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I almost forgot to post an entry on my drive across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles! This was back in Day 5.

I was forewarned about this drive. It’s a 9-hour stretch of nothing. I know I covered Oklahoma in the previous entry, so let me focus more on Texas here.

I stopped at Amarillo, Texas for a night. It’s a surprisingly large town (just picture a massive truck stop that kind of smells like poo) with familiar chain restaurants and stores like Target and Best Buy. I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express which was, as of that day, the best hotel I stayed at during my trip. The hotels just kept on getting better!

Now, if you ever do a drive across the panhandles, here are my recommendations to keep yourself awake:

1) Stop at the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. You can pray and/or laugh at how ridiculously random this cross is in the middle of nowhere.

Random cross in Middle America

Inside the Route 66 Museum

2) Visit the nation’s Route 66 Museum ($3 entry after 4 p.m.) in Elk City, OK. It’s an interesting stop and located just across the street is the KFC drive-through that had me sick for days. The people at the museum actually asked me if I came in the other day. Apparently there’s an Angie look-a-like driving cross country right now too, who stopped at the museum. They couldn’t get over how similar we looked. Well, looks like she’s ahead of me!

3) Gamble at a casino in Oklahoma. There are several of them off the highway, which I never would have expected. I didn’t stop at any but this is definitely a good pit stop, assuming you don’t have a gambling problem.

4) Invest in audiobooks. I listened to the book, “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert. It’s a book on the science of happiness, and it kept me entertained for two hours of my panhandle drive. Did you know that humans are the only animal that can “plan” for the future? It’s because we have a large frontal lobe in our brains. If this lobe gets damaged, we won’t be able to imagine or “see” a future anymore.

5) Sing your heart out on the road.

Make the most out of a boring drive through the panhandles

Fun Fact on Texas Panhandle:

According to Wikipedia: As of the census of 2000, approximately 402,862 people lived in the panhandle. Of these, 68.9% were non-Hispanic White, 23.8% were Hispanic, and 4.6% were African American. Only 2.7% were of some other ethnicity.

Oh, I don’t know. “Some other ethnicity” as in Asian? What about Native Americans? Come on, people. =)