Remember those all-night road trips we made at the end of college breaks, with five or six exhausted young people taking turns driving some beat-up old rattletrap down the interstate to make it back from break just in time for an 8 a.m. class? The sweaty, squirmy bodies all squashed together in a car that kept threatening to collapse in some godforsaken southern backwoods straight out of Deliverance, the "meals" composed of 7-11 Slurpees and a shoebox full of bran muffins someone's mother packed for the trip, the incessant switching between radio stations obsessed with preaching us into the kingdom or wailing us into despair. Why don't we take trips like that anymore?
Well, for one thing, we're adults with (generally) reliable cars and a little more disposable income than we had as college students, and we have needs college students could never imagine. Sleep, for instance, on a nice firm mattress in a quiet room with wireless internet access and a warm breakfast in the morning, with all the major food groups available, especially plenty of fiber. We get stiff and sore when we sit too long and our eyes get tired, so we like to break a long road trip up into manageable chunks. Yes: we have become boring middle-aged people who don't dare pull 15-hour marathon driving days.
Except when we do.
Now we hadn't planned to drive 15 hours yesterday. (And let me just point out that 15 hours is our personal record for the trip from my parents' house in central Florida to our home in southern Ohio, a record made possible only by the fact that we had the highways to ourselves because anyone with half a brain cell knew better than to venture out into the cold. But I digress.) We had planned to drive nine or ten hours and then spend the night in a motel along the interstate before attempting that last burst of treacherous driving over the mountains, but then we woke up before 4 a.m. in a house to hot to allow easy sleep and we threw on some clothes and got on the road.
We had the road pretty much to ourselves for, literally, hours, and we hit the major cities at odd times instead of the usual rush hours. But the time we hit North Carolina, we realized that we had enough daylight to continue driving all the way home, but did we have enough stamina?
Apparently we did since here we are, but those last three hours were a challenge. The snow was sparse but blowing, cutting visibility and sometimes creating slick spots, but the wind was outrageous, gusting out of nowhere and pushing us across the lane lines. In the West Virginia mountains we saw few cars but many trucks, their tires spraying road salt and slush into our windshield. I white-knuckled it for a while and then we stopped for a burger and I found that my legs were shaking so much I could hardly walk. Time to switch drivers! My husband drove the rest of the way home.
Home! Such a wonderful word. We had a great trip--I won't soon forget seeing my brother's new house, sighting those roseate spoonbills, or gobbling a luscious fish taco with an old friend--but the ultimate goal of any vacation is right back home. The temperature here has been stuck close to zero since we got here and the wind is blustery and bold, but I'm content to stay inside and be still. Enough driving! I have to get back to campus tomorrow, but for today, it's All Systems Stop.
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