February 20, 2005 - Driving East through Oklahoma.

Unfortunately the wind died down during the night and that allowed the noise from the interstate about ¼ mile away to come right into the trailer. We both woke up at various times during the night, so our night's sleep was somewhat broken and we were both a little groggy in the morning. After a quick breakfast of pancakes we simply retracted the stabilizer bars, hooked up the lights, dumped the wastewater tanks, and were on our way. For the dump, we tried out the combination of the 3-inch diameter hose connector on the end of our sewer hosed pressed into the 3-inch diameter elbow I had purchased in Holbrook, AZ, to actually drain the tanks. The combination worked perfectly and avoided much of the mess associated with that task, and when you're talking raw sewage you really want to avoid the mess associated with that task!

For the day's drive, we continued eastward on Interstate 40 through Oklahoma City to a KOA at Sallisaw, Oklahoma near the eastern border with Arkansas. As we drove our altitude gradually decreased to around 600 feet MSL and the landscape changed from the plains of the Texas panhandle to a more rolling and wooded appearance. The air was gradually becoming more humid and hazy, but it was still so clear that we only noticed the haze when we could look all the way to the horizon. The pastures and irrigated lands of western Oklahoma gave way to normal farms and silos of a typical Midwestern type, interspersed with hills covered in deciduous forests.

After a full day of driving, Monika and I tied in the Truck Thank You Blink contest with 19 apiece. Neither of us had an uncontrolled downshift, so the Transmission Killer award was not given out that day. Our campsite was again flat enough that I could leave the trailer hitched to the truck and, put down the stabilizers. So we were all set up for the night by 5 o'clock and just settled in for a bit of computer work before we had dinner, 2 ham and cheese sub sandwiches we had purchased at Arby's earlier in the day.

On Baby, I was working with the Camedia software in an attempt to "save" one of the panoramic pictures of the Grand Canyon that we had taken earlier. That panorama had extended from the sides of the canyon in the shadow, which were quite dark, to the beautiful canyon walls across from us, which were in full sunlight. The result was a huge difference in luminance across the pictures that made up the panorama. My camera apparently fixed the exposure for the first picture in the panoramic series, so the end result was that the lighter frames were over-exposed and the wonderful colors washed out. I selectively darkened some of the lighter pictures in the series and tried to re-stitch the panoramic shot, and it worked to some extent but it still didn't look quite natural. Sigh. At the shank end of the evening we turned in with our new book and had fun reading that until it was time to put out the lights for the night.