Setting Limits….and letting some go.
Welcome all to our 2013 Miata adventure! This trip involves a brief weekend stay in Spearfish, South Dakota for Matt’s family reunion, and then heading out to the other destinations we have planned.
As many of you know, I am a habitual planner and organizer (call me a control freak, it’s fine, I’ve come to grips with my diagnosis), which means I had a plan for this trip, or at least a semi-structured timeline of events. With that being said, we were set to leave Oklahoma City on Wednesday evening (6-23-13) at 6 pm and drive 7 hours north to York, Nebraska, cutting down on what Thursday’s drive time would be. 15 hours later (but who’s counting), we finally pulled out of our driveway. This was 9:30 am on Thursday, frustration point numero uno for me, as this “slight” delay posed 15 hours of driving time to occur in one day. I don’t do any one thing for 15 hours a day EVER, much less sit in a car with Matt. I suppose I should preface that statement for the new folks to the blog, or those who don’t know us personally, that Matt and I have been together 14 years, so keeping one another entertained that long can sometimes be challenging. While I do enjoy spending quality time with him, 15 hours is a long time for “closed in a car togetherness time,” with my only “alone time” coming in the form of a cramped, usually unclean bathroom stall at a roadside gas station with others also “just trying to get away” (whether that be from their spouse, child, friend) for a minute.
We hadn’t even made it to Ponca City before the car starts to show signs of overheating. Ahh….how does this happen, seriously? How has Matt not checked everything with this car before we left? We continue on, closely watching the temperature gauge. Matt turns the a/c off to see if this resolves the problem, and at times it does. So, between us babysitting the car every 2 minutes combined with rising temperatures inside the car, I stop navigating from the map (whose brain can work when it’s boiling inside?) and just say take I-90 north to get to Salina, Kansas. 20 minutes later I realize we are 30 miles out on the wrong highway! Matt could kill me at this point, but because all he had out in Newton, Kansas was me, he got over it pretty quickly. Our quaint and hot drive through Newton (a small Mennonite town) got me thinking about why or how people choose to live so far away from modern day amenities like Target, Crest (grocery store), or 7-11’s. On the flip side, I think having a farm might be kind of fun….for a few days that is. Maybe Matt and I should try out some agri-tourism on one of these adventures, so I can finally figure out why people love it out there. Reality is, we probably wouldn’t make it even a day or two.
Lunch in Salina, Kansas put us back on the road to babysit our flammable car while we sat in the mobile sauna. We found ourselves curious about the “worlds largest porch swing” as we approached Hebron, Nebraska, home of such a thing. We found it, took a picture, and carried on. Dinner at 8 pm in Broken Bow, Nebraska was the beginning of what would be a very long night. We still had 4-6 hours of driving and I was already passed my “limit.”
Setting limits…and I’m not talking about “limits,” as in Fifty Shades of Gray limits, but rather my own personal limits in various areas of my life. I set a limit of how long I would spend in the car again, and another limit about taking cars you might not get to use the air conditioner in during the middle of the summer. Setting some new limits and letting some limits go is my theme for this trip…good thing we aren’t going to Vegas any time soon.
18 hours into the trip we made one last stop in Rapid City, South Dakota for Matt to take a 15 minute power nap and to drink a Red Bull at 2 am because he was about to fall asleep driving, we amazingly arrived in Spearfish, South Dakota, together, alive, and extremely tired. to think, this was only Day One!
