Purina entrance, by Aneta Lopes Graca
Once a year Saluki people from across the country (and sometimes around the world) meet 
to greet long time friends, meet new friends, and compete with their hounds. The last few years it has been at the Purina Event Center in Gray Summit Missouri, and this year I agreed to manage it.
This means packing myself and some of the hounds into my trusty if not lovely motor home for a trip Google Maps insists on calling 976 miles; 14 hours and 35 minutes. Maybe. If you don’t have dogs and you’re not driving alone.
trusty motor home
For we who do travel in that fashion it gets perilously close to twenty hours. At least it’s all on main roads…as long as you don’t get lost.
I had envisioned writing a quick blog every night to share my travels. To this end I stayed at parks with WiFi but by the end of a day driving, tending the dogs, then grabbing something for human fuel, there was not a lot of energy available. So I thought I’d get back into the blogging (and writing!) habit by reporting a week late…kind of like war correspondents who never actually see the front lines
Amarillo Sunset
My intention was to leave on Thursday, late morning, and get to El Reno Oklahoma where the KOA site is really nice. My intermittent OCD took over and I ended up clearing out half the garage (don’t ask, I can’t figure it out myself!) Friday, then. I could leave early Friday. More like Friday afternoon, and I made it to Amarillo.KOA.
Lovely site, until the mosquitoes tried to drag me out of the motor home. OMG those Texas 
people must be TOUGH. I saw this decoration on the side of a building as I left the site…what do you think? Doesn’t it look kind of Arabian???
TOMORROW: My encounter with a nice Missouri patrolman. Poor fellow
Mona Karel Author 