Driving to Florida

So this year we are heading to Florida for Christmas to visit my folks, which means driving for about 18 hours straight. It has been some time since I drove someplace of great distance. The longest I have ever gone is to St. Louis for a training session for work, which was about 6 hours. The last time I drove to Florida must have been about 1984 or ’85, so this was going to be an adventure. I had always enjoyed the driving to Florida as a kid, and I figured that with gas being as cheap as it is right now, it would be a good, cheap vacation and we get to visit my parents to boot.

We got off to a slow start. I wanted to be on the road by 3:00 AM and we didn’t get out of the driveway until about 3:20 or so. I figured that this would put us in The Villages around 10:00 PM. It would also get us through Chicago before the rush hour started. And we timed it just right, because we were thru Chicago right as the traffic volume began getting heavy. We were right around the Sears Tower (sorry, I don’t know what the current name of it is) when it started picking up and we were thru and on the south side without much trouble. We did have a little bit of a hiccup just south of Chicago, well two actually. First, we had turned onto a section of the I90 Skyway and as we came around a turn, a blind turn, there was a car pulled over in the inner shoulder right next to the center divider. The problem was there really wasn’t a “shoulder” there, so it was essentially right on the lane line. And doing 75 mph and being on the left side of the lane, to suddenly see a car stopped right next to my lane was a bit of a shock, and with another car next to me in the center lane I couldn’t really swerve out of my lane. Luckily we missed it, though it was also a little bit of a wake up call. Then a little bit past that, the Garmin was telling me to keep left on 94, which would have taken us up to Michigan. I had looked ahead and I knew that I needed to get on I65 to go south thru Indiana, so I kept right which was the right way. After we got past that exit, the Garmin corrected itself, so we were in good shape, although a little way past that exit, I hit a huge pothole, and when I say huge, I mean it was HUGE. Doing 75-80 and hitting that hole I thought I was going to blow a tire, because the bang from the right side of the car was so loud it was hard to believe we didn’t. I would be willing to bet we probably bent the rim slightly at least.

The only other blip we had was going thru Louisville. Again, I was following the Garmin’s directions, and at one point as we were going thru Louisville, it told me to go left from I65 to I265. I figured it was taking us on a way around Louisville, but as soon as we got onto I265, it started “recalculating” and told me to get off the interstate and turn around to go back to I65. I will say that was really annoying. We had been making up the time we had lost leaving late and now with the stop we had for gas around Indianapolis and the mishap with the Garmin directions we were back to where we had started, and in fact a little bit behind schedule. I was hoping we would be able to make up a little bit of that time once we got out of Louisville and were back to where we could run around 80 mph.

Once we were into Tennessee things started to get better as far as the traffic goes. I was actually surprised at how much people drove in both lanes. In Wisconsin, only the fast traffic is supposed to drive in the left lane (I’m not sure if it’s a law, but more of an unwritten rule). Once we were thru Louisville, cars were driving in both lanes, zig zagging in and out. It was weird but I figured as long as the traffic kept moving, who cares? One thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t really use the cruise control because we would come up on slower cars and then have to slow down because there were cars in the other lane and I wouldn’t be able to pass.

We only had a couple of instances of bad traffic. First in Nashville. We rolled thru Nashville around noon and got into some heavy traffic for about 15-20 minutes going thru downtown around the football stadium. But that was just slow. We went from about 75 or 80 down to 40 mph for a stretch. But things picked up again as soon as we got out of the downtown area. Then we ran into another jam around Chatanooga. We were actually about 20 miles outside of Chatanooga when the traffic started to slow. For a time, we were in full stop. Turns out that there was a brush fire that was causing people to stop and gawk at the firemen that were working on extinguishing it. It wasn’t big, just a nuisance. Then once we got past it, we ran into more slow traffic in Chatanooga itself, right past Lookout Mountain and all the way to where we got onto I-75. It probably took us about an extra 15-20 minutes to get thru. I didn’t realize that there is one way, and only one way to get thru Chatanooga. So I guess it is to be expected. But even that wasn’t all that bad. The bad part of the trip was Atlana.

