No, not the kind of trip with wings, $8 bottles of water, and unpaid TSA operatives.
I'm talking flying in the hit-em, turn-em, and burn-em sense of the word. In-n-out. Get it done and run.
The whole thing was the result of the conjunction of the unlikely trio of The Brother's surprise 70th party, The SIL's home remodeling/redecorating project, and The Wife’s road trip to deliver a vehicle. The first in Michigan, the second in Missouri, and the third 20 years ago.
What's The Wife’s long-ago road trip got to do with anything? - I'll get back to that later.
I got word of the first, The Brother's surprise 70th party, via super-secret clandestine channels. - OK, so it was a text from my nephew's wife - and started shifting some medical crap around to see if I could fit it in.
The second, the SIL's home remodel, has been years in the making. Probably a little over a decade, what with the pause when Elmer took up residence there for his final years. - You may remember that Elmer was firmly entrenched on the clumsy side of the spectrum, clasic bull & china shop stuff, and could trash a place faster than a herd of two year olds. Nothing deliberate or malicious about it, that's just the way it was. So no sense in trying to make things nice while all that was going on. - As a result of the protracted time-line The Wife had a few "finishing touches" kinds of things she had restored/refurbished/redecorated/made to assist with the remodel that had been taking up a portion of our limited space for years. But now the remodel was finally at the point where it was time to relocate that stuff the 800 miles between here and there.
Which gets us back to The Wife’s road trip of several decades ago. Although there's still some background info neccessary to make sense of it.
It's a hard fact that there are certain things that must be done to make everyday life function. It was that way when humans were exclusively hunter-gatherers, it was that way when the majority of people lived an agrarian life, and it continues to be that way in our complexly "modern" world.
Like many households, for most of our 40+ years together The Wife and I addressed this need with a divvied partnership. She handled certain aspects of daily living, I handled others, and between the two of us we had it covered.
Then three years ago we were looking at a very real posibility that The Wife is going to be left to handle everything on her own.
We immediately started converting to a shared partnership. The ultimate goal being that either one of us can handle any of the everyday house/life-management tasks that come along. That way, if one of us is left without the other the household can continue to function without adding any undue stress at an already difficult time. We've made a lot of progress on that and are down to cleaning up a few odds and ends.
For instance, because of our hard well-water and an adversion to water-wasting traditional water-softners (Generally speaking, for every gallon of water consumed another half to full gallon is used to backflush the softener. I don't know how people on metered water-systems can put up with that!) we have a catalizing infuser canister installed on the inlet of the water heater that reduces (but doesn't eliminate - something we're willing to live with) the amount of solids and scale that percipitate out during the heating process that needs to be replaced every quarter. Last change-out I walked The Wife (a visual learner) through the process as I did it and next quarter she will do the change herself.
But there is still one big thing we needed to work on. As we've gotten older we've both noticed that certain traits/behaviors of our individual neural-divergentencies have become more pronounced.
In my case I think it's because I haven't had to practice my coping skills near as much since my slightly early retirement (58) and I've gradually become even more of a sour old curmudeon an isolationist. For The Wife, who's particular brand makes the outside world a scary and overwhelming place, similar to but not quite the same as agoraphobia (familiar places, like the local towns aren't overly traumatic for her, especially if she can do curbside pickup and not have to mingle.), her life was disrupted earlier than that, forcing her to give up work in the late 90's, well before typical retirement age.
For the last several decades she hasn't exactly been housebound, but neither has she ventured beyond our usual boundaries. The last time she made the trip on her own to Missouri, where her sisters live, was a couple of decades ago to deliver a vehicle we were done with to one of her sisters.
Some six months ago we chipped away a little at that limiting issue when she rode with me up to St. Louis where I dropped her off in the hands of her sisters while I went off and camped for a few days before we hooked up again and drove home together.
Now, what with the confluence of me needing to make a quick trip to Michigan and a bunch of stuff needing to be delivered to her sister, we suddenly had an opportunity to do it again. Only this time, she would drive her own car (up to this point her 2 year old car had barely 5000 miles on it. And the nearest town is 17 miles away!), following me up to the south-side of the St. Louis area then breaking off on her own while I continued up to Michigan. Then we would meet up in about the same area a few days later and she would follow me back home.
It was an ambitious, and frankly pretty damn scary, plan, but we went to work. Finishing up some details on the stuff going to her sister (color scheme changed!),
buying a set of two-way radios for communication while driving, having her practice putting addresses into Google maps then activating the route and following the directions, marking and sewing the hem of the skirt she made for the trip (we use a laser and chalk to make sure the hem hangs even and it's a two-person job, me marking while she turns), packing all the crap securely into her car, lining up the local Rover to feed the cats and water the barn-toad, and that sort of crap.
But the prep did not go as smoothly as one would hope (does it ever!).
While we were in the middle of all this the gate opener decided it was old enough for its own retirement and let us know by acting up pretty much every-other time we tried to use it. Fine for us, but we couldn't expect a Rover to know, and perform, all the little tricks for coaxing the damn thing to function everytime they came over. And for us leaving the gate open is not an option! (Here in rural Texas a fence and closed gate is the same as "Trespassers Will Be Shot On Sight" signs posed every few feet and that's the way we like it.)
So in the middle of all the other crap we had to purchase and install a new opener. Idealy we would pull the old one out and drop the new one in place, but of course our 20 year model had long been discontinued and the replacement was just different enough that it required some additional tweeking and reworking to get everything to fit-n-function. Time we really didn't have.
Especially when we suddenly got word that an appointment in St. Louis had been moved forward by a day!
Panic stations! As we scrambled to finish up and hit the road a day earlier than expected.
