On the 13th day
Last night we decided to split the difference between Tallahassee and Pensacola by stopping at a town named Bonifey which is almost dead center in between. We got lucky and found a very nice and new Holiday Inn Express to stay at. It was right around the best of the places we stayed at during this road trip.
Our dinner on the way in was an extravagant Subway meal. Both Cindy and I have had more than our fill of convenience food during this trip. After we get back from road trips we normally have a lot of resolve to eat very clean to make up for the dirty road eating.
So like I said the hotel was very nice. The shower was clean, the bed was comfortable, and everything was well tended to. Despite these things I got yet another miserable night of sleep. Why you ask? Somewhere on the second floor there must have been a smoke detector with a low or dead battery. The result of that was it beeping every 20 seconds or so the entire night.
I was exhausted when I fell asleep last night so the detector sound couldn’t stop me. However once I woke up around 3AM it became like Chinese water torture. I did not feel like going down to the front desk in the middle of the night. Instead I laid in bed trying to ignore the noise and fall back asleep, unsuccessfully. I then grabbed one of the extra pillows and sandwiched my head in between it, fashioning some makeshift ear muffs. The thick pillows did a good job of blocking the sound but also was warm and uncomfortable. Having pillows jammed against my ears also made me hear/feel my pulse which was just another thing to keep me awake. I basically laid in bed awake until maybe 5am and then was awoken at 5:40 by the alarm. I am looking very forward to recapturing a more normal sleep schedule starting tonight in my own bed. I let the clerk know about the beeping this morning, I find it impossible that nobody else on the floor would have complained about it prior to me.
When Cindy turned on the tv this morning there was some Alabama public access tv channel tuned in. The show that was on was called Hobo Pantry. At first I thought the chubby man seated to the right was a woman as he had a bizarre 1975 haircut and a plaid button down shirt that would have passed for a blouse. Once he spoke there was no doubt he was a hard core southerner. To his left was some sort of park ranker type guy. He sat in a large wooden rocking chair with his hands folded across his lap. The set looked like it was straight off of a Hee Haw set.
While I watched they covered a variety of topics, including how to not shoot yourself during hunting season, fishing regulations, and how the host was glad to hear someone he knows that supports same sex marriage was moving out of town. It was strangely compelling, enough so that I filmed a few seconds of it.
We were pulling out in the Prius by 7AM and have had an uneventful drive south so far. Our eta is 4PM but we need to make a grocery store pit stop on the way home so we probably won’t get home until closer to 5. Once we do a whirlwind of unpacking, laundry, and cleaning will be unleashed, unlike anything the world has ever seen.
Just like all of our road trips, this one has had so many memorable moments it is pretty much impossible to pick them all out. But let’s run some numbers first. It looks like out total mileage is going to be just over 6600 miles, making it the farthest road trip I have ever done. To be honest I think it was a bit too ambitious. As I mentioned yesterday Cindy and I have both been going a bit nuts being in the car so long. Just for perspective our trip last year was around 5000 miles.
We spent about $1100 on hotel rooms during the trip, not bad for 12 nights that included Vegas and the Grand Canyon area (most expensive of the trip) Believe it or not to cover all those miles only cost us $375 in gas, I added it myself a second time because I couldn’t believe it. We averaged a little over 45 mpg for those 6500 miles. Our best tank average was 54.7 mpg and our worst was 38.7. The most we paid for gas was $3.29 in the Vegas area, the least we paid was $1.99 in Georgia somewhere. The lowest price we saw posted anywhere was $1.80 a gallon somewhere in Texas.
So as far as highlights of the trip, every spot we targeted delivered in one way or another. There are 13 days of blog entries you can pour through if you would like them in detail. There was so much beauty to be seen in many forms from the man created Mount Rushmore, Las Vegas and Hoover Dam contrasted by the natural awesomeness places like Yellowstone, Craters of the Moon, and the Bonneville Salt Flats possess.
I really couldn’t establish a clear leader in the best of those attractions but if I were to pick the worst of the five I would probably choose Vegas for several reasons. Only spending one full day there made everything seem rushed and when combined with all of those damn people, cigarette smoke, and pricey entertainment I found Vegas to be the only time during the road trip where I really found myself in a foul mood. I also was not happy that they have torn down so much of the strip and rebuilt it in the span of 10 years that I hardly recognized sections of it.
The bad luck I had with my aerial sorties during the trip were pretty funny in retrospect although they certainly didn’t feel that way at the time. To crash the Phantom at both Yellowstone and Craters of the Moon after basically never crashing the drone in two years of ownership is pretty nuts. The feelings I had of embarrassment and anger at myself as I maneuvered the dangerous, restricted lava field area of Craters of Moon trying to find the drone are something I will not soon forget. I was literally a minute away from just giving up and walking away from $1400 of quadcopter and camera equipment.
Of course road trips are all about the travel as much as the destination. We saw so many things, met so many different types of people and got to experience a seat of your pants style of life that is such a contrast to our mostly regimented day in and day out existence.
Cindy and I pretty equally split the driving on the trip which made things more bearable. My distraction of choice when I was not driving was either punching out the blog or playing dozens of games of Hearthstone on the iPad. It helped long periods of time pass by pretty painlessly.
As I have mentioned several times the length of the trip was something that was a bit problematic. It’s very hard to cover those kind of miles in 13 days and not have any conflicts which there have been a few of. Luckily Cindy and I are normally pretty good at putting stupid things behind us. I think our experiences will help us when it comes to planning future ventures out of the state. Less miles and a more casual driving pace would probably make a road trip less about the grind and more about the great.