July 20th, 1:30 PM
Things were pretty much on schedule until our stop at the Stuckeys in Ellsworth, KS. We stopped for gas, bathroom, and snacks. We got back on the road and 15 minutes later Jessi asks me if my cell phone has service. She can’t find her’s and wants me to call it. We do and we don’t here anything. I utter a cuss word. There are not exits every mile in the middle of Kansas, so it is 5 minutes before we reach the next one and can turn around. We drive back to Ellsworth and I go in to search for it. I can’t find it. So I call it hoping that I can hear it ring. But much to my surprise Jessi answers. She then explains that when I called she heard it. It had fallen out of her pocket and landed on my parent’s seat. When Dad got back in he sat on it. While driving there had been enough road noise and noise from the A/C, combined with the insulation of Dad’s butt, to muffle the phone's ring. But, once stopped, they could hear it. Ordinarily I would have been pissed. We had wasted twenty minutes and today we were on a tight schedule. But I wasn’t. It could have turned out a lot worse and it was kind of funny. Plus, it popped into my head that maybe this was one of the serendipitous things that allows us to have a good experience by affecting the timing of when we get somewhere, or avoids something serious by not being in the path of some unfocused driver at another time.
We are about 45 minutes from Abilene and we may or may not stop. I’m getting a little hungry, so I imagine everyone else is too. Our last stop we also discovered that Stuckey’s seems to be out of the restaurant business. The one that we stopped at, and the only other one we have seen so far, have been composed of a gift shop on one side of the building and a Dairy Queen on the other. There was a Texaco station on the front of the Ellsworth one. I wonder if it’s the same for all of them now? I don’t remember if we actually ate at one on our last road trip or not.
