THE TRIP (Part 2)

    After two fairly short driving days of 300 and 360 miles respectively, it was now officially time to put some serious pavement behind us. We had 600 miles on day three’s itinerary, so we hit the road early. We made quick work of Pennsylvania, going the short way across, and likewise for Maryland and West Virginia. The same could not be said, however, for Virginia. As our intended course travelled the entire spine of the Appalachians, 320 miles southwest along Route 81. From Winchester, Virginia to Bristol, Tennessee. Pretty but long. And surprisingly full of traffic, for a Sunday.

    In between her duties as navigator, DJ, and interesting places investigator, Jenn helped us pass the time by asking Google just about any question that popped into our heads. Things like: Who is the Tappan Zee Bridge named after? What is the Pennsylvania town that has a fire burning below it? How do planes record the highway speed of cars? Does your odometer turn if you tow your car in neutral? Can you ride/lasso a Zebra? The answers were always entertaining, usually thought provoking, and sometimes downright hilarious. And they definitely made the miles fly by.

    Partway down Virginia we took a detour at Front Royal to hop onto the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. The narrow road snaked higher and higher along the ridge and afforded us tremendous views across the park and down to the river valley below. We jumped out at the first place where the road crossed the Appalachian Trail and had our first spring trail run of the season. T-shirts and shorts, dirt and mud. It was March 1^st. It was sunny. And it was perfect! Just what we were hoping for when we decided to drive south to go west.

    Unfortunately, our other plan to camp along the way hit a paralyzing snag when we realized that none of the area campgrounds were officially open just yet. Add to that the fact that I’d packed the wrong (leaky) tent with no rainfly, and it was an easy decision to switch to hotel stays. The upside was that we’d get a nice comfy bed, that we didn’t have to set up in the dark, and a free breakfast. The downside was that not every hotel in the south allowed dogs. So, sometimes the lodging search, while driving, was frantic and unnerving. And that’s when we had cell service!

    The next day’s drive was much of the same. This time, for fun, we did it in the rain. 680 miles over the full length of Tennessee. We jumped onto Route 40, a highway we’d call home for the next four days, and hit the gas. We blew by Knoxville, flew through Nashville, and stopped for a quick lunch in a Kroger parking lot outside of Jackson. We had originally planned on doing our daily run at Frozen Head State Park, home of the Barkley’s, but with the torrential rain we decided to push on to Memphis where Jenn found us a really cool running venue just east of the city.

    Shelby Farms Park had miles of trails. Dirt for running and paved for biking. Lots of interesting buildings, sculptures, pavilions, and pieces of landscape architecture, including oversized chaise lounges and porch swings. All situated around a massive man-made lake. They even had a Bison field. And we also spotted our first, official, sign of spring. A daffodil, popping through the clutter of leaves. The park was a surprising and interesting find which more than made up for the disappointment that was Graceland.

    We spent the night just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas. And for dinner we had a massive pizza at a dive bar called Razorbacks. Jenn knocked back her share of pie and two huge beers. I had less than one brew and was already buzzed. Seriously, is there anything that this girl isn’t better at than me?! I blamed it on the miles of driving I’d done and not my impeccably pure liver. Thankfully, the hotel was just across the street and Jenn was able to roll me over there.

    The next morning it was on to Oklahoma, and probably the polar opposite trail run experience that we had in Memphis. A ratty, brambly, poorly-marked, leaf-strewn, cluster-fuck of a park called Greenleaf. The place was so unkempt that even the road leading to it had wash-outs big enough to swallow my whole car, including the bike rack! We left there tired and bleeding and convinced we’d heard the sound of banjos playing in the distance. But we soothed our "Barkley's Revenge" wounds with a delicious banana split in the nearby town of Henryetta.

    Afterwards, we visited the solemn but stunning National Memorial and Museum on the site of the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. A reflecting pool. A terraced garden. A survivor tree. Two monolithic walls, at either ends of the block, inscribed with the minute before and the minute after the bomb went off. And in the center, 168 empty chairs in an open lawn representing the number of innocent lives lost that day. It was as heartbreakingly moving as it was beautiful.

    Then, pretty much from the moment we left OKC, Jenn and I started seeing road signs for it. “FREE 72oz STEAK” in huge letters, with much smaller and finer print directly beneath it. Every 10 to 20 miles came another one. Then another one. Soon enough, we realized that this billboard campaign was an advertisement for the Big Texan Restaurant in Amarillo, Texas. And it did not take long after that for us to realize that THIS was where we would be dining that evening.

    So, 620 miles after it began, day five ended with each of us digging into an enormous steak. Not the full-sized 72oz version, but the much more manageable 18oz serving. Turns out the big one, weighing in at a whopping 4 ½ pounds, isn’t free unless you can eat it, a salad, a dinner roll, shrimp cocktail, and a baked potato in under an hour. Mine was a quarter the size, and I still couldn’t finish it. But Riley was more than happy to lend a paw. By the way, the record time for eating all that food is 4 minutes and 52 seconds. I can’t even imagine!

    The next day we would be hitting a state that neither one of us had visited, New Mexico. And later, Arizona, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley, California. With no disrespect to the east, this was the “good stuff”. Places that didn’t look anything like home. We had been looking forward to this portion of the trip since before it began. But, if it were not for a little luck, and a bit of divine intervention, we never would have made it.