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Notes from the road
Taking a trip is no fun when you have to worry about time and money.
But when you’re a busy family like we are, and when you live on a budget like ours, it’s hard not to worry about time and money.
So my advice to anyone like me who wants to squeeze in a quick trip halfway across the country is don’t do it.
Of course, we didn’t really have that option.
My brother, Chuck, died in St. Louis about seven years ago. He was 38, my older brother and my only sibling. I am 42 now.
I had seen his two boys four times since then; my mother had seen them three times. They are 10 and 13 now. A visit was long overdue.
My family was caught in the balance, trying to make an 1,800-mile round trip fun without losing our tempers or out minds.
I can tell you that I failed to keep my temper and sanity several times. But now that it’s over, I do think we all had a good time.
Here’s a link to a slide show capturing many of our stops. (I have now added more photos and captions.) And what follows are some notes from the road. I have a lot more to add, so check back here later if you want to learn a bit more about St. Louis, some travel tips and details and, hopefully, some funny audio. Click here for the slide show
Hour by Hour
We arrived in Greenville today about 5:45 p.m. and, man, was it good to be back home.
The girls woke up from a good nap just outside Farmville. They fell asleep after a picnic lunch at Pilot Mountain State Park near Mount Airy. That place is one of the many cool spots we passed where I want to spend more time and about which I would like to write more. I thought about Ernie Pyle and all the places and people he wrote about in America before he went to war.
My wife, Crystal, was on a mission, driving the distance home from Charleston, W.Va., where we stopped Sunday night. She and the girls wore expressions of deep satisfaction after we backed into the driveway to the scent of crepe myrtle buds, we opened the garage door, and our three cats bolted outside, signaling a return to the comforts of our routine.
All right, I’m getting carried away, here. But it’s been a long trip in a short time. My wife and I left our respective workplaces at 5 p.m. on Wednesday. We packed ourselves, Madison and Abigail, and my mother, Barbara, into the car and hit the road by 8 p.m. We hit Asheville about 1 a.m. Thursday and piled into a room at the Howard Johnson.
We hit the road about 9 a.m. the next morning and arrived in St. Louis at 6 p.m. thanks to the time change from Eastern to Central Standard Time. We checked into our hotel, made a few calls, and headed out again to make some visits and drop Mother at a friend’s house. We got to bed after midnight.
We were up Friday about 8:30. We saw a parade, I went to pick up my nephews Alex and Drew, we went to the Celebrate St. Louis festival and saw Drake Bell and a great Purina dog show, played in a wonderful public fountain, swam in the rooftop pool at our hotel, tried for about three hours to get a meal at a restaurant that was supposed to seat us in 45 minutes (see earlier blog posting) and watched a great fireworks show.
Saturday we slept in until 9, ate breakfast, packed up, checked out, waited at the arch until 2:25 for our ride to the top, rode back down and bolted to the 2:55 baseball game that had already started. We made the game by the top of the third and then had a thrilling, exciting and genuinely fun experience that made the trip.
Several friends who I had hoped to see at or after the game were out of town, so we headed to White Castle, a place that serves little greasy hamburgers cooked in onions. I try to go there and to Lion’s Choice Roast Beef every time I hit town. Then we went on to my sister-in-law, Cathy’s, house, to see the boys one more time. We ended up crashing there by 10:30 we were so tired.
We arrived to pick up Mother by 10:30 on Sunday morning. She had been staying at the home of her best friend, Mereda Eckert, and Mareda’s daughter Ulya. We got on the highway about noon and hit Charleston about 11, picking the hour back up that we had lost during the switch to Central time on the way in.
If you read all the way through this, and, trust me, I left out many details, you know why Crystal was on a mission to get home this morning, and why we were so glad when the garage door cracked open.
Pick your route
At least three relatively easy routes exist between St. Louis and North Carolina. Between 1978, when we moved to Missouri from our native Tar Heel state, my family and I have driven them all many times.
The first goes through Asheville, Knoxville, Nashville and Clarksville Tenn., Paducah, Ky., and Mount Vernon, Ill. The second turns north at Knoxville to Lexington, Ky., to Louisville, Ky., then on to St. Louis. The thirds, cuts north at Winston-Salem and heads through West Virginia onto Lexington, Louisville and St. Louis.
They all are good routes. But I think that I would choose the last as the best. The rolling hills of southern Indiana into the mountains of northern Kentucky are particularly fetching late in the day. And I’m in love with the rugged Mountain State, where I lived for a too-short year as editor of The Record-Delta in Buckhannon.
This is one of those things about which I would like to write much more about than my time now permits.
Suffice it to say that any of these routes offers beauty and points of interest, so leave time to turn off the beaten path if possible. Caves and coves, historic sites, architecture and good people await.
License plate bingo
Driving all that way excited my girls. I hope that continues. One of the activities that helped us pass the time, of course, was trying to identify as many different license plates as we could. We recorded 33 states and one foreign country: Mexico. Here is a list of the states, pretty much in the order by which we spotted them.
North Carolina New Jersey Illinois Georgia Florida South Carolina Tennessee Oklahoma Indiana Montana Idaho Nebraska Texas Kentucky Wisconsin Mississippi California Ohio New Hampshire Utah Michigan Alabama Washington, D.C. Missouri Iowa Arkansas West Virginia Kansas Maryland Pennsylvania Minnesota Massachusetts Oregon
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