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The Road to Tennessee: Day 2

Sunday, August 15 – 2021

9:30am comes pretty quickly when you don’t get to bed until after 2am. Even with almost 7 hours of sleep, the weariness of the road still hangs on you like a wet shirt. The grunge from the previous day hangs on you even worse. Unfortunately, showers would have to wait. We had another 600 miles to cover and the day is starting to burn away.

We gather our belongings and load them up in our vehicles. After a quick stop to gas up, we’re on the road again. Our destination for today is Sioux Falls, SD. We’re going to traverse about 1/3 of Wyoming plus the just about the whole state of South Dakota.

It should only take about 9 hours.

The first part of the day’s trip was much like the previous one. Very hilly. The truck crawled up the hills threatening to overheat on each one. The warning light would come on along with a warning beep and paranoia would set in. At one point again, we had to stop and let the truck cool down.

During this stop, we called my father-in-law and asked if his truck overheated. He and my mother-in-law made this same trek 2 weeks prior. They didn’t have any trouble with overheating. They also told me that the truck has a 6th gear disable. That allows you to manually put the truck into 5th gear instead of waiting for the automatic transmission to do so.

This was a nice piece of information to learn.

It put a little more power into my finger tips and made the hills a bit less hard to climb. Only a couple of them really slowed us down a lot. The rest only slowed us a little bit. So we were able to make better time.

I handled the truck a whole lot better on this leg. I only rolled on the braille-line a few times. When we hit the rolling hills I figured out a good rhythm. The truck would drop into 5th gear while climbing the hill. Once I hit the crest, I’d lett off the gas to shift back into 6th. Then I’d hit the accelerator to get to 70 mph as quickly as I could to go down the hill.

The average speed for this part of the trip was around 60 mph.

I find area/town/city names in some states rather interesting. Like Dead Horse Creek in WY. Is the water bad and kills horses? Not sure. A little further up the highway is Wild Horse Creek. I have a feeling that the rivalry between these two places is bitter.

But I digress.

Our arrival time in Sioux Falls was around 12:30 am. Showers were taken and there was much rejoicing. We still weren’t going to get the amount of sleep we’d like, but it was another good day. 9:30 was coming up quick so we went to bed.

Round 3 would begin soon.


(Photo by: Tori Close)

Published by Derek

Musician, Writer, Husband of Miss Tori & Son of the King!

One thought on “The Road to Tennessee: Day 2”

  1. Brian says:

    I love your blogs. Keep em coming!

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