What I Did on My Holidays, Part the Oneth

I’m writing from my MIL’s house in Fallston, Maryland where we’ve been since very very VERY late Tuesday night.  Due to Certain Events (stay tuned for Part the Twoth), I actually have a Net connection that doesn’t make baby Jesus cry to use it.

We made the trip so L can go to her thirtieth high-school class reunion on Saturday and decided, this time, to make the fifteen-hundred-mile drive in two days rather than our normal three, because it’d save a night’s lodging and a day’s meals—significant, given we’re having to finance this trip with a firkin of salt, a buffalo nickel, and half a cheese sandwich.  Doing that run in two days means a minimum of fifteen hours’ driving each day, and that’s being very optimistic.  L, M, and I left Austin Monday in the middle of that PISSING-down flood that went on for long enough to throw us an hour behind time.  We only had to deal with until about Thorndale, at which point we got out from under the leading edge of the front.  After that, weather was about the least of our travel worries.

We stopped for a picnic lunch at Martin Creek Lake State Park, just outside Tatum.  While we were there, L came up with the idea of trying to drive an alternate route across Arkansas, taking US 79 instead of I-40 to try to reduce my stress level.  It didn’t work.  The US highways in Arkansas are all posted at 55 miles an hour rather than 65 or 70, so we started losing LOTS more time relative to our schedule and I started pushing harder on the speed, trying to stop the hæmorrhage.  This ended as you might expect in Fordyce, Arkansas, where I was pulled over for 68/55 (I’d missed the sign, several miles before, where a short stretch posted at 65 went back down to 55 again).  Then, to make things happier, I found I hadn’t put the current insurance card into the car, so all we had was the one for the policy that expired three weeks ago.

SOMEthing/one smiled on us, because the state trooper didn’t ticket us for either offense.  He wrote a warning for speeding and just plain blew off the insurance violation, for which he would have had to cite us; there’s no such thing as a warning for that offense in Arkansas.  I behaved most politely and minded my manners, as my grandmother the deputy sheriff taught me long ago, which I like to think helped a little.  From Fordyce, I set the cruise control for 55 until we could get across to I-530, which runs north from Pine Bluff Arsenal to Little Rock.  After that it was I-40 to West Memphis, then up I-55 through the foot of Missouri to I-155, down and around and back up US-51 through a corner of Tennessee into Kentucky, and start hunting for a motel.  Which wasn’t to be found anyplace.  We missed one at Wingo, and Mayfield, where we looked next, had nothing—the only one we could find had closed its office for the night.  In the end, and in desperation, we ran north all the way to Paducah, where we found a Best Western just at midnight.

Tuesday we slept late, and didn’t start until after nine—which might have been all right, had I not missed the junction where the Wendell H. Ford Western Kentucky Parkway split away from I-24.  (L was doing needlework rather than watching the map and didn’t catch me up on the mistake.)  I didn’t discover it until we got all the way to the Tennessee state line, more than fifty miles out of our way.  We had to backtrack to US 41 and run up to Hopkinsville and Nortonville to get back to the Ford Parkway, losing us more than an hour.

We lost more time when we got to Lexington.  L wanted to try going round Man o’War Boulevard, which looked to be an outer loop on the map but proved to be a suburban ring road, full of local traffic, stoplights, and malls.  We burned yet another quarter of an hour looking for a hypothetical city park where we could have lunch but never did find it.  By the time we had given up on that goose chase and eaten at McDonald’s for lack of any better or faster choice, I was so upset and unhappy that L insisted on taking the wheel herself.

We didn’t lose any more time to mishaps, and the roads through eastern Kentucky and West Virginia (I-64, I-79, and I-68) were wonderfully open and clear, but the time zone change and what time we had lost put us so far back that dark caught us before we got to the Maryland state line near Friendsville, with another four hours and more still to go.

We staggered our way through Cumberland in the dark.  I’d hate to have to do any more than drive through there at night, or go within ten miles of the place in the daylight.  ALL the exits off the interstate were what we would call “corners” in Texas—right-angle turns at the end of a truncated lane.  Pure-dee evil.  Somewhere east of Cumberland Quinn pulled a stunt that spooked L (throttle plate stuck closed, and she didn’t know how to react to it), so once I’d identified what was going on, I took over driving again, to run down I-70 and around Baltimore on the loop.  For a blessing, the county map L had showed a clear way to get from the loop out to Fallston, we only saw three or four deer once we got on Fallston Road (remarkable, seeing that it was almost full moon and prime grazing time for them to be out), and hauled in at L’s mother’s house a little after one in the morning.

Next time:  I install a computer and ride a steam train.

The Marathon Man prohibits the whizz.  Fnord.