Toll Booth Personnel: "That'll be $5.75 to drive the 130 miles to Tulsa. What? You want to get off at the next exit for gas? Then take this refund receipt, and when you get off, they'll refund $2.51 of the $5.75 you just paid, and then you go back through the toll booth, down to the next exit and pick up a pink ticket to use when you come back through the toll booth on the other side."

Us: "Where do we get the pink ticket?"

Toll Booth Personnel: "Pink ticket. You'll need one."

Us: "Yes, but where do we get one?"

Toll Booth Personnel: "At the refund receipt $2.75 exit booth plaza exit receipt."

Us: "Oh."

It took us an hour and a half and $12.00 in tolls to get gas and get back on the road again, because we actually had to go back an exit. I am not kidding. We now know this is a very bad thing to do on a toll road. Basically, if you're on a toll road in Oklahoma, just don't ever get off.

In Tulsa, where we had to exit for more cash for the toll roads, we got back on the entrance ramp for 44 west, only to be confronted with the choice of going left for 64 or right for 64 (no direction was noted in either case). No mention of 44. No mention of west. Just a 50-50 chance of guessing right. We didn't. "That'll be $5.75, please."

Oklahoma employees get paid 45% above the national average just to be able to pay to get off the roads. Otherwise, they'd have to just drive and drive, never exiting, scores of nomadic Oklahomans joining the teeming hordes of naive visitors who were foolish enough to think that the $20,000 cash they cleared in the stock market last year would be enough to be able to exit the road. Perhaps this is actually what the ghost lights are -- aimless wanderers who haven't been able to afford exiting Oklahoma toll roads since 1881.

By the time we reached the toll plaza for Tulsa to Oklahoma City, we needed Jean Luc Picard to translate for us.

Us: "Will this toll get us all the way to Oklahoma City?"

Toll Booth Personnel: "No, this turnpike ends in 47 miles, then you need either 35 or the Kilpatrick Turnpike starts."

Us: "We just want 44 West."

Toll Booth Personnel: "Turnpike at Tenagra. When the walls fell."