Overnight, we stayed in the small town of Memphis. It was a very small town, because it only took me ten minutes to run clear across it this morning. The far side, away from the highway, had no streetlights at all, so it was utterly dark. I had a headlamp, and I used my phone as a flashlight. It actually felt a bit like I was doing an ultramarathon again.
The town is slightly scary beyond being very dark. There are a lot of bible verses quoted around. We saw bible verses on roadside billboards. We went to eat at the Rock Inn Cafe and the menus there had bible quotes on the bottom. We also heard more coughing than I was comfortable with. Unfortunately, the mask I had brought with me decided to break so I did not have enough protection.
After the morning run, I had intended to grab a quick bite at McDonalds. However, the restaurant was drive-thru only. Since we are in an 11 foot tall truck, we couldn’t do that, and with no other options, we couldn’t go in. So I did not have a good breakfast. That meant only eating the breakfast bars and fruit we had in the cab.
Of course this meant lunch was very important. I would have no energy to go for a run while Catalina was picking up lunch, as we had done in the previous two days. But that is probably a good thing. We have been seeing signs around here saying “Hitchhikers might be escaped convicts”. I don’t think it would have been safe to go careering down the side of the road with little to no I.D. on me. And with the heat, I couldn’t even guarantee wearing a shirt.
In any case, we had a lunch at an In-n-Out Burger. The ingredients were fresh, and the fries actually tasted like potatoes. The Neapolitan milkshake was very pleasant. I would recommend, except because they only cook when you order, it felt like it took fifteen minutes for our food to come. I think people using the Drive-Thru got priority.
After that we pushed through and drove to Sugar Land. We passed through Houston during rush hour, which was not pleasant. But we got to Catalina’s family home at around 6:30. We were done.
2021-10-6 23:13

We didn’t intend to go through Oklahoma. Last night we had done planning of where to go, and our route would have taken us through New Mexico. However, that was last night. When we started off this morning, we asked for the best route to go, and it was now through the Oklahoma panhandle. This was because traffic in downtown Denver was backed up, so our GPSs were saying going around Denver was better, and if you are going down the east side of Denver, you might as well keep going east.
Oklahoma looked pretty desolate. Maybe the corn has already been harvested, but the fields were covered in dead plants.
I timed our trip across. 1:39:27. However, we stopped for lunch in Boise City. Well, Catalina did. I took off like an escaped prisoner down the road. I got 10.5km before she caught up to me. (She had a relaxing lunch and filled the truck with gas.) My run was very boring with the aforementioned desolation. Very flat land. But I did encounter some grasshoppers that were bigger than any I had ever seen. I will call them “locusts”.
Annoyingly, five minutes of driving after being rescued, there were interesting canyons along the side of the road.
2021-10-5 16:01

This state is rather flat. I expected it to be mountainous, but clearly that is on the western part of the state. Flatness is actually quite nice when you are driving a U-Haul.
We overnighted in the town of Thornton, which is effectively Denver. We ate a dinner at Applebee’s; not the best choice for Catalina’s birthday, but it was really simple and easy. Afterwards I went for a run to get to my daily mileage goal. It was not a fast run with food in my belly, but it was nice and cool.
This morning I did a quick run to grab some Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a McDonald’s breakfast. Our hotel provides a breakfast, but it is a bag containing a water bottle, a muffin, and sometimes a clementine. It is not the most filling for my stomach when I still need running calories.
We have also discovered that the benefit of driving south, into the sun, is that any food on the dashboard gets heated nicely by the sun. So even hours later, those doughnuts are tasty.
We have hit more construction in Colorado than in all of Montana and Wyoming. It isn’t too bad; I don’t mind the slow downs because we can’t go that fast anyway. But occasionally the single lane highway becomes one way and we have to stop for about five minutes for traffic the other way to get through. Mind you, we are on a smaller interstate, so it is single lane and a lot of speed-trap towns in the way.
There have also been a lot of windmills. It’s nice to see them. I do not think they ruin the view.
2021-10-5 12:52

Today we completely crossed Wyoming. It was a long slog. But this state was at least more interesting than the last one. There is more rugged terrain whereas Montana was very much like the prairie provinces: flat.
The highlight was lunch. While Catalina picked up lunch, and ate it in the U-Haul, I made a break for it and started running down the highway. But the time she finished eating and caught up with me, I had gotten six kilometers away.
Another cool feature of Wyoming was the “statues” they put on bluffs near the highway. Well, they are more flat silhouettes, sort of like from a diorama. The first one we say was of a large Jakalope. The second was a man on a horse with a dog. Then there was the buffalo. It was a nice way to perk up an otherwise long drive.
2021-10-4 22:33

We crossed the border into Montana yesterday. I had a lot of anxiety leading up to it; if they didn’t let me cross, what were our options? Best case scenario was that Catalina drives across and I fly to Billings and meet there. When we actually got there, it was surprisingly easy, even with a 15 foot U-Haul. They didn’t make any motion to searching the truck. They asked if we had weapons, or houseplants and that was it. No mention of cannabis at all. After less than five minutes it was “Safe travels” and then we were off.
Things we saw while driving: In Great Falls, there were a large number of people demonstrating on the main road. They were anti-abortionists, probably a church group. They were mostly older men and women; the only young person was a man.
An antelope jumped across the road right in front of us. We think it was an antelope because it was certainly not a deer. We nearly hit it, but thankfully didn’t.
No one is really wearing masks here. Maybe a few token people were, but those that were seemed to be half-hearted at best. There were signs saying “We request that you wear masks”, but inside no one, not even the clerk was wearing.
Billings was very pleasant to look at; you come down a high winding road and it is all before you. It looked promising for running, but my actual route was something I planned in under five minutes that mostly took me through an industrial park and a big box store complex.
It is really warm here. The high today will be 29°C. That is hot summer weather for me, despite being autumn. It does look like an American Western film here. The land is arid and dry with rolling hills, but it seems to be more green in the south east. At one point, off in the distance, we saw a perfect plateau rising up off the plains.
2021-10-4 10:02