– Nashville, Tennessee to Denton, Texas –

My poor baby. Today was a sad day for Ripley. We got up at 6am and went for a run at Nashville’s Shelby Bottoms Greenway. The park is phenomenal. It was a truly great run, and we all had a blast. Well, maybe not Mark, but he made a good show of it, even if he didn’t enjoy it as much as Ripley and me. It was very hot and humid for so early in the morning, but we survived, and nobody got a sunburn, because most of the trail was well shaded. Over all, it was a good experience, and we would definitely run there again.

HOWEVER, it ended up having a problem that Ripley was not prepared for. When we made it back to the hotel, I started finding ticks on the baby. She ended up with a total of 4 ticks. We discovered the first two almost immediately. The third I found on the sensitive part of her nose, right under her nostril, just before we left the hotel. She’s an angel, I have to say. She just rested calmly in our laps while we removed ticks with tweezers. It’s especially impressive, considering the fact that we had to pull a few hairs out with the ticks, since we couldn’t get them all alone. We managed to pull all of the heads out successfully, which is always nice. Prior to this trip, Ripley has only had one tick in her entire life. She got it at Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma.

Today is also the day I learned that her Trifexis, which she takes monthly for heartworms and fleas, apparently does nothing for ticks. I thought at first just biting her would kill them, as it does with fleas, so I was pretty freaked out when we found the 4th tick later, and it was still alive despite being attached for several hours. I googled it immediately. It almost makes me want to change medications, but she’s done so well on this one, and we almost never see ticks, since she’s 4 and has had 5 ticks in her life, now. I’m taking her to the vet next Monday for vaccinations, so we will see what he says. It probably isn’t worth the hassle of a switch, and I always check her. They are easy to spot in short, white hair.

After the tick scare, we hopped in the car and were off to Denton. We got stuck in traffic on the way back from our run, and between that and the ticks, it was already after 9:30 when we left, which isn’t great for a 10-hour day, but we expected that we’d still be home around 9pm. We were so wrong. It was already lunch time when we made it to Memphis, and we weren’t sure we wanted to wait until 2pm, when we’d make it to Little Rock, to get our lunch, so we had the Whole Foods hot bar there. It was probably the worst one we’d had, in terms of selection.

It did turn out to be fortuitous that we decided to get lunch there, since we didn’t make it to Little Rock until 4pm. On I-40, just outside of Brinkley, we ran into horrible traffic. We weren’t even moving for a while. It took us over an hour to make it through about a 7-mile stretch. It turns out that two 18-wheelers (at least one of which was a tanker) collided with an SUV on a bridge, and I-40 was closed for a while. This all happened around 11am, and we weren’t there until around 2pm. Much of the traffic was diverted to neighboring I-70, which isn’t meant for so many vehicles. Traffic over there inevitably snarled, and by the time we got there, we were between a rock and a hard place. They didn’t reopen the highway until 3:20, and then, almost as suddenly as it had all began, it cleared up, and Mark and I were able to continue down I-40 with no trouble whatsoever.

Just past the traffic, we stopped for gas, and everyone inside was talking about how bad it had been along the road. One woman that had diverted to I-70 said she’d been in traffic for 3 hours. I’m glad we missed out on that, for sure. Everyone was pretty happy to finally be moving again, and as you might expect, the bathrooms were packed. I felt really badly for all of the people with kids. I’m sure it is horrible to explain to your kids that you don’t even know when you’ll be able to get them to a restroom.

Everything was much less eventful for the rest of the day. We stopped in Texarkana for dinner, where we got Mooyah. They actually have a decent veggie burger, which we only discovered last month. Their fries are tasty, too. We did each order a burger and small fries, but it seems that they made too many fries, and they just filled the bottom of our bags with what was left. We could’ve split one of the bags of fries and still had leftovers. It was ridiculous. Mooyah also makes milkshakes, which we will have to try someday.

Since we didn’t have milkshakes, we stopped and got ice cream later in the evening at a Sonic. The first Sonic we stopped at was out of cookie dough, and since Mark and I both wanted cookie dough ice cream, we moved on to another Sonic down the road, where they were out of brownies. It was a major disappointment to me, since Mark’s ice cream was peanut butter and cookie dough, so he was fine, but mine was supposed to be brownie and cookie dough. Alas, I had to choose something else.

We finally made it home around 11:30pm. I had intended to wash Ripley that night to do a final check for ticks, but we were just too tired. We looked over her again to be safe, and I bathed her on Tuesday morning instead. She didn’t have any more ticks after all, for which I was grateful. It’s so much easier to tell for sure when she’s wet.

– Trip Total : 2,264 miles –