The Road to Chicago

So, after I drove to Avalon, I had to drive back to Chicago. My wife had gone to Avalon ahead of me with her friends, and I was going to meet her there and bring her home. We were planning to swing south into Kentucky to visit family on the way.

Step one was getting out of New Jersey, which proved a little tricky. There are several bridges across the Delaware from south Jersey, and our GPS system wanted to take the southern-most bridge, the Delaware Memorial, presumably because it was closest to our starting point in Avalon. But we were reliably informed that traffic on the small roads between Avalon and the bridge would be very congested, and that we should take one of the northern bridges, possibly even the Ben Franklin into Philadelphia. Even though we’d have to travel in the wrong direction, it was supposed to be much quicker.

So I decided to ignore Jill (the GPS) for a little while and cruise north along the Garden State Parkway until Jill stopped advising me to turn around, at which point I could assume that it had chosen a more northern route. This took us close to Atlantic City, at which point we switched to the Atlantic City Expressway heading west toward the Ben Franklin bridge.

It all went wrong when I followed Jill’s instructions to take an exit onto some small roads. I should have balked, but I needed gas anyway, so I decide to see where Jill would take us. After maybe 15 minutes of driving on silly little streets — definitely not a major route for driving to D.C., although I did get gas — we got on the southbound New Jersey Turnpike — and promptly proceeded down to the Delaware Memorial bridge anyway. By the time I figured out what Jill had done, it was a little too late to change directions. Except for the silly little streets, it may have been faster than the more direct route — there was very little traffic — but it was not what I had been planning.

As for Delaware, all I know is that we were in a traffic jam. Then we left Delaware and everything got better. I realize this is probably not a representative sample of life in Delaware.

We crossed Maryland without incident — not even in Baltimore — entered Virginia, and headed for the western burbs of D.C., where we met up Mirriam Seddiq. I’ve known her for years through her blog, where I followed her job-hunting and the birth of her children and the re-launch of her legal career, so I wasn’t about to pass this close without taking the opportunity to meet her in person.

My wife and I didn’t want to intrude, so our plan had been to call her when we got close and meet her for late lunch or early dinner somewhere in her neighborhood. Mirriam, however, insisted on inviting us over, so we got to meet her whole lovely family.

Larger ImageMirriam, Yakob, Drue, and Yonas a.k.a. Stick Kid

Afterwards, we got out of D.C. and dashed southwest a few hours to get a headstart on the next day’s travels. I had been hoping to take Skyline Drive for the view, but we were running a bit late and the sun was almost down, so we just drove down Interstate 81 to Lexington. It went pretty fast, and I had ripped about 80 more of my CDs before leaving home, so we had some music. At one point we were listening to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and I couldn’t help reinacting the headbanging scene from Wayne’s World, which probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do while driving 70 miles per hour down a unfamiliar two-lane undulating mountain road at night, surrounded by trucks, in the rain, and fog.

The next morning, I decided to add some scenic driving to our trip — unaware that Jill would later add some scenery of her own — by taking Virginia-39 northwest to Warm Springs. I had noticed that there weren’t a lot of photos along the route on Google Earth, so I thought I might be able to contribute a few, but the road was narrow and had no shoulders for stopping. I would have had to either stop right on the road or find a place to park and walk back. I didn’t want to risk the first, and we didn’t have time for the latter. I did get pictures from a lookout, but since everyone does that, Google Earth doesn’t need another one.

Larger Image

As we were leaving, another guy was also leaving, and he was driving what looked like some kind of Mazda coupe (Miata maybe?). I figured that having my comparatively ungainly RAV4 in front of him would ruin his fun drive through the hills, so I let him go ahead of me. This turned out to be a mistake. He proceeded to amble along comfortably below the speed limit for the next 3 or 4 miles. Then he slowed down even more to look for the right turnoff.

People, please: If you want a slow, relaxed drive, buy a big sedan. If you’re going to buy a nimble little coup, learn to drive it like the sports car that it is. If I can keep up on a mountain road in my SUV, you’re not doing it right.

Anyway, once we reached Warm Springs I decided to get off the scenic route. I wanted Jill to find a route back to the main road, but the GPS system didn’t really have a routing mode for that, so I improvised by asking it to find all the nearest fast food places, and I picked a McDonald’s in cluster of them to the southwest of us, which pretty much had to be on the highway.

That worked, but Jill found some hilariously tiny and windy roads for the trip. I guess that even though they are built like a roller coaster ride, with steep banking and sharp blind turns, they’re rural roads, and therefore the default speed limit is 55mph. I guess that looks pretty attractive to the GPS system’s routing algorithms.

