Day 4 Always Confirm

Second Trip, Day #4

We were within driving distance to our fourth reserved hotel, except it wasn’t a hotel, no wait, we did stay in a hotel….what? I’m confused! So, what happened?….it's a long story.

Although it was a quiet night in the hotel, I woke up WAY early. Maybe because of the time change? “Back in California”, it is 1:30 AM, but now in Texas, it's 3:30 AM. That’s not it! Maybe the excitement of making it to the campground that we had reserved, and not driving for the next 3 days? I don’t know, it didn't make sense why I woke so early, but it didn't matter the reason,the fact is: It was super early and I was awake. I used my morning time to talk/text, to my children who live on the other side of the world attending university. About 5:00 AM Will was waking up and now, I was hungry. The hotel “breakfast” was about to open, so we got dressed, and headed to the lobby. To our surprise, their breakfast was nothing more than fruit and individually wrapped danishes. At least there was hot coffee, and so we split a banana. I always pack food on our trips that includes hard boiled eggs. We returned to the room, ate our own breakfast food, and hit the road.

This morning, I drove first, as Will was still a bit tired. We were treated to a beautiful sunrise, 6:45 AM. The flat plains of Texas make for a wide palette of color for the sun to paint the day’s greeting. What a beautiful greeting.

Hour after hour, It was a pretty uneventful drive, which I give great appreciation and thanks for. I would rather have an uneventful drive than a drama filled eventful drive. Don’t want drama on a long distance road trip. If you aren’t used to Texas driving, as we clearly are not, the design of the exit and entrance ramps onto the highway are something to get used to. It’s important to follow your electronic map guide, as the off ramp for your desired exit can be ¼ mile earlier than the location of the gas stations or restaurants. In California, you can see a gas station sign that you would like to stop at, and then exit. But in Texas, you may not be able to see the gas station sign, but yet need to exit the highway, then drive along a frontage road quite a distance before the gas station sign is in view. Very tricky. Likewise, when re-entering the highway, one drives along a frontage road, then without a stop, veer to the left onto the highway on-ramp, sometimes right in front of a stopped car, that is patiently waiting for you to cross in front of them before they can continue on their path in the opposite direction. As I re-read this, I don’t really know how to better explain Texas road design. Unless you are familiar with the roads, I'm not sure you understand our confusion. Suffice to say, the highway designs take some getting used to.

We trekked toward Oklahoma, now heading nearly completely in the northern direction, and we were anticipating an arrival time of 5:00 PM to our campground cabin. Something was telling me, (you know that gut feeling that if you don’t listen to, you regret later?), that I should contact the campground, and let them know we would be arriving at 5:00 PM. The lady, I’ll call her Patricia, was a very nice person, and I have had pleasant conversations with her before. Several months before, I had made a reservation for a cabin, but I had to cancel and travel toward California earlier than expected. She gave me a full refund, and I promised I would set up a stay in the near future, the next time I returned to Oklahoma. Keeping good on my promise, I called her three weeks before we left for this trip and set up a reservation for 3 days. As we got closer to our travel date, we realized we would get to Oklahoma a day earlier, and so I called her to see if she would be able to shift the reservation one day earlier. She assured me there wasn’t a problem adjusting the reservation, and we were all set. Today, we were arriving on our adjusted reservation. I called to announce our arrival at 5 PM. My call reminded her that yes she did confirm a change, but she didn’t write it down. And therefore, she gave our cabin away to another party, and she had no extra cabin for us. Trying to assure us, she stated the following two days were still reserved for us. But at that moment as we turned east toward the campground, we ultimately had nowhere to stay for the night. She began calling around to other campgrounds to accommodate us for the night, but no one had availability for all three nights, just one night which meant we would again have to pack up and move to her campground, to use the remaining days of our reservation.

With the night quickly falling upon us, I quickly called another hotel we were familiar with, and found they could take us and our dog, for all three nights. Communicating with Patricia that we found a place to stay, she was relieved, but sorry about the confusion and promptly canceled our reservation with a full refund, and apologized profusely for causing the issue. Mistakes happen and that was a big one. She admitted to me that she uses a 3-ring binder system to make reservations, as she called it “the old fashioned way”. Friends and family are encouraging her to get an electronic reservation system set up. Maybe this will encourage her to jump into the modern era. Her decision.

Well, the good part was, we had a place to stay. The bad part though, we now have an additional 2 hour drive through the dark twisty Ozark Mountains. If we would have known a bit sooner, we could have continued on the straight highway north then cut east to the hotel, which was near a major road. Unfortunately, thinking we had reservations, we drove east into the mountains toward the campground but now had to turn north and drive 45 miles further, through the mountains to get to our hotel. You may wonder if there were other accommodations along the way that we could have stopped at, for example other campgrounds, small inn, a Bed and Breakfast? Straight answer, No! It was late in the evening, and everything had been booked up. This area is a big fishing and hunting recreational area, and cabins and accommodations needed to be reserved much earlier in advance.

By this time it was getting dark, very dark, with no moonlight to help. Oncoming vehicles with their lights shining brightly made a quick blinding of vision as we were trying to keep an eye on the road. The majority of the road did not have a fogline to follow, and the yellow line in the middle was often worn down to nothing. I tried to encourage Will to pull over and let me drive as I have better vision at night, but he knew I was tired and needed me to navigate as I knew where we were headed, and the roads we had to take, so he kept driving and I did my best to direct him on what was coming up ahead.

Besides sliding backwards down an ice road 40 years ago, this last 2 hours was one of the scariest drives I had experienced in a long time. We kept up spirits by talking to each other nearly constantly, and I encouraged Will by telling him how much longer he had on each road before we had to make a turn onto the next. 1 1/2 hours later, we emerged onto a larger lit highway, and 20 minutes after that, we arrived at our hotel. A much longer day than we planned, but were successful in arriving at our hotel Holiday Inn in Poteau, Oklahoma.