Vacation, part 1

We're back from vacation and we are both very tired.

In the weeks leading up to our vacation both of us were busy at work, working hard to get our desks ready for vacation so not much blogging was done prior to our trip.

But, now there's tons of stuff to blog about now so I will bring it to everyone in small doses in order for me not to run out of blog filler.

My back vs. the Super 8 motel bed

We left out on Tuesday morning with high hopes to arrive around lunch time. Well, we ending up hanging around town in order to switch out a CD in a computer game we got the night before. As the clerk was putting the disk in the game sleeve, he stuck the wrong game in there. That wasn't going to keep James happy in a 4 hour car trip with the wrong game so 2 hours later, we left out for Tulsa, OK. with a happy James playing Jewel Quest 3 till the laptop battery ran out. Good thing we have two additional kinds of back up entertainment for him, we still had an hour and a half left to go.

We arrived in Tulsa around 2:30ish and promptly started making calls to our friends letting them know that we had finally arrived, missed lunch time and was going to check into the motel room. Being on a budget we had to get something that wasn't going to cost a nightly fortune so we found a good rate at a Super 8 on the east side of town, clean and with access to the highway it said.

Here's our view from the motel window. Just over the grassy island is I-44 highway. I-44 is a major interstate running straight through Tulsa, with 6 lanes of traffic ALL NIGHT LONNNNNGGGG. One would think with all that semi-truck noise could drown out James's snoring but sadly, no it didn't. Myself being the type of sleeper who wants complete silence when sleeping learned to adjust when Bailey came but with the noise rumbling outside and right next to my ear, it was hard to sleep the 4 nights we were there. One can always expect motel beds to be bad but this was the worst the both of us have ever slept on. Our next day there we went and got some additional pillows but that didn't help. The thought of sleeping in the car sounded more comfortable than the bed and crossed both our minds a few times. I would have done it but on the night we came back from the Elmo live show we saw a Fox news crew setting up for a LIVE location shot in front of our motel. Our first thought was a dead body had been found but no crime scene tape or police was present so we headed off to our room to watch TV. Apparently the local Fox station was doing a story on recent car thefts at local motels and our was one of them. They actually caught the two criminals staying at the very same motel we were at the previous week. So if your into crime areas, hard beds and the sounds of 18-wheelers downshifting all night long, I highly recommend this motel for you.

This trip was a special for James. It was the first time he actually was in Tulsa for more than a day and I was able to show him the town I had lived in for a couple of years. He quickly noticed how many Daylight Doughnut shops there was in this town.


Daylight Doughnut is like the Krispy Kreme we have here in Johnson county but worse. There are 24 Daylight Doughnuts shops in Tulsa and only 1 Krispy Kreme shop. I grew up on Daylight Doughnuts and never even heard of Krispy Kreme till I started working at Penton Media (back in 1999 it was called Intertech) but since my folks lived 5 miles out of town, doughnuts were a rare treat for us. I didn't discover the yummy goodness of Daylights until I lived in Fort Scott, KS. I lived just a block away from one and that is where I learned of the cheese filled sausage roll. I had forgotten all about those awesome tasting rolls till the day we left Tulsa. James promptly yelled at me "Why didn't you take me here on the first day????" I now have something to get him back in the car for another vacation.