Things you've learned from roadtrips

In My Humble Opinion
1

I just got back from a roundtrip from Sanibel, Florida to Stilwell, Kansas (just outside KC), with a stop for the weekend in St. Louis, and here’s what I learned along the way:

Illinois is bad, because the speed limit is 65 and IDOT likes to close entire lanes of the interstate for miles to fix one pothole.

Paducah is a scary place.

Nashville just dares you to stay on Interstate 24.

Everyone from Georgia drives like an insane maniac, even when they’re in other states.

The Georgia State Patrol is just there to look good, bless their peachy little hearts.

When you see two cop cars sitting opposite each other in the median, the cops are sharing stories and donuts, and you can drive as fast as you like.

Even though Atlanta has 20-lane freeways, it still has the worst traffic of any city I’ve been to.

No one uses the HOV lane in Atlanta; therefore, Atlanta has many very lonely souls.

One stalled AMC Pacer can bring the above-mentioned 20-lane freeway to a stop, when placed directly downtown.

The exit for my house is 345 miles from the first exit in Florida, which is just way, way too far away. You can drive from Missouri to Illinois to Kentucky to Tennessee in the time it takes you to get from the border to here, and the midwest drive is a more interesting drive to boot.

Best Value Inns are neither a value, nor the best. To be specific, they are moldy ratholes, teetering on the edge of collapse, which cost $90 per night. But the beds are relatively comfortable, which counts the most in the end, I suppose.

If you look ragged, scary and tired enough, no one in an Applebee’s will make eye contact with you.

After two days on the road by yourself, you start speaking in tongues and ranting to plastic toys glued to your dashboard.

If you eat a pizza in a hotel room, followed by a Denny’s Grand Slam for breakfast the next day and fried chicken for dinner, you won’t have to go to the bathroom for days.
Anything you’ve learned?

2

Louisiana = Hell.

3

I’m sorry, did I read that correctly? Eating at Denny’s actually keeps you away from the bathroom!?!

Let’s see here…things I learned on road trips… Ah! Got it, keep your butt squeaky clean when driving through NJ in a car covered with Grateful Dead stickers.

Reclining bucket seats make a decent substitute for an overpriced hotel.

Fast food in the south is much better than in New England. Arby’s, Hardees, Popeye’s, Chic Filet are all cool places to stop.

Don’t break down in rural PA on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

There’s no such thing as too much music to chose from.

4

Truck stops generally have great pie.

You can get good prices on hotels by picking up those stupid newsprint booklets for the interstates. Those little rags are ubiquitous at truck stops and the like.

Go off the beaten track and you’ll have much much more to talk about years later.

Traveling with a little kid may seem like a drag, but if it forces you into towns to find parks (instead of those stupid McDonald playlands) the whole trip feels more relaxed.

You gotta ask for UNSWEETENED ice tea in the South if that’s what you want. Sweetened tea is the default. For reasons I’ll never understand, the same is true in Toronto.

Sending postcards (especially from dorky places) is a quick, cheap, easy way to stay in touch with friends and get credit for writing. Also it can make you a hero to your nephews and nieces.

Work out the rules for what music you’ll listen to (who gets control) before you start. Don’t forget to listen to local radio every now and then. That’s interesting.

Stop at antique stores when you need a break from driving.

Respect truckers. You ought to to this because it’s a hard life and they’re the backbone of our distribution system. But even if you don’t buy that, it’s still better for your sanity and safety to treat them and their rigs with respect when you’re on the road.

5

I love Montana’s open roads. 75 MPH now. Heard they used to have no speed limit in the past. No traffic. Beautiful scenery.

About lodging: If you can book in advance, you get better, cleaner, sweeter deals. I had a 2 bedroom suite in Ohio for $49. :cool:

6

Sweet tea = tinted sugar water

In a word:
BLEeEeCcCcHhHhH!!!

:o

7

In some places, the speed limit is 70 miles per hour. Heaven! (um, that was somewhere between Harrisburg PA and Savannah Georgia by way of Greensboro NC).

8

Most important:
A fear of height is one fear you can not overcome by facing it, at least on Old 66 between Kingman and Oatman Arizona.

You get a real feel for the shape of the continent driving the interstates coast to coast.

But the little state roads are better.

Wait staff lie about having cream and maple syrup; ‘creemer’ is not cream and if I couldn’t tell the difference I wouldn’t have asked. But maybe I was pushing it asking for maple syrup in Texas.

Elkhart Illinois is probably the nicest little town I have ever been in. The only good breakfast I got on the road.

Check to make sure the shower works before you go to bed; people are nicer at 10 pm than at 5 am.

Christian radio financial advice shows give adequate financial advice.

The Ozarks are breath-taking.

66 in Kansas is a perfect road.

