From our driveway in Cincinnati, Ohio to our son’s driveway at Fort Riley, Kansas, it’s a good eleven-hour drive. Factor in gas stops and restroom breaks, along with at least one lunch stop, and we quickly add an hour to the trip. Depending on how many stops you make, you can easily add two hours to your drive.
So on Thursday morning, I took off for Junction City, Kansas, with a friend, Alice, to go pick up my two youngest granddaughters, Tobie (3) and Kyndall (4). On a drive that long I like to leave early and arrive early. Therefore, I like to leave between six and seven in the morning. But Alice isn’t an early riser and she ran into an unexpected delay, so she didn’t get to my house until about 8:40. Needless to say, we weren’t on the road until almost 9:00. Combined with the routine stops, we pulled into my son’s driveway at 9:30 p.m. (10:30 Cincinnati time)
Alice and I stayed Friday in order to rest up from our long drive and packed up the car that night. for our return trip. The next day we loaded up the kids and took off for Cincinnati, leaving a few minutes before 8:00 central time.
The two little ones traveled remarkably well. They never got fussy or whiny from being in their car seats for an extended period of time, and we made good time until we got to St. Louis. Heading into downtown St. Louis, the freeway change sneaked up on me and I was in the wrong lane when 70 E divided from 55 and 44, so I missed my turn. Now I had to decide whether to stay on 44 or jump to 55 toward Chicago. I didn’t even know where 44 was headed, but it didn’t matter. I was on the wrong freeway either way. I needed 70. So I followed 44 around and got off at the first exit. I knew that I had to go back the way I’d come, but I only saw a freeway on-ramp for 55 North, so I pulled off the road and plugged in my GPS. It directed me to get on 55 North, so I did. Guess what I discovered. 55 N and 70 E ran together. If I had followed 55 instead of 44, I wouldn’t have had to even get off the freeway. All in all, it was only a ten-minute detour.
But the one that really set us back was the freeway closure in Indiana. About a hundred miles west of Indianapolis, we were forced to exit the freeway by a state trooper who had all lanes blocked with his car. And another officer blocked the on-ramp, directing traffic to the left as we exited the freeway. We followed the semi’s in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic for three or four miles down a little two-lane road before turning onto a state highway, which eventually led us back to Interstate 70. That detour took us an hour out of the way, but we arrived safely at our destination around 11:30 p.m. (10:30 central)