Another day...640 more miles.

Tomorrow, we really need to kick the mileage up a notch. Here we are in Knoxville, TN at the Hampton Inn which feels like a luxury hotel! The room is gorgeous, there is a sweet LG television and it's cleancleanclean! The decor is an improvement from last night, however, it still leaves something to be desired:

I had intended to collect pictures of each bedspread...but the one here is stark white and plain, so nothing interesting to see there.

Today was a crazy day. We left Wilkes-Barre this morning around 10:30 and we were only on the road for an hour and a half before we hit traffic. There was an accident at Exit 1 and traffic was at a stand-still all the way back at Exit 10. We actually sat with the car in park for a bit. We didn't mind all that much - other than the fact that we wished we were covering more ground! It was a gorgeous day and we rolled the windows down and just listened to the radio. It gave me a chance to take some pictures of the scenery:

Oh - and it's not complete w/o some vain self-portraiture...

Here are the first real mountainous looking formations we saw:

...and here is a cloud we saw that we thought looked like a giant UFO:

We passed this truck...

...wait a minute...did you catch the name of that trucking company???

Yeah...

John's car hit 21k somewhere around Roanoke:

It started getting dark:

and we had a couple of redneck run-ins. Firstly, we stopped at this little gas station / gift shop in VA...in the middle of nowhere. John joked when we got to the end of the exit ramp that he thought this seemed like just the kind of road that would be a satanic repeating loop - you drive a mile down it and you are exactly where you were a mile ago - so we turned and pulled into this gas station. No sooner do we get out of the car, this rickety, loud, helter-skelter pick up truck pulls in with an untethered, rabid and mangy dog running around in the bed. It pulled up to the diesel pump across the lot. I looked at John and said, "I'm going to go inside and look around, come in when you're done pumping the gas...hey...this feels like a horror movie, me saying I'm going to go look around..." We laughed and I went inside. John came in and we were looking at drinks...and I feel someone behind me trying to get by. I step aside and this 6'6", redneck, full beard having, dirty, coverall wearing, manure smelling guy. Of course I moved out of the way, only to turn around and see what I can only assume was this guy's son. Just as tall...and dirty...and not right looking...inbred. Well, they didn't kill us, but they never once said a word, either of them, to anyone. I'm all set with SW Virginia...seriously.

Ohhhh....so then we get on the highway and John is doing 88-ish in the fast lane and we start coming up on this busted old Camaro, with like 27 people in it, driving in the fast lane, slow with the hazards on. John slowed down but got pretty close to the car expecting them to move out of his way. Well, apparently they didn't want to move, so John put on his high beams. They responded with a couple of brake checks. Finally, they passed the 18-wheeler they were using to block us from gettng around and they got in the right lane. John blew past them but ended up stuck behind another car not a minute later. In the rear view mirror...here comes the Camaro again. He got right up behind us and John put his hand up and waved (sarcastically, if that is possible) to them. Then we got the high beams from them and at this point, John and I were laughing thinking okay you got us back, ha, ha. The Camaro then comes up alongside us on the right and I look over expecting to see this guy smiling or something. He's got his window down, arm hanging out pointing at me, face red and he's yelling and spitting at us! This guy looked like he was going to murder someone, for really reals. I started getting scared but John was like, "I'll pull over, this $%^&* wants me to pull over." I yelled at him an told him absolutely not. This guy kept driving right next to us and yelling and flipping us off and trying to get us to pull off the same exit...but thankfully, John kept driving. I'm SO glad the guy got off the highway because about 5 minutes later, we hit this:

This lasted a good 20 mins. and not long after that, we stopped for some Sonic and found the hotel.

Tomorrow, we are going to leave early and our goal is to make it to Oklahoma City by nightfall. It should be about 12 hours of driving...which is really not bad if we leave early enough. I'm looking forward to taking more pics tomorrow!