Well, Yesterday morning my alarm didn’t go off as planned, which set the tone for the day. However, the drive wasn’t too bad. We passed the following:
- St. Louis traffic [25 minute delay]… possibly from Cardinal’s game
- An Elvis is Still Alive Evidence Museum
- A cow loping down a hill out of control
- Several camels
- What seemed like millions of cars [Abby lost count after 0]
- People who got pulled over to alert me to the fact I needed to slow down
- More Semi’s than you could shake your fist at
- Zero Starbuck’s in the entire state of Kansas
- A Kelp farm [not really]
- Cloverdale and Boonviller [two towns on the way to my grandparents’ in Mendocino – only in the Mid-West this time]
- A lot of fluids through our mouths and on through our bodies trying to stay awake
And in the end we got home at 12:45. This means that I drove or was ‘on the road’ for 18 hours and 45 minutes. I listened to approximately 6 hours or Veggietales, 2 hours of Paul Simon, 2 hours of John Coltrane, 45 minutes of Crystal Lewis and 30 minutes of Audio Adrenaline. It rained for about 5 hours of our trip which slowed us down further. I also drove for hours and hours of my life through Kansas passing unnumbered museums and ‘porn towns’. Jessica and I dubbed these ‘stops’ porn towns because there was one house and one building and the house housed the loser who ran the building that housed porn.
I could tell that the financial state of America was still not great because of the number of ‘Ad Here’ billboards that were looking for clients to offer their wares via huge posters. One set of billboards that I did notice something good about (I had not noticed this before this trip) was the billboards for Cracker Barrel. Their approach seemed to always be the following:
- Place a billboard relatively close to the upcoming Cracker Barrel restaurant, usually within 20 minutes of arrival… keeps your mind moderately fresh with the idea of ‘Country Cooking’ or ‘Comfort. Food.’
- Always have the billboard display clear, simple directions at the bottom in easy to read lettering
- Always have an easy to see sign in the air as you approach the town/city
This little bit of marketing and clear thinking impressed me. Our waitress there at lunch was cheerful and glad to help, she smiled and laughed several times making it easy to interact with her when needed. Clearly a good game plan for a business even if the food there is not always what I’m after. The distracted ‘store’ at the front is brilliant and probably garners Cracker Barrel multiple millions of dollars extra every year.
OK, I’m done now 🙂 I’m going to head out to church soon, which I didn’t think I’d get to do today.