On the road, redux...

It's a little after 8 p.m., I'm siting in a Fred Meyer drinking a Starbuck's coffee (don't ask), charging the laptop and winding down. I left Phoenix at 11:30 a.m. Sunday and have been on the road since. I drive for several hours and then find a rest stop or the corner of a parking lot and climb in the teardrop to sleep. The problem: I can only sleep for about 30 minutes at a time. I've done that for four cycles since I left - a total of about two hours of sleep. That two hours plus the time I spent in that horrendous traffic jam in the central CA valley puts me here in Albany, OR. In a little bit I'll drive about 8 miles up the road to a rest stop I've located on the map and crawl back in the teardrop for what I hope is a longer sleep. In the a.m. I'll drive into Salem for some breakfast and then on to the Portland airport to meet Pam's 9:30 a.m. flight. I'll be a smelly, bristly mess by then but she'll deal with it until we get to the campground 90 minutes later and I can shower and shave.

More misc. observations from time on the road:

• I'm pretty sure Asia is empty, and they're all at various Pilot gas centers.
• "Slower vehicles keep right" is apparently on a par with Newtonian physics. 
• Oregon as more Christian radio stations per capita than any place I've ever been. If you took out the country western stations and the Christian stations they would have six left, and they play pop rock and rap.
• Am I the only one who thinks all rap "songs" sound the same? (And can you tell I couldn't listen to Christian or country.) 
• Nobody anywhere on earth in any profession moves faster than a gas station attendant in Oregon when you try to pump your own gas. Only Oregon and New Jersey require that attendants pump gas. That's not entirely true: you can get a special license that allows you to pump your own in OR, but you have to pass a test to get that license. You don't have to pass anything if you're hired to do it at a gas station. Nope; "just set down your joint and get out to that pump, son."
• It's harder than you'd think to peel a banana while you're driving. 
• Don't bother listening to an Agatha Christie audio book while you're driving. The chapter divisions aren't announced, which means that as scenes change from one chapter to the next you have no clue what's going on. The reader is going on about Rebekah and suddenly you're in a room with two seedy Persian guys. Huh? I tried for about 8 chapters and then gave up. I'm about 2/3 of the way through a Carol Higgins Clark story. Yeah, not a brain bender, but hey, it's vacation and I'm driving across country. 

We have a phrase we use at out house, one of our of inside expressions: "I'm too tired." That means physical fatigue and/or stress has reached the point where emotions are frayed and at the surface. When one of us says that it means, "Please don't take anything I say as coming from me; it's the fatigue talking." And when one of us (usually me) is too tired the accepted cure is sleep. Nothing more can or should be done; just get some rest. 

I'm too tired. So though the laptop isn't yet fully charged I'm going to head up to that rest stop and get some shuteye.

(I guess it's not an inside expression anymore, is it.)