Firemen in Saint Louis are very nice.

Tail-gating truck drivers are purely evil.

Dogs and young male cattle are not a good mix; in Texas, when the pavement ends, turn back. That’s probably a good idea in the Ozarks, too, but I didn’t come across any cattle.

New Mexico is the land of enchantment; even rocks and dirt are beautiful there. Don’t listen to the radio, just drive.

A big dog is the best companion, well worth the trouble of finding a motel that will accept one.

9

Oh yeah, driving exclusively on the inside radius of turns will not result in any appreciable decrease in the total length of your trip.

10

Oh yes! Gunslinger and I managed to stay in a fairly-luxe hotel in Jackson, MS (amazing, isn’t it?) for half price thanks to one of those. And I’ve had a couple of $30 nights in $50 hotels, too.

IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT
Before you plan your road trip route, check the NASCAR Winston Cup schedule. If you possibly can, avoid having to spend Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday night within 200 miles of that weekend’s venue. I learned this the hard way.

There’s a place in East Texas that makes and sells maple syrup. Believe it or not.

11

So, I am right; road-side waitstaff just lie, lie, lie. And my observation is that the more cows you can see from the road, the less likely your are to get real cream. Except in Vermont, but that’s a well-known exception to everything.
Kind of like East Texas, if you think about it.

12

You can almost maintain the legal speed limit in a blinding snowstorm by staying close behind the snowplow.

…Unless you are in Blue Earth, MN, wherein you’ll slip off the road and go through a barbed wire fence into a field resulting, ultimately resulting in higher insurance premiums, even when it isn’t snowing or particularly icy.

Middle Tennesse to Manitoba and back is a reasonable weekend roadtrip. Same with Middle Tennessee to Maine and back. Also, the round trip between San Francisco and Reno can easily be done in one night, even through the mountains in winter. There’s even a handy place to buy chains for the car you rented.

Carbonated water = lots of stops.

Mississippi is the most boring place on the planet (except the gulf coast).

Virginia has the most, um, vigilant state troopers patrolling the highways, mile per mile almost as watched as Bellevue, ID, the worst little speedtrap town I’ve ever had the misfortune of driving through.

13

The average tank of gas for a VW Rabbit lasts about as long as a 20-oz Dr. Pepper.

You can be completely, totally happy with everything you own in the abovementioned VW Rabbit, and not a place on earth to call home.

Travelling with a dog makes life more interesting, and gets you familiar with odd areas of rest stops.

There isn’t a spot in the continental US that can’t be reached in 3 days from any other spot in the Continental US. For under 300 dollars. If you’re driving the abovementioned Rabbit.

In Canada, if you drive far enough in the right direction, they start speaking French at you.

There is a place deep in the mountains of Maine where a steak sandwich is an inch and a half thick steak, on a roll. Yum.

The patty melt is the ultimate American food.

There is a state of mind that can be reached on truly long drives that approachesthe Infinite. When the idea of “not-driving” becomes inconceivable, when every gas stop becomes an interruption, you’re there.

You can sleep comfortably in a VW Rabbit at a rest stop, even if you have everything you own as well as your dog in it.

If you do sleep at a rest stop, you always wake up at dawn. And dawn is always glorious.

Chain motels will provide you with fewer adventures than local motels. This can be a good thing.

Chain restaurants will never be the equal of local restaurants, in food or adventure. Seek out locally owned eateries, and you will be rewarded with conversation, good grub, and occasionally a place to crash for the night.

There are places on roads throughout the US that were specifically designed with certain albums at certain times of day in mind.

A breakdown is fate giving you interesting stories to tell, if you live through them.

Every place is different, every person you meet is different, and they all have different ways of speaking to you. You have something to learn, something to teach, and something in common with, all of them.

14

1 (and most important). Choose your passengers carefully. I can go nonstop from Texas to Vegas with a laid back hippie chick, but I can barely drive around the block with a high maintenance anyone.

  1. An extra seat in the subcompact does not mean that a 300 pound friend can get a ride.

  2. The best time to drive across the South on I-10 is on a friday or saturday night. Every trooper on the road will be busy with a drunk driver that ran off the road.

  3. Camper Van Beethoven is an acquired taste; the only way to acquire this taste is to listen to the tape for 2000 miles. No one else has done this, so no one else will like that damn tape.

  4. When the car doesn’t track well anymore, pull over. The car is fine; you are tired.

  5. If friends says that you should check out the fireworks warehouse thirty miles before their exit, don’t. You lost all willpower five hundered miles ago and will go broke buying stuff.

  6. racinchikki, you’re right. NASCAR translates into most languages as “traffic jam in the middle of nowhere.”

  7. The fastest way to get there is to keep the left door closed.

  8. After a day in a car with kids, you will see a McDonald’s with a playground and realize that sometimes life is like a commercial.

