En Route Troubles

I just want to start off by thanking everyone (family and friends) for their support in my adventure out here to get a higher education that will be useful and beneficial to help me attain an virtuous career.

Well it was an interesting start to getting to Danville, Illinois. Luckily, Jesse drove with me. It was peculiar how the scenery and culture changed so drastically after Kansas. Let me explain, the first few states went like this.....California-normal, Nevada-normal, Utah-normal, Colorado-normal, Kansas-mostly normal, Missouri/Illinois- what the heck happened here?! 
 
The first hotel we stayed in was in Utah, in a small town called Richfield, which by the way, only has two exits. In the morning, Jesse tried to start the car while I checked us out. I came out to the car to find that it couldn't be started and made a funny clicking sound when it tried to turn over. SO...we did the only logical thing and called AAA, thank goodness for roadside assistance. I was really panicky and thought something was wrong with the alternator, but as it turned out, I was wrong. Apparently the car had been packed so full (thanks to me) that the back did not shut properly the night before when I had unloaded some stuff. Therefore, by the morning, the car was dead as a doornail. This incident was confusing because when I tried to start the car, the lights and radio still came on....that is why I thought it was the alternator, or perhaps the 15 degree weather outside. Well, thanks to AAA, we were back on the road in no time and our next exit was 30 miles away. We were slightly below half-tank so I mentioned that we should definitely stop for gas at the next Chevron. Well as it turned out, there was no Chevron at the next exit, and then a sign suddenly appeared that it was over 120 miles until another gas station was available. This is the part where I smack my head against the steering wheel repeatedly, reprimanding myself for thinking Chevron's were plentiful across the United States (or at least en route to IL). We took a detour on the next available exit to somewhere in order to search for a gas station (we were at 1/4 a tank by this time). We did find gas, but only after taking a backroad to no where which actually did end up somewhere. The first small town we came to had one gas station, but it was closed because it was New Years Day. So, we continued on. The next gas station that we came to was 14 miles from there and all the tanks said out of service. Fortunately, there was one gas station that was catty-corner to the other broken tank one that looked more like a market, but it was not closed for the holiday! After this, we headed back to the 70 East, noting that we had detoured over 50 miles total for a tank of gas...lesson learned.
 
The second hotel we stayed in was in the small town of Limon, Colorado. The next morning was awesome because the car started. Seriously, we were very excited about that. We saw two bald eagles flying alongside our car and a live coyote eating something beneath the snow on the side of the road. I have never seen a bald eagle in the wild, but come to think of it, I did think it peculiar that there was a sign a few miles back that said, "CAUTION, eagles on road." We hit Kansas in no time and when we stopped for gas the second time, the car did not start. Now let me tell you that we did know about having to get a new battery because the factory one was still in my car (from 2002), but we figured...er, I figured I could just get a new one once I reached Danville. What the heck was going on? NOW the battery decides to act up!? None of the lights had been left on from doors being ajar (I had made sure of that myself). So then I resorted to calling AAA for the second time, frustrated that I was going to waste my 3 roadside assistances in the first few days after the New Year. It had started snowing while we were waiting for the AAA guy to get there and the car temperature quickly dropped. While waiting, we swore to ourselves that we would stop at the next Walmart and get a battery no matter how vile Walmart seemed to us before. When the guy finally arrived (approximately 45 min later), Jesse and I had on all our heavy clothing, but all three of us (including Edward) were shivering. It was a lovely 6 degrees outside, and God only knows what the windchill was. We immediately looked up on our phones the closest Walmart and 60 miles later, we stopped and got a new battery that came with free installation (thanks Walmart!). I also grabbed some long underwear and shampoo, conditioner, and body wash because I wasn't about to go digging in my car for those things in the freezing weather. This just goes to show...you have to prep a small travel bag that you can remove easily from a fully packed car. That day, we almost made it completely through Kansas, but stopped in Topeka for the night.
 
We were very happy, again, that the car started in the morning and continued onto Missouri. I was surprised to see that in Missouri there were adult stores every other exit. What the deuce?! Anyhow, when we hit Illinois, we noticed two dead decapitated deer in the median at roughly 20 miles apart. I figured that you need to be really careful driving here at night via the 2 lane highways since deer crossings seem a lot more common here than in previous states.
 
Having left Las Vegas on December 31st at 6:30pm, we arrived at our destination in Danville, IL at a Sleep Inn at 4:30pm on January 3rd. For those of you that are unfamiliar...Danville is approximately 2 hours south of Chicago, and 1 hour and 40 minutes west of Indianapolis. Danville is an incredibly poor town with an unemployment rate of about 15%. After much investigation into the rentals available in Danville, I have safely decided to live in a gated community in a Urbana, a town about 45 minutes (30 miles) west of Danville.

The countdown to graduation with a bachelors of science in nursing is now 487 days.
(Thank you to http://www.timeanddate.com/date/durationresult.html?m1=1&d1=5&y1=2010&m2=5&d2=11&y2=2011 for helping to calculate this information)