Music City

We are in Nashville, TN (map), visiting friends. We are parked at a Wal-Mart here which, from the looks of it, is brand new. Handy, because I needed to buy coolant this morning. It dropped into the 20's last night, and our usual cold-weather coolant leaks have returned. These are mostly hose-to-pipe connections, where silicone rubber hoses have been clamped over brass pipes with steel clamps. The brass shrinks more than the steel, and coolant begins leaking between the pipe and the hose. We are still searching for a solution to this issue.

We had a nice drive through Oklahoma on Thursday, stopping for the night in a Lowe's parking lot in Van Buren, AR (map). Somewhere in the last hundred miles or so of Oklahoma, we passed a pair of marked state trooper Expeditions parked in the median, doing speed enforcement. We thought nothing of them, because we are never speeding in Odyssey. Nevertheless, a minute or two later, one of them comes roaring up alongside us, paces us for a few seconds, clearly looking us over, then drops behind us, and disappears. We had fun imagining the dialog in the median:

Trooper 1: "Did you see that? Them guys was drivin' right down there on the ground!"
Trooper 2: "No way. They was up top."
Trooper 1: "I'm tellin' ya, they was down by the ground. Go look."
Trooper 2 (pealing out as if in pursuit): "OK, but you owe me a beer if you're wrong."

We'll never know how it actually went down. But if some of the dialog we hear the truckers engage in on the CB is any indication, this is a good guess.