We drove to and from New Orleans from St Paul in late August and early September for a mystery convention. The convention and New Orleans were pure magic!
Our skill set for driving 20+ hours has diminished over time. We stopped just south of St Louis on the way down, but somehow thought we could drive straight through on the way back home. Let's be honest, we are little old people now who need our naps. We need rest stop breaks. Driving through an entire state which seemed to be a construction zone with narrowed lanes and either barrels or little stakes lining the road while trying to stay awake...very bad.
We did plan to drive Route 66 next year for the it's Centennial. I think we are both no longer interested in a long road trip together. It took a few weeks before we could drive to Cub and back together.
Even now, because we are using my car, my husband makes a point of hanging onto the handbar my Jeep has like a monkey. Hang on, buddy, we're about to turn a corner!
Kudos for travel planning prep. My spouse often uses Google maps (?) to walk the streets of places we are going to visit. Who knew you could use that same feature to drive the entire length of the road you're going to travel? He knew the streets, the roads, the road signs for the entire route down. Been there, drove that.
As an extra bonus, he used Mapquest to give himself some turn by turn instructions. That he tweaked. Fine enough if he was the passenger and could interpret his notes. But he kept asking me to read his frankly cryptic notes and somehow I was responsible when they weren't quite matching the road.
We were really pushing it on the trip back. We should have stopped at hour 12, before it got dark. We did not! I needed coffee and pop and then a break to keep going, with increasing frequency. Nope. Wasting time. Messing with Google's estimate of how the long the trip should take.
Again, I'm a little old lady and don't like the cruise control in my spouse's car. Instead of just pushing a button on the steering wheel to turn it on and off, you have to do some maneuvering with a lever to the side of the wheel. Click and move up or down to turn on and off? Zzzzzz. So when I was driving, my comfort speed that I could maintain was 60 miles an hour. Tsk. Messing with the travel time estimate again! At some point only he could drive because he could go 70, cruising along, right? Until he started getting sleepy.
The finale came entering Minneapolis at like 5 in the morning. Mr Big at the wheel. Suddenly I noticed we were crossing two white lines for the special traffic lanes and were heading for the large concrete wall at the side of the road. A sharp call out of his name woke him up, and I drove the rest of the way. Oh yeah. 60 mph or bust, baby.
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