That Was Hard

I moved to Texas back in 1980, just a couple months before my 30th birthday. (Yes, I know how old that makes me!). When I went back to Ohio to visit family and friends (at least once or twice a year) I drove straight through. Back in those days, it was rare to have anyone accompany me on those trips other than my son, who wasn't old enough to drive. So I had to drive it all by myself. And I did, stopping only for gas and food. To stay awake and amused we played license plate poker. When my son fell asleep I played the radio or put in a tape I could sing along with. (You can't sleep and sing at the same time.) Sometimes I'd have some "stay awake" pills, but more often I'd be running on caffeinated Dr. Pepper.

I did it without a radar detector or a GPS system. I'm not even sure I had a CB radio. I might have, but I listened more than I talked. The first time I did it I had a trip-tik map from AAA. After that, I just knew the cities I had to go through - Texarkana, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland. The challenge was always to better the time from the previous trip. I think my best time was somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 or 18 hours. (The best time ever was the time I drove with Deb Stempowski. She took over the driving in Little Rock and when I woke up we were just outside of Columbus. Total time = 14 hours. I'm glad I was asleep otherwise I'd probably have been scared to death.)

I was still driving it this way when I got married. After the drive up there, that particular husband said we should stop and spend the night somewhere. It was just too hard to drive like that. That was probably 1983 or 1984. So I hadn't done any "hard driving" trips in about ten years.

And since Mark and I have been together, we've redefined the leisurely trip. When we drive to Ohio or to West Virginia, we don't just stop somewhere for the night. We stop for the night and the entire next day. It can take several days to reach our final destination. We've stopped in Memphis, Nashville, Lexington, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. We've come home by way of Williamsburg, Jamestown, Myrtle Beach, and Orlando (just to name a few).

But this week when we had to drive to West Virginia for my uncle's funeral, we didn't have the luxury of time. We stopped for the night in Little Rock because we'd both worked on Monday and didn't want to try to drive straight through. We stopped there at 11 PM and had our wheels rolling at 6 AM Tuesday morning. We were determined to get there on Tuesday because we didn't want to risk some kind of traffic delay on Wednesday. We stopped only to get gas and food we could eat in the car. We arrived around 8 PM on Tuesday evening, an hour before they stopped serving dinner. It was a hard drive.

Wednesday afternoon after the service was over and everyone was sitting around eating, someone asked when we were going back. It occurred to us that we might want to consider leaving that evening. We had to be back for Mark to start working at 11 AM Friday morning. The drive is supposed to be 17 hours, which is driving time. It doesn't include stopping for gas or food. Our driving time to get there had been 20 hours, again not allowing for the time stopped for gas or food. (We were actually "on the road" for about 25 hours, including stops.)

We plotted out several different scenarios, and in the end we decided to leave around 9 PM and drive through the night. At first I thought we'd made an epic mistake. There was a magnificent thunderstorm. The lightning in the mountains was stunning. But then the rain started and it was intense. Fortunately, we drove out of it quickly and then the driving was actually a bit easier because we didn't have truckers pulling in front of us every seven minutes, at least not until the sun came up. (I timed that on my way home. Once the sun came up, a truck would pull out in front of me about every seven minutes and it would take another seven minutes for him to get back in the right-hand lane and for me to resume my speed.) About 4:30 we were both too sleepy to drive so we pulled into an "open all night" restaurant, slept for an hour and then had breakfast.

We were back home around 5 PM. The driving time actually was 17 hours. We had a "go in and sit down" lunch because the pressure of getting home by a certain time was off. When we went to bed at 10 PM, Mark mentioned that if we'd stuck with our original plan of leaving at 6 AM on Thursday that we'd still have four or five hours of driving left. A dreadful thought!


I'm glad to be safely home and I don't really want to do any hard driving again. Ever.