  9. If you order a jalapeno in rural Missouri and eat it whole, the whole restaurant will talk about it. I don’t know why.

15

Do NOT eat pork rinds - especially if you have nothing in the car with which to quench your thirst, and a driver who loathes the thought of stopping.

As far as I can tell, you can eat nothing but a hot dog and a Sprite for every meal (save breakfast) for an entire month and not suffer any long-term adverse effects.

Beware traveling with a golfer. Chances are, they’ll have already scheduled a tee time to occur approx. 30 minutes after your ETA. You’ll get to your destination in a timely manner, but you won’t get to see much on the way.

16

California is the gateway to the afterlife, apparently. And, like Dante’s “Inferno,” the afterlife is circular, getting worse the farther in you go.

For example, while most of the San Francisco Bay Area is obviously heaven on Earth (Well…the geography, at least), as are the Sierra Nevadas, the Central Valley is clearly the physical manifestation of Hell.

Corollary: After produce, the Central Valley’s main products are (1) Haze, and (2) Heat.

Corollary two: When you can’t get the main theme to “High Plains Drifter” out of your head, and you start to expect to see your dead ancestors beckoning to you from the side of the road, you’ve driver in the Central Valley too long.
Fast food reacts with the human body’s internal chemistry to become highly sensitive to gravity, and it starts to do all it can to get to the center of the Earth from within your body.
Don’t drive to Biosphere 2 from Phoenix before making sure that “Closing Time” is different from the time when the last tour group is admitted.

Corollary: Do not pick up hitchhikers near the prison.

17

Driving from San Francisco to Albuquerque is an amazing experience for a London driver. Lessons learned are:

So that’s what cruise control is for! I managed to not touch a pedal for an hour on the road to Albuquerque.

Never pass a gas station if you have less than two thirds of a tank.

Is America really this big? It took a day just to leave California. OK, so we went via Yosemite, but you get my point.

Smile at the car coming the other way, it may be your last brush with humanity for the rest of the day.

No matter where you go, no matter how remote, you’ll find a radio station playing your kind of music.

And from a previous trip - Anchorage to Fairbanks - Alaskans like English accents but know nothing about England. I had some wonderful, surreal conversations about the British constitution when camping in Denali national park.

My conclusion - once you escape the cities, the USA is a great place to drive.

18

All exceptionally true. Glad I’m leaving in a little over a month. Add a Braves game into the mix and you’re in traffic hell.
I-55 through Arkansas has the worst exit/entrance ramps I’ve ever seen. There’s not any acceleration room.

The peach in Gaffney, SC (just off I-85) looks like a butt with something hanging if you look at it from the right angle.

Louisiana has boring interstates.

It’s much easier to get from New Iberia, LA to New Orleans if you take the new road (hwy 90?) south.

Chattanooga, TN has multiple ways to avoid the ridge cut and get over to I-75 south.

Yes, you can go from Atlanta to Knoxville and not drive through Chattanooga, if you’re willing to leave the interestate.

Driving from Roanoke, VA to DC sucks. But the traffic is much better in the Sterling, VA area than in any area surrounding Atlanta (see above).

19

  1. As has been said, pick your passengers carefully. Good passengers make for good trips.

  2. When normally non-funny roadside signs become hilarious, it’s time to take a break.

  3. Good tunes. I don’t know about anyone else, but I always seem to strike huge stretches of highway where there’s either no radio reception to speak of or crap stations, so good CDs are essential.

  4. Bottled water. Lots of it, in a mini-esky, if you’ve got one.

  5. Take side trips now and then. You can find some really cool back roads, or find some nifty little attractions. Failing that, you might get a good capuccino & slice in an unlikely place, and I know some country cafes with fan-bloody-tastic milkshakes (the Paragon Cafe in Gundagai is great).

  6. Get out and stretch your legs now and then.

  7. If you’re driving through roo-infested areas around sunset, pull over for a while. A roo on your bonnet can really ruin your trip.

  8. Never run over a wombat. You’ll need a new front end.

  9. The Great Ocean Road is one of the top (although short) drives on earth.

  10. Conversely, the Hay Plain is one of the most boring.

  11. The highway patrol guys based in Tarcutta, NSW, take their job very seriously.

  12. If you’re driving on a clear night, away from cities, pull over and look up for a while. If it’s cold, lie on the car bonnet. It’ll be warm.

  13. Enjoy the trip, not just arriving at the destination.

20

Sweet iced tea is the default all across Canada, actually. And I think the entire US of A is freaky for trying to foist off cold, brewed, crappy orange pekoe with a whiff of lemon as “iced tea”.

Another rule of road trips-- anyone who attempts to put Morrissey into the tape deck can acceptably be discharged from the vehicle at full speed.