On the road again

We made it to Boulder last night after driving for 17 hours, 1100 miles. It was nice to not have to spend the night on the road, and if it weren't for a few setbacks, we would have made it here at least an hour earlier. Coming out of Wisconsin, we got into a wicked storm that reduced visibility to almost zero. The car fishtailed one time so much that I thought we were done for. However, my superior driving skills (lol) pulled us out of it and we went crawling on our way. The storm finally dissipated and we made it to Iowa, but soon after we arrived there we missed a turn, not realizing it for a while, so we had some backtracking to do.

After those two setbacks, things went pretty well other than having to deal with the typical summer road construction, although there were some upsetting things on our way there. As always, we saw a lot of slaughterhouse trucks and feedlots, which is very unsettling no matter how many times I have seen them. There is one feedlot on I-80 in the west part of Nebraska that is just huge. You can smell it before you see it, but that's pretty typical of all of them. They're very depressing to see, but at the same time remind me why I'm vegan.

We also saw a few crop dusters. I felt my blood pressure rising just seeing all of those nasty chemicals they were dropping out of the air and wondering how much of it we were breathing in. We try to keep the windows open unless if it's unbearably hot or raining, but when we saw that we rolled up the windows, turned on the air and put it so that it would recirculate the air inside the car. Yet one more reason amongst many to buy organic.

There were also some very strange & disturbing things we went past. In Nebraska, someone spray painted "Outlaw Sodomy" on a large piece of wood and leaned it against a fence so that everyone on I-80 can see it when they drive past it. We saw the same sign several years ago while driving through South Dakota. Is there some guy going around making that his mission? Very odd. We also passed a restaurant called Skeeter's. Now, if that doesn't say midwest redneck, then nothing does. I mentioned to Mike that we should stop there on the way home to ask if they have anything vegan on the menu, but he wasn't too keen on that idea. "And they were never seen again" would probably follow our entering that place.

Oh, and get this! Here we are tooling down the interstate, through Nebraska (really, this state is an odd one), going 80 miles per hour (the speed limit is 75 there) and we pass a truck that's going just a little slower than us with two dogs in the bed of the truck. They were just loose in the bed, too. WTF is up with that? Just seeing that made my heart stop. That's so, so unsafe.

I do have one rave about the entire trip that I would like to bring up. I had purchased some food from Pitseel before our trip. It got packed up in our cooler and came with us so that we could eat it on the road and when we don't feel like eating out in Boulder. Between that, the veggies we packed and nuts that we bought from the gas station, we were eating good on the road! So, yes, it is extremely possible to be vegan while traveling. We've done it for four long road trips now and have never had any problems no matter where we are. Just be prepared!

Eventually, we arrived in Boulder and checked into our room. Sadly, we found that the vegan, organic, eco-friendly fast food restaurant that we were so looking forward to eating at, VG Burgers, had just closed for the night, but we got to eat there for lunch today, so no big deal. We checked into our room, unpacked, cleaned up and passed out for the night.