WWR I

Disclaimer: Written While Riding (WWR)
Implication: Most likely really boring, as author had many hours to type out every minute detail flowing through her head while husband was at the wheel and child slept
Warning: Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery or motor vehicle while reading, or for several hours thereafter.

When I last wrote we were in the parking lot of the TA…we headed out from there to spend the night as close as we could to St. Louis. We found a Walmart parking lot to spend the night in. Now I’ve never seen evidence of Walmart actually encouraging RVers to spend the night in their lots, but several people had told me so before our trip. This makes sense, as I figure it’s a good way to promote the ’Walmart is good, not one of the major factors in the downfall of the entire planet’ image. Thus it was my intention to spend at least one night in a Walmart parking lot and not spend any money there, while also not thinking any better of their company, just to stick it to ‘em. For more on my hatred of Walmart, see original blog-starting post. As an added (major) bonus, there was internet in the parking lot of Walmart! I don’t think is was specifically Walmart internet, which would have been a great contributing factor in my ability to ‘stick it to ‘em‘. It was just the ‘lynksys’ or whatever I’ve been seeing all over the place. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, maybe there are computer hackers reading this and now they know I was on that network, so now they can steal my identity. Is that how it works?

Well it was fantastic having this unexpected internet and I got caught up on a bunch of stuff I hadn’t been able to get around to. I was mostly caught up on my blog, save for some random details that I have had to leave out. I’ve been trying to squeeze in these random details where I can just so my inevitable mish-mashed smorgasbord-of-a-blog at the end of our trip isn’t too long. Zach read over my last few blogs and he tells me that they are confusing because I go back and forth a lot. I’ve been reading them over and it doesn’t seem that bad. Sometimes I do go back and forth but that’s because I’m trying to keep everyone on the same page as to what day(s) I am referring to. And mostly I think I’m trying to place the days myself because I really can’t keep anything straight now. Thank God I’ve been writing and recording every aspect of our trip or else I would never remember anything.

Now I know this is sort of contradicting the place I’ve been coming from in the months before our trip - with the complaining about being addicted to the internet and the musings on whether the obsessive need to ‘record’ all of life is getting in the way of my ability to actually ‘live’ it. However, this is different, this is not real life. This is (mostly) Heaven and I want to store up as much of it as I can for the years to come spent at home. Also, this is what I’ve been dreaming of ever since my AI (age of internet) life began. There’s my BC (before children), then a year or two of blur, then the ‘technology age’. Every day I use the internet, and every night I either stay awake too late at the computer, or simply fall asleep at the keyboard. And pretty much every moment of that is spent firmly planted in a field of guilt. Well here, in this hunk of an RV, there is nowhere to go and not much else to do (that second part is a lie) therefore I have nothing but time to be at the computer, living out my dreams (minus the internet part). So one would perhaps expect my blog posts to be fewer and farther apart while we are on this trip, but to the contrary, my friend.

End brain tangent.

Incase you couldn’t’ follow all that, I was saying I had time to get caught up on internet stuff. In addition to the blog, I got completely caught up (to the minute, practically) on flickr pictures. I had those suckers tagged, titled, signed, sealed and delivered. I had started to add some notes and descriptions, and had even begun to update my sets. Then it was morning and we were leaving the Walmart parking lot. I was satisfied. I could practically empty my memory card on my camera since all the pictures were ‘safe’ on the internet. And it’s a good thing I did because then we drove 30 miles to the St. Louis Zoo and the progress stopped. Ho-ly crap did we spend a lot of time there. I took 219 pictures. Yup.

At the zoo it was only in the, say, 90’s, yet it felt far worse than the 20 degrees higher we experienced in the Badlands. That’s humidity for you. It came back in Kansas, by the way, as did the bugs, and we said, “Well, we must be on our way back home.” We hadn’t seen bugs since that one rest stop in South Dakota when we opened the door and they all came in. For the next three days they took up residence in the RV and left their poop marks ALL OVER THE PLACE, which Zach and I used practically an entire container of Clorox wipes cleaning up various horizontal places. I’m pretty sure they were reproducing because no matter how many we shooed out the windows, the amount of them just kept becoming ’more’. And isn’t the life span of a fly only a day anyway? I’ll tell ya, that is one thing we did not miss. I know Stacey desperately misses the humidity after being away from it for a few years, and I’m sure I would too, but I did not miss it on this trip. Hell no. We also got to experience it last night on our 4 mile, round-trip, after dark, 90 degree walk to and from the St. Louis Arch. After that I decided I was done with this trip. That’s it, I’m spent, let’s go home. I finally admit to what Zach has been saying about me the whole trip. I cannot take the heat.