Adventures in I-40 (preview edition)

We've arrived to the final stop on our itinerant summer: Chapel Hill. It's nice to be back to a place that feels so much like home - even more so after visiting places that nominally ought to be home, and it's nice to be able to visit with friends one last time.

We leave Monday morning for California. There exist a few uncertainties remaining about this drive, including, not least of which include whether we'll actually have a truck in which to load our stuff.

But, thanks to Eisenhower and his National Interstate System, we know exactly how we're getting there. The drive to California will be a blissfully easy (if mind-numbingly boring) straight shot across the country along I-40. At one point we'd toyed with the idea of actually starting the drive in Wilmington (the eastern terminus of the interstate) so that we could claim we'd driven the whole stretch in one straight shot. Then we realized that these were weak bragging rights, and, really, hadn't we driven that stretch of I-40 to the beach enough anyway? So, we'll start in Chapel Hill, and end in Bakersfield, and we'll have done (almost) all of I-40 in the process. That's more than enough for me, thankyouverymuch.

For the record, our expected travel will be:

Monday: Chapel Hill - Knoxville TN ** visit the Wigsphere
Tuesday: Knoxville TN to Little Rock AR ** visit Clinton Library
Wednesday: Little Rock AR to Oklahoma City OK ** visit OK City National Memorial
Thursday: Oklahoma City OK to Albuquerque NM ** watch pay-per-view
Friday: Albuquerque NM to Flagstaff AZ ** visit Petrified National Forest
Saturday: Flagstaff AZ to Bakersfield CA ** begin full-scale panic
Sunday: Bakersfield CA to Palo Alto CA

I realized this morning that we'd be taking a stopover in every state we'll drive through except Texas. Thank God for small mercies.