After leaving the southwest for the heartland of the US, we entered the monotony that is “middle America.”  For those of you that have not traveled the 500 or so miles on I-40 E from Santa Fe to Oklahoma City, I would preemptively tell you to avoid this trip.  Some of the trip included such thoughts as “too bad this town only lives for high school football” and “if I don’t see a roadrunner, then this entire leg of the journey was a waste of my time.”

Unfortunately we did not see a roadrunner and I deemed this trip to be an entire waste of time.  There are interesting things to contemplate when your passenger is passed out cold and only the road and the music lay out in front of you including but not limited to…

1) Thinking about the plains indians that used to roam these landscapes and the buffalo herds that once ran wild here.

2) The fact that this highway we are traveling on was probably an old westward cart path back in the day before asphalt existed.

3) Behind us lays amazing California, and in front of us lays sweet Rhode Island (along with a reprieve from the trip)

4) Man oh Man I can not wait to have a beer.

So with all of these things running through my mind and a entire bag of Peach Rings keeping me going, we made it to Oklahoma City and its 98 degree weather at 5pm.  I left Kasey at the hotel and walked around town for awhile before finding a local dive bar and ordered a couple of local brews.  Amazingly the world is so small that the guy sitting next to me at the bar was from Warren, RI and his band plays regularly on Wednesday nights at the Gas Lamp in Newport.  This trip has taught me that the world is large and so is my country, this encounter taught me that the world is small and I will never truly escape my routes no matter where my life takes me (and I am coming to the realization that that is a good thing).