Stranger in a Strange Land

With the Big Ass Van loaded for the Righteous Road Trip to Texas, GHIW and I took off for parts south early Friday morning. We made good time, arriving in Springfield, MO by 5:30 to ensure GHIW plenty of time to settle in for NCAA basketball on the telly. Saturday morning we began the last leg of our journey to Dallas and, I gotta say, the scariest stretch of highway in recent memory. Deep in the heart of Bible-belt land, our "No W" sticker prominently displayed on the back window, I felt like a moving target. Driving through rural Oklahoma, it's hard to fathom how and why people in this area voted overwhelmingly, and against their own economic interests, to support George W. Bush. But there it was, the "disconnect" between their impoverished living conditions and the spanking new Evangelical church complexes rising from the rattiness of the surroundings, displayed town after town along the way. The atmosphere of anti-intellectualism was palpable. We feel safe enough now, having arrived at D & K's fabu new home outside of Dallas, but there is still the small matter of the conservative exorcism to be performed on their house. (They report seeing Ann Coulter books inside the house on one of their pre-purchase visits) So far, no ghostly apparitions have been spotted, but one can never be too cautious about such things.