Time flew by as I listened to music on Spotify, and contemplated my land options. I only stopped to fill up on gas and to grab horrid fast food. The problems with the food made me not want to stop too much. The chocolate croissant from a Starbucks drive through was stale. I have never ordered Starbucks from a drive through before. If you try drinking coffee and driving, avoid putting a lid on the cup. When I took the lid off the whipped cream on the cover spilled over my seat a bit. But it really woke me up, and I was wired for the rest of that second day’s drive. One of the brighter parts of this food adventure was trying a double cheeseburger at WhataBurger. If you’ve never seen it before, this is because its headquarters and most locations are inTexas. That single meal was 1,600 calories! I’ve been on a veganish diet lately, so this was definitely a “cheat” day. I’ve never had a burger that size anywhere else, Burger King included. There was a strange liverish taste to this burger, but there’s something poopy-tasting in all burgers I’ve inspected. Apparently, this is because of poor hygienic practices at fast food places and meat processing plants. This glitch aside, the meat was extremely succulent and addictive. I was scanning for another WhataBurger on the way back, but then I was too tired and hungry and just stopped elsewhere. Eating a lot definitely made this long trip easier than the trip I took a few weeks earlier to Horseshoe Bay.
On the Bay trip, the sunstroke made me nauseous, so I just ate a tiny grilled chicken sandwich and some sweet tea. It was tougher to stay awake later on as I was falling short on calories. So I recommend eating extremely fattening fast food on extremely long drives.
I nearly joined a truck driving school back in 2009 before starting my PhD program. Given my passion for driving, this would’ve been a blessing and a curse. It would’ve been fun to do these types of country-crossings daily. On the other hand, given my propensity to push my physical limits, I’d probably drive this way daily.
While it’s fun to drive in 75-mile speed limit zones and between time zones, this is a good place to make a public health announcement. A reason to avoid such races is what happened when a truck driver, Kevin Roper, who was awake for over 28 hours and driving 20 miles over the speed limit, hit a limo that Tracy Morgan and his friends were in without seatbelts. One of these friends was James “Jimmy Mack” McNair, who was killed.