I hope you enjoyed the past month of a little fictional writing based on my students’ suggestions. It’s always fun to dip my toe back into that style of writing before jumping back to my weekly musings.
I’m not overly fond of driving long distances. A trip to the Twin Cities or Winona or New Ulm is about far enough for me. That’s right, I’m a homebody.
So I’m sure my family was surprised when, in thinking about vacation this year, I suggested Denver, Colorado, as a possible destination. And that we would drive.
But drive we did - 12 hours each way. And we did it in one day for going to Colorado and one day for returning to Minnesota!
I learned a few things about driving over the course of this trip. Allow me to share them with you.
*There are a lot of dangerous drivers with Iowa license plates. Driving on interstates for the entire trip shows you just how fast and crazy some people want to be. I saw many cars with Iowa plates dashing in and out of lane changes with barely enough room for their vehicle. Driving up the right lane as far as possible while a long line is passing a vehicle on the left is not a great plan of action. It’s worse when that car just zooms into a narrow opening, thus causing the rest of that line to have to hit the brakes.
*When people settled Nebraska, it seems like most of them stayed in the eastern part, specifically Omaha and Lincoln. After that, there’s not much to see in Nebraska outside of a lot of little lakes near the interstate that Michelle noticed.
*Maybe because there’s not much to see, most of Nebraska has 75 MPH as a speed limit on the interstate. I had no idea this was a thing, having seen 70 MPH for so long in Minnesota. In keeping up with traffic, I set my cruise at 75 and discovered that that number is really as high as I’m comfortable driving. Not so for all the people who zoomed by me, making me look like I was in park. If 75 MPH isn’t enough for you, there’s always NASCAR.
*The 75 MPH was put to a test, however, in Colorado. Once we got to the Denver metro area and there were 4-5 lanes of traffic, parts of the interstate were still at that upper limit. It’s very different driving that fast in two lanes, but I just couldn’t do it with so many cars around me.
*Of course, that wasn’t an issue most of the time. Denver traffic is brutal. It didn’t seem to matter what time of day it was. I could understand stop-and-go traffic during morning and afternoon rush hours, but 1:30 in the afternoon? It was also funny to watch the people who think that switching lanes repeatedly will get you anywhere in that type of traffic. Eventually, we’d catch up to them again.
*Have you ever played the license plate game on a trip? We do this on vacations, looking for as many different states and Canadian provinces as we can. This trip, we matched our high number for states with 45, adding in two provinces. We even found a Hawaii plate when we got detoured away from an accident in Denver! The best chances at different states come with semi trucks and moving vans. The most-seen semi plates, outside the ones from the state in which we were driving, were from Maine, Indiana, and Illinois!
*Sometimes those little decisions on when to stop and where to fill up with gas lead to interesting incidents. In the middle of Nebraska, I needed gas and pulled into a small-town Casey’s. While we waited to purchase a drink inside, we were treated to a 10-year-old girl swearing up a storm, including F-bombs galore! Anton and I heard the mother stage whisper to the cashier that she needed prayers because the girl would sometimes carry a knife into her bedroom while she slept. Um, well…
*Here in Minnesota, it seems like you can’t drive far on an interstate without encountering construction in the summer. But all the way through Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado, we only had to deal with traffic stoppage one time. There were other construction zones where you slowed down a bit, but there wasn’t much work being done. Granted, we drove out on a Sunday, so that’s to be expected. But driving back on a Friday, I thought we’d see more. And the roads were, by and large, really in good shape. So why do our roads in Minnesota need so much more work? Do our winters do that much damage?
*I get nervous in new driving settings. Imagine the normal nerves paired with driving up and down Pike’s Peak, where guardrails are at a minimum and the lanes are not wide and luxurious. I did learn about the L setting on my car, using the low gear setting to drive back down the mountain. I also learned that when your brake temperature is over 300 degrees, you take a break!
We had a great family trip, and I discovered that driving a long distance can be okay when your family is along to provide good conversation and when you have good music to play. Twelve hours might be my limit, though. When I saw license plates from Florida and New Jersey, I thought about how much farther they had to drive and was thankful my trip was not that long.
But I will be glad for my trips to New Richland, Owatonna, and Albert Lea in my near future!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is Erewhonian, which means opposed to machines and technology, as in, “The Erewhonian found that they got lost quite often since they refused to use GPS and Google Maps.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!