But we made it.
On the previous trip, when she rode with me, The Wife, made the initial 12 hours from home to Paragould Arkansas just fine, but we weren’t sure she'd be able to drive herself that far all in one shot.
No worries. We managed to hit Little Rock at rush (I usually make it through there around 1500, but I tend not to eat when driving. That's not an option for The Wife so it takes us longer.), but still managed to get to Paragould just as daylight was fading.
At about mid-day the second day, after two mandatory food-stops, she went left and I went right at the 270/55 intersection just south of St. Louis. She - headed for her youngest sister's place in St. Charles then on to the other sister's in Columbia the next day. Me - headed across the river into Illinois and on to the newly reopened Indiana welcome center at Terre Haute for the night. (There's something like 140 truck/RV slots and three seperate bathroom buildings at this masive place!)
An hour or so after we split it occured to me I should turn off the two-way radio. We had clearly been way out of range for at least 45 minutes by then. But after working closely together during the frantic run-up to the trip and a couple of intensely stressful days as we tested The Wife's road-trip chops, it was surprisingly difficult to sever that connection, however useless it was. (I didn't actually turn it off untill after she texted that she was with her sister)
The next morning I stocked my small fridge, now free of the last two days worth of meals and snacks for the two of us, with some salad stuff & sundries there in Terre Haute. Because of the scheduling change at this point I had an extra day, a layover in my flying trip if you will, and decided that rather than get to my sisters' place early I could use some alone chill time.
Turkey Run State park was not too far north of me so I decided to run up there and see if I could snag a campsite for the night.
OK - - here's the thing - - Recently, as a cost-saving measure, Indiana State parks switched to an on-line reservation only system. (Now they don't have to man the gatehouse all day. You just go set up on your reserved site and they come around later to make sure you belong there.) And the cutoff for same-day reservations is 1100. By the time I got there and read the new rules posted where there used to be a live person, it was 1109 - - - Didn’t matter how many available sites were sitting there just waiting for me to pull in (and there were plenty. I could see them!), I was screwed.
Oh, and BTW. If you go to the Turkey Run web page and click on the "reserve a site" button, it doesn't take you to the Turkey Run reservation page, it dumps you out in a general State Park reservation page that starts asking a bunch of questions about what I like and what I want to do "so we can guide you to an excelent outdoor experiance". I ALREADY KNOW WHERE I WANT TO GO, STOP MEDDLING IN MY LIFE AND JUST LET ME HAVE THE RIGHT FUCKING PAGE!
Anyway - screwed on snagging a campsite I figured I'd go a half mile down the road to the day-use area instead - where I got screwed again -
Oh I got in alright, but instead of the $7 non-resident fee I'd been paying for years, it has more than doubled to $15 ! ! !
Well the joke's on them.
After crossing the suspension bridge over Sugar Creek (on foot of course!)
and looping around trail 4 past the coal mine
and the old covered bridge,
I "camped" out in a corner of the parking lot, chilling till dinner, then chilling some more till they were about to kick me out (the day-use area closes at 2300) before heading to the Cracker Barrel in Crawfordsville, about 40 miles away, for the night.
One day, a small project and some jigsaw puzzle work, at The Sisters' place, one day at The Brother's surprise party eating good food, visiting with a surprising number of extended family, hugging the wall trying to stay out of the way of even more strangers and stave off a meltdown without actually having to leave (a whole mess of former co-workers from the Ford Proving Grounds and pretty much everybody from the RC flying club turned up. Good thing it was a large hall!), and back on the road the next morning.
Because of that scheduling change requiring an extra day for her, and the fact that The Wife can only take just so much of her sisters - or pretty much anybody for that matter - she was more than ready to head back home! So, while I was working my way down through Indiana and across Illinois she made her way from Columbia, where one sister lives, towards St. Louis to drop the other sister off, then head south to get the hell outa there!
Instead of meeting up just south of the city she decided she wasn’t going to stop untill she got to Cape Girardeau, another 100 miles further south. Obviously the goal of improving her road-trip chops has been successfully met! In fact, the road-trip part was the least traumatic component of this journey for her. (Family! Whatayagonado?)
As an added bonus, this change in plans let me stay on the Illinois side of the river all the way down to Cape Girardeau and avoid the St. Louis crap altogether.
But the day wasn't without its drama, self-inflicted I admit, but drama nonetheless. We share a points-earning credit-card account, one account, two card numbers, and have it set up to send alerts of any activity to both our phones. As I was headed south that day it occured to me that I hadn’t seen a gas purchase alert from The Wife’s card since we had gone our separate ways days ago.
True, her car gets great fuel milage, but what the hell!
We have Ford Pass set up for both our vehicles on both our phones. Not only does this let us lock/unlock remotely, but, among other things like service/recall notices, we can also see each vehicle's location (the last time it was turned off or updated every 30 to 60 minutes when running) tire pressure, remaning life of the last oil-change, and, more importantly as I was begining to panic, fuel level.
She was down to a little less than a quarter-tank or about 120 miles of fuel left. That doesn't sound too critical, but she had farther than that to go for the day! Around home she only has to worry about fuel once a month or so and the tank is rarely less than half full. So I sent a one-word text - Gas? (I had pulled off the road to do this "spying".) Then I worried myself grey - OK, so my hair is already grey, but you know what I mean - for the next week and a half - or maybe it was only a half-hour - 45 minutes, untill I finally got a gas-purchase alert from the account. Whew!
Anyway, by 1700 we were back together again and a day and a half later, home.
She was more comfortable following me than driving around Missouri on her own, but now we know she can handle a solo road-trip if she has to, though she's already hinted at another follow-me trip in the fall some time.
