Driving

Johnny Jones, 16 August 2002

I began teaching in May, 1990.  This was the first time since then I've had a summer free, so we made the most of it. I've told you about my trip to Kazakhstan in May and our family vacation to the Rockies in June, but we also went to visit Bryan in July.

People tell me about vacations where they drive as far as they can, then finding a motel room. We have horrible luck with that. Once when we had planned to camp but the kids were sick and we were tired we looked for over an hour before finding a decent place in Flagstaff, AZ. I mean, what are AAA Tourbooks for if you can't get a good place at a nice price? To me, that's part of the fun.

But Amy and I ran off to South Carolina. No reservations. No planning. We just left. We had talked about going, and asked Bryan if we could come, but we hadn't really settled on anything. The conversation Wednesday morning was something like, "Do you want to go?"

"I don't know. Do you?"

I told Chip we might go. I cleaned house a little. We went to the Post Office. Finally after lunch I said, "Why don't we go? I mean, this is an ideal time. Both of us are free."

So we packed as quickly as we could, and we left.

Our route was also unplanned. I remembered the route through Cape Girardeau and then through Anna and duck-hunting country over to Paducah, where we spent the night, and took Highway 24 to Nashville. From there, we could go either through Atlanta or Asheville to get to Clemson. Either way was about the same in time and distance.

It was hot, so the mountains sounded good. But close to Knoxville, we were getting tired. And we were tired of Tennessee road construction, where they take traffic down to one lane for 24 miles at a time. It could take an hour to travel ten of those miles. Amy asked if there might be a shortcut down to South Carolina that would help us avoid going east to Asheville, then back west to Clemson.

Looking at the atlas, I saw that just before Knoxville there was a road that looked pretty good: Tennessee Highway 129. Highway 28 going through North Carolina looked curvy, but hey, we live in the Ozarks. We're used to curves. Amy lived in the Rockies last year, near Denver, for months. The Smokies couldn't be worse. Right?

Amy was driving. We noticed there wasn't much traffic after we found 129, which was a relief after the road construction traffic jams. Then 129 started curving. I don't mean 90 degree turns; these were more like 180's to 270's, at first going up the mountain, then back down. What was funny was there were only two curves marked, and they weren't any worse than all the others. And the speed limit was 40. Only a race car driver could have driven that fast. In fact, our other companions on the road were motorcycles.

Amy is a good driver, and she enjoys hills. But after awhile, she got dizzy. Literally. That has never happened to her before while she was driving. There were, of course, no shoulder, no houses, and no roads coming in. There were a few narrow pull-offs equipped with trash barrels.

The rhododendron was blooming and lovely. And what a relief when we finally got to Highway 28! For miles we followed a river that had a mist on it, reminiscent of angels. It was amazingly beautiful. But Amy, generally a lover of nature and beauty remarked, "It wasn't worth it!"

We got honey and gas at a tiny service station just past Fontana Dam, where we planned to buy gas, but the only service station was closed. By that time, we were thankful to find civilization of any kind.

We came back home through on the I-40 through Asheville, and seriously warned Bryan not to make our mistake.

But it was an adventure. It was a shared time. And we won't ever forget it.