Off to the Chevy dealer at 7am to get poor, broken mirror replaced.  Plus wanted to get steering weirdness checked out.  And while I was there, I noticed a tire low & a nail in it.  Steering thing determined to be idle arms and some other thing.  They wouldn’t be able to get parts til Friday and they swore it wasn’t dangerous to drive it like this.  So I’ll wait til I get home for that.  $377 I think it all was — and I was on my way around 11 am.

Well, sort of.  The grey turned to rain immediately before I could even get down the block.  So I figured it was a sign.  I decided to spend the day organizing/cleaning the van & napping.   Maybe planning some quick photos I could take along the interstate on the way home.  The sun would tease me every couple of hours with about two minutes of brightness and then fade behind the clouds again.  After a good long nap and big doggie romps, I couldn’t stand it anymore.  I figured I’d turn the day into a practice run, dress rehearsal for tomorrow.  And maybe get lucky and get a few decent enough shots.

Here’s Grem gazing off at the skyscrapers in the gloom wondering why we’re just sitting around.   Nah, probably just watching for squirrels.  And the iPhone (and all the other sources I’ve checked) promising nothing but sun for tomorrow.

So I limped on into downtown — happy to have my mirror back.  I never noticed this guy before.  Not my era but still impressively ornate:

Never saw this one before either.  A miracle it hasn’t been updated.  Love the giant chrome-y letters and those windows:

Two earth-shattering bits of news to me.  I hadn’t known that the Chase Autobank had closed (see Flickr photos tonight) and that this building next door is also now vacant.  I remember going into this place to check out the interior and the people who worked there were all proud and smiley over the building.  Now, they’ve moved across the street.  I can only hope this place finds some loving owners.  The tiles are all looking a bit rumple-y now especially behind the building.

For the curious that want to know more about my “system”, here’s the map of downtown that I used today (and will be using again tomorrow).  For me it’s way better than any GPS system could be — all clearly laid out.  And then I just cross out stuff as I shoot it.  That way I don’t miss anything.

Same thing for the accompanying list — X things out as I shoot them.  The list is pretty much the order of shooting for the stacks of maps.  But for something dense, one-way streets and such, the map makes it easy to change the order of things on the fly.

There’s a page over there on the right of this blog called “how-to-plan a roadtrip” if you want to know more about all this.  I really don’t use the stickies on the road though anymore — they just end up falling off.  So I draw big pen circles to replace the stickies before the actual trip happens.

Around 6 pm, the sun came out for the last hour of the day.  While I was taking this very photo.  I snapped in the grey gloom and walked 10 feet towards the van when I felt the bright warmth and RAN back to get this shot:

Since I’d had a big nap, I got to spend a little time and energy shooting a bit of stuff at night.  Now it’s nearly 2am so I’ll feel the pain tomorrow.  But not if the sun comes out!

More Tulsa tomorrow.  And then hopefully onward and eastward.