Day 2 -- To Sweetwater, Texas

When we arrived in Joplin yesterday, the temps were in the 70s, but quickly dipped after the sun went down. The Teardrop was cozy, but we could feel the cold seeping in under the edges of our blankets. When we woke up, temps were in the 30s. 
 
Not really excited about the prospect of preparing and eating breakfast in the cold (and eager to see the River’s Bend Family Resort and Campground in our rearview mirror), we got dressed quickly, threw everything back into the trailer and got back on I-44, bound for the Caribou Coffee at the next exit. When we pulled in, we realized that Caribou Coffee is just a counter inside the large Joplin 44 truck stop. So, we opted instead to get right into the groove of the road trip with a good, old-fashioned diner breakfast at the Iron Skillet, next door. 
 
I guess the Joplin 44 truck stop is a sister-site to the Iowa 80 “World’s Largest Truck Stop,” with 475 truck parking spaces and 75,000 square-feet of restaurant and retail space.  Dad and I had fun quickly browsing through all the junky gifts and imagining all the crazy stuff you guys would have unearthed, like samurai swords, flags-of-the-world lapel pins and realistic stuffed cats that look like they’re sleeping. 

Back on the road, we spent most of the morning chatting on back-to-back-to-back phone calls with all three (!) of our children. Thank you all for taking time out of what I’m sure was an otherwise action-packed Saturday morning to talk to us! 
 
We pulled into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City just after noon. We grabbed a couple of southwest chicken salads from the museum café and noshed under the sprawling branches of an old persimmon tree on the museum grounds – absolutely delightful on this first day of March – then took about two hours to explore the facility. 
 
Starting with a special exhibition on the art and craft of cowboy boots, we then quickly moved through the museum’s permanent collection, which includes Native American art and art of the American West, as well as pop culture memorabilia, historic fine firearms and the world’s most extensive collections of American rodeo photographs, barbed wire, saddlery and early rodeo trophies. There’s even a replica of an Old West main street, with shops, a livery, a bank, a church, a one-room schoolhouse and a doctor’s office. We were completely blown away by the size and the scope of this gorgeous museum and wish we had way more than two hours to spend!

Cowboy boots comemorating the state of Wisconsin. Check out the little milk-bottle detail!

The museum's collection includes 1,300 different kinds of barbed wire -- 1,300! -- organized according to physical characteristics, like single-strand wire, two-strand wire, wire with integrated barbs, and so on. 

From Oklahoma City, we drove south to Wichita Falls, then turned off the interstate into the abyss that is north-central Texas. Following U.S. Route 277 for nearly two hours, we skirted wee, windswept farming communities like Seymour and Munday, then followed smaller state highways west as the blazing sun sank toward the horizon and seared our eyeballs blind. We kept going in darkness for another hour or so until we finally – finally! – met up with I-20 and rolled into the town of Sweetwater, where we planned to stop for the night. 
 
You might be aware that Walmart generally allows recreational vehicles to overnight in their parking lots. This is something that I’ve never done, and I’m not sure it’s something that I ever need to do. Dad had never heard of this until tonight, when I mentioned it as a joke. The joke’s on me, I guess, because of course he was immediately, fervently 100% invested.
 
There is a Walmart right off the I-20 in Sweetwater, and Dad spent the last half of the drive today perusing Yelp reviews of the Sweetwater Walmart parking lot; entertaining romantic visions of brushing his teeth in the Wal-Mart bathroom just before closing, donning a sleep mask to block the blinding glare from the parking lot lights, and turning his bad ear up to drown out the roar of the interstate traffic; and then trying to convince me that we should stay there. I do not have a sleep mask, nor do I have one deaf ear to drown out the din. I brushed my teeth once in a Wal-Mart bathroom (long story, don’t ask), and I don’t need to do it again. But Dad persisted until tears rolled down my cheeks, because I was terrified that we might actually have to go through with his plan.

 And so here we are at the La Quinta Inn in Sweetwater.
 
Apparently a small earthquake – registering 4.7 on the Richter scale – rattled West Texas yesterday. Both of the women working the La Quinta Inn front desk confirmed that they felt it. And then they handed me the keys to our room on the fourth floor. Super. 
 
For dinner, we made our way down the frontage road and across the interstate freeway to eat at a Whataburger, the Texas fast food chain with iconic orange and white-striped A-frame restaurants. Because we’re in Texas, so why not?