Jaunted

Before we set out for Tulsa, my girlfriend and I had a couple stops to make. First was perhaps Shreveport's most notorious location, at least for the former editor of a pop culture travel blog. See, last summer, Josh Brolin and Jeffrey White, along with a couple others involved with the movie W, scuffled with police outside a downtown bar called Stray Cat, pictured. Seeing as I'd written about the place and the incident, I figured I should see it. The joint actually looked nicer than I'd expected--and it somehow wasn't open for an early morning happy hour!

Next we hit up the Louisiana Boardwalk, an outdoor shopping mall that didn't impress in the slightest. Had we been eager to build a bear or get a Yankee candle, it might've been worth a visit. The only slightly redeeming attraction was the local color found in the pen of alligators outside the Bass Pro Shop.

Also disappointing was the haul out of town toward Texarkana and later McAlester, home to "America's flagship ammunition plant" and the Oklahoma State Pen. (With those attractions topping the list along the route, we shouldn't have expected much.) But the drive wasn't without interesting scenery, including oil derricks pumping and signs advertising a 75-mile-per-hour speed limit but warning "No Tolerance" on the Indian Nation Turnpike.

When we pulled into Tulsa International Airport to turn in our trusty Kia Spectra, we'd driven 1,407 miles and burned 37.3 gallons of gas, which works out to an impressive 37.7 miles per gallon. We spent $76.01 on unleaded, meaning the trip cost us 5.4 cents per mile, not including the $114.97 we spent to rent the thing--and borrow a GPS navigation system from Alamo. And, for those of you who care, we created 777 lbs of CO2 according to epa.gov; two one-way flights from Orlando to Tulsa would've dumped 882 lbs of CO2 into the air.

For all the fun we had, it would've been worth it at twice the financial and ecological price--but we were thrilled it was so cheap!