BUFFALO, New York to ST. LOUIS, Missouri, July 20, 2005 — Up oh so early. Really from this point it is just the long drive home. It is just like the part of flying vacations where you go to the airport, get frisked, eat expensive bad food, walk great distances and get home 'quickly.' Maybe. Unless your flight is cancelled or delayed. And you end up camping in the airport or in a hotel, unexpectedly. Of course, driving around the country is time-consuming, prone to surprise. More dangerous than flying. But it can get you there. And it doesn't hurt my ears.

FFP starts out driving. I grabbed a couple of bananas from the free breakfast as I was

checking out even though breakfast wasn't really started yet. It is barely dawn. Tomorrow will be an even longer drive. But it will end at home. That's incentive. Today we are just going to get to St. Louis. FFP drives a long time. I navigate, provide snacks. It all runs together. Eating beef jerky, bananas, V8, coffee, coffee, coffee, Wheat Thins, awful little donuts, breakfast bars, drinking water. Interstates. Guys with tattoos on their arms and said arms hanging out of car windows. Trucks, trucks, gas stops, questionable restrooms. Eating little donuts, Wheat Thins. Sun dried tomato Wheat Thins. Snacks that have that sort of 'glued on' flavoring are sort of bad for the car. We listen to heartland radio about the 4-H fair or to books on CD. A neighbor loaned us Poisonwood Bible but not the last disk. Still it was good. I'd like to read the whole book. We bought the new Michael Cunningham book Perfect Specimen (?) on disk but one of the disks doesn't like the player in the car. Still the part we listened to is pretty good. Tomorrow we are going to listen to music CDs, I think. Along the way today, FFP ate some White Castle burgers. The smell of the place dissuaded me from it. Besides I was full of all that other stuff. Anyway we take turns driving and reading the maps and looking through U.S.A. Today. Only when I'm in hotels do I ever read that paper. I try to work the crossword, too, but I never finish it.

Finally the edge of St. Louis. We go around the southern loop and out on IH44 which we will use to take off from tomorrow. We find our hotel, check in, access the wireless Internet. We go off to find a place to eat. We go into two sports bars and choke after a few seconds of smoke. We stumble across a Chinese restaurant (so welcome) that is nonsmoking and have Chinese food and a Chinese beer. We've had a great time, even had some good meals. But it will be nice to get back to Austin where we know where to go to get the food we love.

Well, tomorrow will be an even longer drive. And it will end at home so that's good. Time to get a bit of rest.