When we reached Beckley, West Virginia, the GPS system took us northwest along the West Virgina Turnpike, and then southeast toward our destination in Prestonsburg. It should have been simple — there were state roads all over the place — but when the GPS system took us off the Turnpike, it once again took us on a tour of twisty little roads that had ridulously high speed limits.

The lesson, I think, is that GPS routing doesn’t replace good old map reading. In the future, I’ll use a good road map to plan the basic route, then I’ll plug a series of waypoints into the GPS system to let it handle the finer details and deal with problems like finding my way back to the highway after a stop for gas.

We eventually got to our hotel, checked in, and drove the 25 miles or so to Pikeville. We had been hoping to stay in Pikeville itself, but Pikeville is no longer the tiny little town I remember visiting as a child. It’s turned into a sort-of Eastern Kentucky Enterprise Zone, with chain restaurants, a Walmart, and outposts for large corporations. We found out that all their hotels were filled up for weeks in advance.

We were in Pikeville to take my Uncle Hagan out to dinner. He was my father’s younger brother, and out of a total of ten brothers and sisters, he’s the only one still alive. That pretty much makes him the Draughn family patriarch. Which is probably why he ended up taking us out to dinner.

Hagan’s kind of an amazing and inspirational guy. His wonderful wife, Mary Lou, passed away about ten years ago, and despite having gone blind, he still lives by himself in a beautiful home on a hillside just a few miles outside Pikeville proper. He worked hard to learn the skills that allow him to take care of himself, and he keeps himself fit with a daily exercise regimen. He had no trouble giving me driving directions to the restaurant.

(Hagan’s son Jim and his wife Peggy were away at the time, but they have a home on another part of the hill, so Hagan’s not without family support. Hagan visits them all the time, finding his own way along the path through the woods.)

The next day, we loaded up the RAV and set out for Louisville.

I should mention that my wife and I had a ridiculous amount of luggage for two people on a short driving trip. We had initially traveled separately, so we each brought along a suitcase full of clothing, a computer, and a utility bag. In addition, I had my camera gear, and we brought along a small cooler filled with Diet Coke. We needed to use a luggage cart at every hotel.

The trip to Louisville was uneventful, until we checked into the hotel and found out the wi-fi service sucked. This was a problem because my wife had to give a training webinar of some kind. She ended up having to use her phone’s tethering capability, which was a little slow for screen sharing, and she had to use my phone to call in.

On the other hand, when we were on the road, my wife was able to get an amazing amount of work done while I was driving. It got a bit spotty in the hills — email would come in bursts as we passed through islands of 3G service — but we were pretty much always in touch with the world.

That evening, we took my cousin Betty out to dinner. She had a lot of great stories. She’d known my father long ago, and she’d spent a lot of time with my Aunt Mary Elizabeth, who passed away last year. Mary had always gone to great lengths to appear prim and proper — because she was prim and proper — whereas Betty was a bit more willing to speak her mind and tell people off.

Mary Elizabeth enjoyed playing Bridge, and she apparently played a lot with a fairly elite group. Toward the end, her mind was letting go a bit, and she’d get confused. One day, someone from the group called Betty to complain that Mary’s mental difficulties were making the game less fun for the rest of them or something. I don’t know what she wanted Betty to do about it, and neither does Betty, because she hung up before they finished their whining. I’m proud to have Betty as family.

The next day, we GTFO of Louisville. Really, our hotel was almost on the Ohio river, about three miles from the nearest bridge. We were gone in minutes. And thus we started the last and most boring leg of our journey: Driving across Indiana.

Indiana’s not a bad place, but compared to the states I had been driving across, it was really, really flat. And I’ve been up and down I-65 a bunch of times, so there wasn’t a lot to see. We got home on Wednesday, and I’ve been recovering ever since.

Normally, I would have more photos for a trip like this, but (1) it was hard to find a good place to stop for some of the photos, (2) we were in a bit of a hurry, and (3) I seemed to have lost the ability to get a properly exposed photograph. First the photo would be too dark, then I’d adjust something and the highlights would be all blown out. After a while, I got discouraged and stopped taking pictures.

Embarassingly, the problem turned out to be that I had done a few high-dynamic-range photos earlier and had left the camera in bracket mode, so it was alternately under- and overexposing my shots. It wasn’t until several days later that I noticed the bracket indicator on the LCD display, and suddenly I was able to take decent photos again.