Dwight Il to Tulsa Ok

Due to time changes, some laziness, and a sincere wish to leave early, so we got away at 9, local time. Gas was $3.19, a steal, but we saw as low as $2.969 during the day. This is good when you fill up almost twice a day.

Dwight is in the flatlands, a where the farms are huge and all they grow seems to be for the biofuel market. What an absolute waste of great farm land, but that's another story.

By mid day, the temperature was up to 12ºC [53ºF] too high for serious snow which is predicted. By mid-day, it came down to 8ºC where it stayed for the rest of the day. But, and a fairly big 'but', the rain started and got progressively worse during the remainder of the day. Still able to drive the speed limit plus a bit, until after 5 when darkness and heavier rain meant slowing down big time. The afternoon was also in big hill country, but the roads are great and well signed so maintaining a good average was fairly easy. The hills brought us smaller but still large farms, and black angus cattle everywhere. Gorgeous white fences, large entrance roads to good looking farm homes and neat outbuildings. All picture perfect, but not a single pixel was exposed today, ... again.

After a little work by Carmen to fix a missed turn, we found a Comfort Inn & Suites, right next to Ruby Tuesdays, one of our preferred restaurants. How good can this get? Our room has a separate siting room with its own TV, a small sofa, and a computer desk. The main area has a king sized bed another large TV, what more could we ask for.

Ruby Tuesdays was great, relaxing, and we were well fed, well served, and left itching to try some other menu items. Good deal!

Tomorrow we have a decision to make whether to proceed weather permitting, or stay put and return to Ruby Tuesdays to sample some more good fare.

One of the issues that surfaced is that I forgot to pack the book disks to help pass the time when good radio is not available. Most of the day we were able to receive the Public Radio Network which seems to be the only intelligent radio available. Unfortunately, these stations quite often have a weak signal, so increasing static forces us to find another station. At one point, I stopped the scanning at a talk program that ended up being about guns, front loading guns at that. The talk hosts and the callers were of a type quite fitting with our northern impression of the Ozarks which we were driving through. It took almost ten minutes to select another station... I guess the talk of coon dogs, shooting coons in trees for the coon dogs to get, and the discussion of shot size, powder bags, scopes, etc. was just too much for Joan and she found a nice classical station with very decent Polish Christmas music. Good enough for me. Next time, I'll bring some Cd books...