Posted 9:33 am Sunday, September 05, 2010
Driving With Kids
Transcontinental Road Trip Filled With Sights, Jitters
By BRIAN PEARSON
Managing Editor
Nine states. More than 3,500 miles and a dozen McDonald's cheeseburger Happy Meals. From the piney woods to the amber waves of dying corn stalks. From the mountains, to the prairies, to the swamps green with slime.
Managing Editor
Nine states. More than 3,500 miles and a dozen McDonald's cheeseburger Happy Meals. From the piney woods to the amber waves of dying corn stalks. From the mountains, to the prairies, to the swamps green with slime.
God bless America and Clifford the Big Red Truck, which ferried my merry family of four from Tyler all the way to Virginia Beach, Va., and back last month.
Air travel costs these days would have added $1,000 to our annual trip to the family beach condo in Virginia. So we decided to make the journey by land in my new four-door Chevrolet Silverado, which the mother-in-law nicknamed Clifford because of its size and color.
A mix of excitement and trepidation filled the truck cab as we set off Aug. 5. The idea of seeing the country was the exciting part, while doing this with young boys, ages 6 and 8, provided the trepidation part.
The first day's goal after an afternoon launch was to get to Little Rock and shave four hours off the drive. The hotel, booked online with a reputable chain, proved to be less than desirable, with a dirty pool, nasty rollaway bed and blood on the drapes. (Lesson: Check the online reviews before deciding on a hotel.)
The hotel set a foul tone to the journey's start, but we didn't let that continue as we hit the road at daybreak and headed to Kentucky.
Interstates provided a clear shot to one of our second-day destinations: Mammoth Cave near Bowling Green, Ky.
Interstate 40 took us through Memphis, Tenn., and on to Nashville, which we had targeted for lunch.
The wife, Amy, and I are into food shows such as "Man v. Food" on the Travel Channel and "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" on the Food Network.
Researching and targeting restaurants made nationally famous on television shows added spice and excitement to a transcontinental trip.
Our target in Nashville was the Athens Family Restaurant, an odd little place with a wacky menu of items ranging from pot pies to pan-fried crab cakes to all kinds of Greek things that likely only Greeks can pronounce correctly.
I chose the lamb burger, one of the items Guy Fieri from "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" featured, while the wife had a Greek salad and spanakopita, which is oven-baked layers of buttery phyllo dough filled with sauteed spinach and feta, according to the menu.
Both meals were excellent.
After lunch, we made the 90-minute drive to Mammoth Cave, arriving just before 4 p.m. To our disappointment, all the shorter cave tours were sold out, so we had no choice but a two-hour tour, which turned out to be mind-blowing.
After lunch, we made the 90-minute drive to Mammoth Cave, arriving just before 4 p.m. To our disappointment, all the shorter cave tours were sold out, so we had no choice but a two-hour tour, which turned out to be mind-blowing.
From there, the goal was to drive east as far as possible, stopping only after we grew tired or the boys had had their 127th argument over video game cartridges.
Drained, cranky and worried about potentially difficult roads ahead, we pulled into Somerset, Ky., after dark to find all the hotels booked by a biker convention.
With my patience firmly splattered on the wall of emotions, we set out east in the dark toward London, Ky., about 30 miles away. Knowing that incoming bikers were desperately spilling into hotel accommodations in surrounding cities, the wife brilliantly got on the iPhone and booked the last room at a nice hotel.
Morale in the cab soared as they gave us the suite for the cost of a regular room. The boys had their own room, and the wife had a big Jacuzzi in which to relax after a hard day on the road.
London, population 5,600, is a pretty little town on the east side of the Appalachian Mountains. A cool front had come through, so crispness hung in the air.
The decision to come this route was based on not wanting to backtrack to Nashville and pick up Interstate 40, adding about 180 miles to the trip east.
The trip out of London through the mountains was eagerly anticipated, but there was uncertainty about what kinds of highway awaited. A thick, red, straight-looking line on the map doesn't necessarily mean wide and 70 mph sailing.
Interstate 75 south led to State Highway 92 east to get to U.S. Highway 58. The route looked straight, and it did say "U.S." on it, but we soon found ourselves on a winding, brake-pad-melting mountain road that kept us at speeds of 20 mph for the better part of 250 miles.
The scenery was great, but the real payoff came at Lover's Leap just west of Patrick Springs, Va. It wasn't quite the Grand Canyon, but it was impressive.
Once we got past Danville, Va., it was a straight shot of blissful 70 mph driving all the way to Virginia Beach.
On the return voyage, launched Aug. 24, a different route was taken to make our way to Nashville, where we were to spend the night at a college friend's house near a weird little town called Leipers Fork.
While a big highway, Interstate 95, which runs between Florida and Maine, is the main East Coast jugular and can be a beating with the heavy traffic. It was slow-and-go, and sometimes stop, all the way to Interstate 40 in North Carolina.
Once on Interstate 40, it was easy sailing all the way past Asheville, N.C., where the scenery got spectacular.
But flashing signs warned of a lane closure and slow traffic ahead, and another brake-pad-searing grind ensued for more than 20 miles through the Great Smoky Mountains. (My oldest son, Curt, 8, who is mildly autistic and has a roaring imagination, pictured the Smoky Mountains as a forbidding landscape marked with erupting volcanoes, like Mordor in "Lord of the Rings.")
After 13 sweaty-palmed hours on the road, we finally pulled into my college buddy's home just before sunset.
After a fun evening, we departed around dawn the next day, with another massive stretch of highway left between us and Tyler.
(Lesson: It is important to note here that it's way faster to get to Nashville from Tyler by taking Interstate 20 to Interstate 65 out of Birmingham, Ala., and going north. Traveling up East Texas from Tyler to Interstate 30 means grinding through a bevy of small towns.)
For years, I held the belief that the kids needed to just stare out the window and play travel games on the road, like I once did. However, without video games and the backseat DVD player, the trip might have been a difficult whinefest.
Subsequently, a small crisis ensued in the truck when my youngest son, Luke, 6, lost power to his Nintendo DS, so the search was on for a Walmart to buy a car charger for it. (They don't stock them at truck stops apparently, but they've got chargers for just about everything else.)
In addition to scoring the charger at a Walmart in Birmingham, I made a key purchase in the form of the first volume of "Looney Tunes" cartoons on DVD.
Once we got to Interstate 20 at Birmingham, about 500 miles of mindless driving to Tyler still lay ahead, with pretty much the same scenery the whole way. Although, Northern Alabama is hillier than one might expect, though.
We waited until we crossed the Mississippi River at the Mississippi-Louisiana border before we popped in "Looney Toons," and mass hilarity ensued in the backseat. The boys laughed almost constantly across northern Louisiana and all the way into East Texas.
Tired and bleary-eyed, we pulled into Tyler just before dark, and it took about two days to get over the truck lag.
Would I do it again?
Heck yeah!
Heck yeah!
Essentials for transcontinental automobile travel
