the outdoorsy stuff and exercise equipment showed up. It was amazing.

*yawn* mmm I need sleep. Remind me at some point to tell you about the redneckiest gas station I've ever seen, the conservative billboards, the music I listened to, St. Louis, the weird bird in the parking lot of this hotel, the multitude of American behemoth cars, cruise control on steep hills, and I don't know what else.