The Trip Home

            The first part of the trip home to Michigan was packing. Kim’s part of the job was doing all the packing. My part was carrying stuff to the car. She has a great special sense and can picture how things fit – into boxes, and then the boxes into the car without sliding around. I don’t have that ability, though I am good at opening jars and reaching things on high shelves.

 

            We decided to make this trip, as much as possible, an adventure. What we (Kim) had in mind was – as much as possible – to get off the Interstate and onto smaller more scenic roads. We had to take I-75 out of Atlanta, and we left by 6:30 in an attempt to beat the traffic. And we stayed on the Interstate for much of the first day, but a surprise near Knoxville reinforced our small roads decision when we encountered a large truck stopped in the center lane (ours) while the traffic on either side moved relatively freely. I saw it in time and applied the brakes, but I had under-estimated how the weight of our loaded 2015 Toyota Highlander would increase braking distance. With the help of some urgent warnings from Kim, I stopped our car about six inches short of a collision. Some of the stuff that I had loaded in the car without Kim’s supervision shifted a bit, and I felt something hit the back of my seat.

 

            We made it to our motel in Lexington, Kentucky a little after 3:00. We had been snacking on cookies, peanuts, and, frankly, anything Kim would hand me, so we weren’t hungry for dinner. The Hilton Garden Inn features a bar and restaurant, and we chose the former, where I had the best Manhattan ever – even better than mine. Back to the room, a brief struggle with the tv remote, and then to bed. We slept for eleven hours.

 

            We awoke to rain. It rained all day.

 

            It was time to shift our trip into small-road adventure mode, so after a little map-study we saw how we could get to highway U.S. 127, which we figured would take us all the way to Northern Michigan. Just a brief drive on I-75, with trucks splashing water all over our windshield, confirmed our decision.

 

            Traveling on Highway 127 turned out to be just the adventure we were looking for. We drove through beautiful farmland, flowering trees in dramatic cliffs where the road was carved through mountains, and the occasional Amish wagon. We also saw evidence of the terrible flooding that hit Kentucky – fields under water, and trees down from the wind. Fortunately for us, none of this impeded our travel. What did impede our travel was trying to stay on Highway 127, since it led us to downtown Cincinnati, where it merged with a number of other roads and changed names a few times. While looking hard for the “127” I managed to drive the wrong way onto a crowded one-way street. Fortunately, Kim’s arm-waving from the front street got the traffic to allow us off the one-way. We hopped back onto the Interstate, figuring that would take us to a motel.

 

            It did. But it was dismal in ways I won’t describe here. We bypassed the fast food restaurants and headed toward a small town a couple of miles from the motel, where we found a restaurant/tavern and had a martini with dinner. The problem was that we did not know how to get back to our motel. We did not have an address to tell Gertrude, the name we gave to our GPS voice. We drove around a bit, hoping to see something familiar. Nope. We saw some people on the sidewalk and, hoping for more information for Gertrude, asked them what state we were in, Ohio or Indiana. I don’t like to imagine what they were thinking, but they told us Indiana, which was no help. We finally saw some familiar landmarks in the form of about a mile-long string of fast-food restaurants, and we made it back to the motel for another good sleep.

 

            The next day we instructed Gertrude to avoid the Interstate on the way home. It was our best day of travel – farmland (often flooded), swollen rivers and streams, the occasional Amish wagon (seldom seen on the Interstate), small towns featuring a four-way stop sign or maybe a traffic light. We found a small breakfast place somewhere in Ohio (or Indiana), populated by a few farmers and no strangers, where we enjoyed home made corned beef hash and eggs, plus coffee and juice, plus two slices of lemon curd cake that the waitress’s mom made, for $20. It was a friendly place with the personable small-town charm that seems to be disappearing from America. It was one of many highlights of our trip.

 

            Warm feelings when we crossed into Michigan, and warm again when we hit familiar roads just outside of Traverse City. Some apprehension when we drove in and saw all the fallen trees cut and stacked next to our little dirt road.

 

 

More on our homecoming – and our departure from Atlanta – in a future post. Still digesting it all.