Hi Ya'll

If the rain doesn’t stop soon, we’re going to have to double our daily Vitamin D dosage. We haven’t seen the sun since we left New Mexico. We left Elk City, OK, on the morning of Wednesday, May 8, to continue our journey east on I-40. We started Wednesday and Thursday with flash flood alerts/warnings. Not really sure why we’re bothering to curl our hair each day – probably just to make our curlers and curling irons feel needed, as if they actually matter on this trip.

Oklahoma City

Just as a tip:  Welcome Centers are the best places to stop to use the restrooms. The bathrooms are very clean. We stopped at the Arkansas Welcome Center pictured below.

It rained all day on Wednesday as we traveled from Elk City, OK, to Searcy, Arkansas. Why Searcy, you ask? Because I-40 passes through Little Rock and we spent a few days in Little Rock on our last journey. We wanted to shake up our route a little bit and see something different and Searcy is located just outside of Little Rock, so Searcy was it. It’s a small community and, again, we stayed at a Hampton Inn. The Searcy Hampton Inn was renovated two years ago and it was very nice. We really appreciated the fact that our room had extra plugs and connections to charge our electronic devices.

We can’t give you a lot of details about Searcy because it was raining so hard we couldn’t see much of it. And it was still raining this morning when we left our hotel. But while we were packing the car this morning under the shelter of the hotel’s front portico, a nice young man who was staying at the hotel with his high school track team offered to help us load our luggage into our car. That southern hospitality seems to be typical of our travels through the southern part of the United States.

We’d also like to report that we after three days of traveling, we are still accident free. None of our body parts have been damaged or broken; OSHA would be proud.

We left Searcy, AR, this morning… in the rain. But, eventually, it stopped raining!!! It was still cloudy, but at least we could get out of the car without getting drenched. We drove from Searcy to Memphis, Tennessee, (and it wasn’t raining in Memphis) where Mrs. Garmin wanted us to catch I-40 and head east through Nashville. But we have traveled I-40 through Tennessee several times and we wanted to see something new. So we completely flummoxed Mrs. Garmin and headed out of Memphis towards Mississippi. She finally recalculated and got on board with our new plans. The different route added about an hour to our trip, but it was worth it as we passed through Corinth, Mississippi, and the entire top part of Alabama. We even were in Georgia for about five minutes.

Crossing the Mississippi as we enter Memphis, TN

The scenery is gorgeous through these areas. Lots of hills covered with trees. We can’t imagine that people even need to water their lawns, there is so much natural greenery everywhere. We passed through Huntsville, Alabama, which was a first for both us. It’s the first time for either of us to be in Mississippi and Alabama.

So we are in our hotel for the night and tomorrow we actually reach the destination for which this whole trip was created. Thanks for checking in with us and come back and see where we end up next.