March 19, 2010: Leaving for Points North

We were all pretty tired this morning.  I got only two hours of sleep last night.  Probably not the best idea just before beginning a very, very long drive and its associated long week.

Brian and Jen decided that today was going to be a day off after all of the work that they have been doing so they spent the day playing Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3.  In fact, Brian played it so much that he is now actually further along in the game than I am even though I have had the game for ten days now!  Jen is dramatically ahead of both of us.

I worked all day as usual.  In the late afternoon I ran over to the office and picked up my Red Hat coursebook that had been delivered there.  I was only physically in the office for fifteen minutes or so.  Then it was back over to the apartment to work from there again.

Work ended at a decent time tonight and we had the car pretty much already packed.  The moment that we thought that I could get away we made a run for it and were gone!

We decided that we wanted the ability to make audio recordings in the car so we had shopped around and found that the Guitar Center nearby carried a Tascam portable digital recorder.  That was our first stop.  That probably cost us thirty to sixty minutes but we are hoping that it will be very valuable on the road today and in the future.

From there we were “on the road” and making good time.  Brian took the first “shift” driving through Texas.  Jen took the back seat.  Brian drove through the daylight and I took over after it was dark.

We discovered that the auxiliary input for the car’s audio system got broken at some point and it no longer plays in stereo.  If you attempt to hook up an MP3 player or something to it you only get sound from the right side of the car which is exceptionally annoying.  I am going to try very hard to get that fixed before driving back down to Texas or I will be very sorry.

We drove on Interstate 30 heading east out of Dallas.  That is a long, lonely stretch of nothing heading out to Texarkana in Arkansas.  Once we were east of Dallas all of this highway was new to me.  I am quite glad that we are going this route as I get to see another very large chunk of Texas, the entire crossing of Arkansas and the western half of Tennessee on this trip – all of which are new to me.  I have never been to Arkansas at all so this gives me another state as well.  I have added many in the past eight months or so.  Jen spent much of her childhood in Arkansas so knows the region pretty well.

For dinner we just picked up food at Taco Bell.

I took over driving in Arkansas and drove us east to the east side of Memphis where we got a room at the Comfort Suites and crashed there.  It was around one thirty in the morning when we got to the hotel room.  I was doing surprisingly well for having just worked all day then driving all evening and into the night on just two hours of sleep after having had a very busy day the day before.  Unfortunately there is not a lot of time for sleep tonight either.  I have to be up tomorrow morning at eight local time so that I can work on some Bahrain software deployments and then Linux kernel patching.  It is going to be a very long day indeed.

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