.:Saturday, July 14, 2007:.
NATS Adventure: Day One
Kolby just before we left.........well, about an hour before we left. You really wouldn't want to see a picture of him as we were leaving. He screamed and threw a massive fit! I felt horribly guilty and wanted to cry myself. I know that he will have loads of fun with Tammy over the next 10 days though. He just adores her to death! Off to a late start, we finally made it on the road sometime around 2:30 this afternoon.....MUCH later than our anticipated 9am start! Jeff and I had both, Ozzy and Smokey in the truck with us and we almost immediately began to worry about having brought Ozzy with us. He was more spastaculiar than ever and driving us both nuts! We were using my computer with the GPS program directing us on where to go and Ozzy managed to jump right on top of it and then started scrambling, ripping two of the keys off of the keyboard. Needless to say, I was less than impressed! THEN, he threw up everywhere! This, this was all BEFORE we hit Lawton, OK.........which is just 40 miles from our house! We decided to get the kennel out of camper and let him ride in there. Yeah, that didn't last long at all. I think it was just about half an hour later that we were stopping again to take care of him throwing up all over the place. Amazingly though, after taking him out of the kennel, he calmed right down and didn't throw up again. Oklahoma roads stink anyway, but pulling a camper made it about a thousand times worse! We felt like what those bobble heads people put on their dashboards must feel like. Even I was feeling a bit green!    Getting a mere 8MPG, we were having to stop about every 3 hours to fill up on gas. Tehehehe. This obviously slowed us down a lot! Clearly, we were not going to make it nearly as far today as we had hoped! We decided to stop in Joplin, MO at a KOA camp site and call it a night. Apparently, we missed the turn off for the campground though and ended up on a very narrow 2 lane road. When Jeff attempted what I refer to as "should have been the 140 point turn", he pulled it a tad bit on the tight side and ended up damaging the bumper on the truck quite a bit, put a small dent in the propane tank and a small dent in the camper where his "box" hit. Okay, we are still dealing and eventually get us turned around. What we couldn't figure out though, is why everyone seemed to be honking at us! A few minutes later, we realized that we no longer had any lights on the camper! ARGH! After closer inspection, we realized that on top of all of the other damage, we had also snipped the wiring for the lights AND crushed the adapter box! We only thought about turning around to go home a few dozen times though! Tehehehe. Just the same, we have landed in our temporary home for the night and couldn't be more thankful.  Tomorrow's another long day of driving! Hopefully it will go more smoothly for us! |
