Run in With the Po-Po - Day Two

Let's see...how to sum up day two of the journey...well, for starters, America can be so great and interesting...but I forgot how it can also be painfully boooooooooring. Today's scenery was a lot of this:
And this:

Annnnnnnnnnnnd this:

YAWN. Seriously?! How is there that much open land? With nothing for miles and miles and miles. I said the same thing last year while headed in the opposite direction, but somehow it surprised me again this year. Please get me to a busy city....ASAP.

I wore my "I <3 Justin Bieber" bracelet for luck today (that was for you, LK!). Unfortunately, it didn't work so great. See below for details on our run-in with the law.

Eventually it got a LITTLE more pleasant on the eyes, and we started to see things like this again:

(At that point we would have taken anything we could get)

And luckily, we were able to confirm once and for all that New Mexico comes after Arizona when heading east across the USA:

Overall, it was a pretty good day though! We covered a lot of ground, stayed reasonably sane, and made it all the way into Oklahoma before ending the day. Now, let's get to the good stuff.

Key stats for day two of the journey:

* Number of miles driven today - 855.4

* Number of miles left in journey - approximately 800

* Things consumed in excess quantities today - cups of coffee and Atomic Fireballs

* Time we departed to start the day - 9:25am Arizona time

* Time we finally checked in to our hotel to call it a day - 2:30am CST

* Number of hotels we had to stop at in El Reno, OK before finding one that had vacancy at 2:30am - THREE

* Number of rooms available at ours when we got there - literally one! (and it was a smoking room...awesome)

* Number of apologies I owe my sweet mom for being such a crabby-pants to her from about midnight to 2:30am - 100 (not even sure that will cover it)

* Number of times we heard Enrique Iglesias' "Tonight I'm 'Loving' You" on the radio - 4 (which is weird because it's not even a new song...explaining the radio edit to my mom was super fun though)

* Number of times the Budget truck got pulled over by the cops on I-40 East - one (thanks Texas State Trooper Miller)

* Reason for police intervention in the journey - he noticed that both taillights had mysteriously gone out, and we were driving in the dark of night in middle of nowhere Texas

After Officer Miller let us go, I pulled off at the next I-40 exit, and into a parking lot to call Roadside Assistance - here we are:

They got a hold of a local mechanic and sent him our way. It took about 35 minutes from the time we pulled in until Steve-the-mechanic arrived to save us. Needless to say, at 9:30pm we were NOT happy campers about this precious-driving-time-wasting issue. Look how mad my mom was...that middle finger almost never comes out...
I wasn't too happy either...

He eventually got us fixed up....turns out there was a 10-amp plug thingy where there should have been a 15-amp plug thingy, and it just couldn't sustain the amount of lights the truck was using. So it crapped out. Boo.

Steve left us in that Home Dept parking lot (in Amarillo, TX) at 10:05pm, which left us to decide if we wanted to just bail for the day and stay there (but we had only covered 615 miles), or carry on into the night and hope we'd run into someplace to stay at the right time. We decided to truck on. We topped off the gas tank, got some coffee, and hit the road again. And as you saw above, we ended up driving another 240 miles, in about 4 hours, and then giving up at about 2:30am. What a day. And now? Time to start it over again....yippee! Here's to no police run-ins today.