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C'mon Baby, Drive South...
The Drive South 
| | OK. This should have been pretty simple. |
| | Went to the usual Internet Map sites, and checked the travel directions (their small details are often kinda wonky, but the big stuff is usually pretty decent). The breeder also had sent directions from the nearest highway. |
| | Here's what the route looks like according to MapQuest. |
| | So my driving directions went something like this... |
| | IN 46 West to Terre HauteThe |
| | Pick up Interstate-70 West there |
| | Continue on I-70 toward Effingham, IL and then take Interstate-57 South |
| | Pick up Interstate-55 South, and head toward Memphis |
| | Merge onto Interstate-40 West, and head toward Little Rock. |
| | Somewhere near downtown Little Rock, take Interstate-30 West, and head toward Texarkana. |
| | Take exit 91 (Social Hill), and turn left, then drive a little over a dozen miles or so, scoot over a dirt road, forward thru an intersection, then look for the big sign at the head of the breeder's driveway. |
| | Retrace steps until home. |
| | Sounds pretty simple, eh? Riiiiight..... |
Toward Terre Haute, 12/22/01
| | The day started well, with a nice leisurely pace of final packing of the car, assembling the entertainment options (about a dozen various CDs, plus the BBC Radio presentation of LOTR, which is 13 hours on 13 CDs). |
| | At 8:30am, Bloomington time, I filled the tank, and headed out. I had 113,673 miles on the odometer. |
| | The drive on I-46 was pleasant. Light traffic, sun playing hide and seek in the clouds, temperature in the mid-to-upper thirties F. I listened to the first hour of the BBC program. |
| | Then I got to the near side of Terre Haute. The on-ramp for I-70 West was closed! Ack. |
| | In fact, all of the I-70 West traffic was being rerouted. This was the scene looking south toward the I-70 ramps. The weather was turning bitter, as the wind whipped up. |
| | At the gas station, the rumor-poop was that a truck had overturned or something. Anyway, the entire westbound interstate was shut down. No one knew where the wreck was exactly, or how much of I-70 was shut down (Note to self: ask a trucker next time, they usually have much better highway info). |
| | Most everyone was getting on Margaret Avenue, and cutting across the south end of the city, heading for the next I-70 West on-ramp. So I did, too. Baaaaaaaaaaa. Just like a sheep. Or perhaps a lemming would be a better simile. |
| | I got in line, and waited, and inched forward, and waited some more, and... I did listen to the second hour of LOTR as traffic slowly crept along. It took that long to get to the next on-ramp. This all pretty-much sucked. I should have headed north to I-40, and picked up I-70 in Illinois. |
The open road
| | As I drove along I-70 West, the weather began to take a turn for the worse. Very light rain showers, here and there. |
| | To keep myself entertained, I decided to try to capture important parts of the trip. Like certain interchange signs: |
| | The rain showers grew in intensity, but would clear quickly. A few times, I almost pulled to the side of the road to wait one out, but I was on a tight timeline, and had been overtaken by whiteline fever. A little after a particularly nasty downburst (I dropped to about 4mph, with blinkers and prayers going), I soon saw a man-made mass rising above the flatness around me. |
| | It turned out to be an important landmark in my journey. I realized where I was, halfway across the bridge -- this was the Mighty Mississip' |
The Pilot Travel Center
| | I kept driving. My gas was beginning to get low. I would need to refuel soon. I saw a likely place eventually. A Pilot truckstop, er, travel center. If you've ever driven in the MidWestern US, you've probably seen one of these. Right as I pulled into the parking lot, the sky opened up again, and the winds kicked up. I dashed inside, and captured the deluge. It's hard to see from this picture, but this is one of those rains where the drops hurt as they strike you. I also missed my chance to snap the spinning cow go past the door, though... |
| | I also had the chance to remember what it was like to have the gallons sold amount be larger than the sale amount total. Felt darn good. I now had 114,009 miles on the odometer, just a little over 336 miles into this trip. It was about 3:20pm local time. |
| | This Pilot Travel Center had the usual gas station, convenience store on steroids with items most of you wouldn't see at your hometown convenience store, and also had an Arby's fast-food joint in it. I needed fuel again, so I went to grab some food. A teenager named Randall was working the counter. |
| | Randall was the only worker visible, and my encounter with him was transcendent in some mysterious road-trip manner. He obviously had worked there long enough to have everything down to a routine. But he was still at that point in the job where the chance to perform the routine to perfection was still a potential challenge, if only a private, unstated one, and just for his own benefit. |
| | There was no wasted effort as he took my order. A genuine greeting, polite attentiveness and clarification of a road-traveler's slurred words and fuzzy thinking, another appropriate but real smile where it should appear as money was exchanged. No extra words, no sloppy speech habits (uh, um, er,...), and after he had my order, no extra motion involved (not even of his hands) as he moved around to gather the pieces of my order. This precision extended even to when he went over to where my sandwich would come down the stainless steel slide from the kitchen. He had a quiet exchange of words with the worker in the back while waiting for my sandwich to appear, and then my completed order was bagged and handed to me. |
| | I'm really not sure why, but Randall had made me feel very good. It wasn't about the food, certainly, that was as expected. There were no surprises there. I can't really explain why, but somehow Randall had given me hope about humanity again. I'm not entirely sure why, not even now. But I won't question that feeling, either. |
| | The rest of the drive was rather uneventful. A little bit of excitement at the interchanges, and then a twilight approach into Little Rock, playing the usual games with local traffic and orange barrels. The I was in the big city, and started looking for my exit. A little jockeying for position at highway speeds, and I was headed southwest toward my destiny at Exit 91. |
| | I took the exit, and drove past some homes where the owners were determined to singlehandedly help boost energy stocks -- huge displays of Christmas lights on 1+ acre lots, blinking and dashing all the way from the house down to to the road and then zipping back. I finally found the dirt road, and made it to the breeder's house. A little initial confusion (they don't use their front door, it seems), and then I noticed human activity in the puppy house. I knocked on the door, and met the woman SHE had spoken with. |
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| | We made some small talk as the rowdy pack of puppies would alternate between attacking my shoelaces and barking warily at me from behind objects that were too skinny to hide their round little bodies. I gathered instructions from her about caring for the pup, and readied the carrier. The money exchanged hands, and I was now the possessor of a puppy, his puppy-passport, and a travel carrier, along with a bag of his food -- to help ease any transistions in feeding habits and supplies. |
| | I got back in the car, with the puppy in the carrier on the backseat floor, and started retracing my drive. |
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