We got to Atlanta right around dinnertime. We hit the northern ‘burbs around 4:30 or so. I wasn’t sure if taking the bypass would be better, or to just stay on I-75 thru downtown. I decided on the downtown route, figuring that either way we went, we were going to be stuck in traffic. Rush hour the Friday before the Christmas holiday = brutal! We got into some heavy traffic downtown, but I figured that was going to be expected. So I just stayed in my lane, and kept moving with the traffic figuring that it would thin out eventually. When we began to move faster again and it looked like we were thru the heavy stuff, I got off to grab some McDonalds quickly for dinner. We were off the highway for about 10 or 15 minutes tops. The traffic on the city streets was just as bad as on the interstate. But then…. When we got back on the highway, we went about half a mile before we were sitting in traffic again, which just happened to be where 675 joined back up with I-75. Apparently I should have just stayed on the highway because it took another hour to go around 20 miles on the south side of Atlanta. Like I said… BRUTAL! I thought that it may be an accident or something that was causing the congestion since we saw an ambulance and a cop car with the lights on go by on the shoulder, but we never saw anything. I guess the traffic is just that bad around Atlanta. It would definitely make me NOT want to live there.

After that things were pretty smooth, traffic-wise. The only snag we sort of ran into was having to stop for gas. I was hoping to get to Valdosta for our final gas-up, but we couldn’t quite make it. We ended up needing to stop about 30 miles or so north. It was dark, and there was construction, and not a whole lot of traffic. I pulled off following a sign that said “Gas”, but when I got off the interstate, there were no gas stations to be found. What there was, was a deserted, shell of a gas station. It looked like something out of an episode of Scooby Doo. Dark, broken windows, weeds growing up around abandoned pumps. It was actually kind of scary. The sort of thing that horror movies are made of. We made a quick U-turn back onto I-75 and headed south to the next exit, which was about another three miles before coming to a place where we could fill up. We got lucky, because according to the telemetry on the Santa Fe, we were about 25 miles from being out of gas, and I don’t know how accurate the gauge is since I never took it down that far before, so who knows how much farther we could have gone. The overall drive from Macon to Valdosta was boring. It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. Every now and then we’d come up on a city/town, but then it would be gone. Like a one exit town, then nothing. And when you get into the dark in rural Georgia, you are in the dark. Seriously dark. It would have been great for star gazing, but for anything else, not so much. It made for a very long ride.

Once we filled the tank in Vienna, we were straight thru to The Villages with no more incidents. We arrived around 11:30 PM local time and it was good to finally get to my folks’ house. I was really starting to get worn out about the last 30 or 40 miles of highway.

Overall, the drive was uneventful and I thought enjoyable. The state I enjoyed driving in Most: Tennessee, followed by Florida and Kentucky. State that was the worst: Indiana, then Georgia. Indiana by far had the WORST roads. They were very bumpy/rough and I felt like the suspension on the car was going to break with all the bumps we were hitting. Or at the very least bust a shock absorber. The roads outside of Chicago were pretty bad as well; it’s hard to believe that you have to pay to drive on them and this is what you get.

I will also note that I was told not to stop in Georgia to use rest rooms if I could help it. I have to say, that was good advice. Even in the large truck stops/service centers we stopped at in Georgia, the bathrooms were horrendous. I would have almost preferred a hole in the ground. It was like they hadn’t cleaned or updated equipment in the bathrooms of the gas stations or roadside restaurants (yes, even in the McDonalds we stopped at) for the last 15 or 20 years. Y-U-C-K! The gas stations we stopped at in Tennessee halfway between Nashville and Chatanooga were a little better, but not much. Apparently that isn’t a priority in the south. But otherwise, I would definitely make the drive again.