Driving Cross Country

Good morning!

Since there are a number of vexacious happenings affecting my life just now, I think I'll use today's blog to continue my tale of driving alone on the interestate.

When I was younger and had three little kids, and my husband was gone who knows where, I had the idea to pick up and drive to Tulsa to visit my mother in law--a straight route as the crow flies, and do-able, theoretically.  We packed up and got as far as Gila Bend, or somewhere, before I thought better of it.  So we spent the night at that crazy Space Motel, and returned home the next day.  End of Tulsa trip.

Later that summer, husband still gone, I decided to take them up to San Francisco, still my favorite place in the world at that time.  That was easier. We went up Hwy. 101, very familiar territory, spent the night in Morro Bay, and drove on to San Francisco next day.  No glitches.

There was a long hiatus then, in which I did no long distance driving. This was the era of the bus and train trips, when my husband stayed with the kids and I got some time off from teaching in the summer. 

It wasnt until the fall of 1986 that I, on my own and not teaching for the first fall since 1978, recognized that I could realize my dream of driving to Texas.  So, I did.  It was easy.  The Reagan era speed limit of 55 mph helped; the drivers were mostly all good and made driving the wide interstate highways like a run in the park.  Everyone drove 60, which was very manageable and made computing time/distance quite precise when estimating a time of arrival.

I had strict rules for my own driver behavior.  When the sun struck below the yardarm, I looked for a place to stay the night.  No driving after dark for me.  No leaving the main roads even though some of the byways looked so enticing.  The only time I ever swerved from my planned route was when I got thrown off the go-around in Baton Rouge and found myself on a charming road up through Mississippi that I had not been on for many a year.  It wended and wandered through Natchez and Vicksburg and thoroughly entertained me until I finally got back on another interstate into Birmingham and on into Asheville, NC...but that was another trip, another time.

My first trip to Texas was a sheer pleasure and joy until I arrived in Brownsville to be greeted with dismay by my mother, who didn't like my overheated and windblown appearance. (The Toyota I owned at the time had no A/C). But driving alone for long hours in West Texas was wonderful: those high blue skies, huge white clouds, limestone walled cliffs...magic.

I was lucky never to have been caught out nor trapped by any mechanical mishap of the car. Once, it conked out in Arizona and I remembered passing an offramp which led to a garage on the frontage road...so I got off and there it was.  Car fixed, on my way. Out in the middle of nowhere. That same station saved Theo and me last summer when we had a flat leaving Tucson.

I probably would not do any more such trips at eighty two even if I had the chance now. But I would be tempted, and even now I spend time at night re-driving all those trips to Seattle and back when Alexander lived up there and driving on Hwy.5 was like being in a herd of buffalo with the trucks, cars, and so forth all surging north bumper to bumper at seventy five or eighty MPH.  I can re-live the pleasure in my memory, and I do. It was wonderful, freeing and empowering. I loved it. YAZZYBEL