I’m a road warrior… I hate flying, but I’ll hop in the car without reservation to visit friends and family in the east or travel out west to the spaces in the U.S. that I love the best.
Besides a brief trip to Kansas City to visit Annette’s brother and to see the traveling “Hamilton” musical, I stayed home in Iowa for most of the summer. With the season approaching an end and my old university, where I recently worked, firing up classes next week I thought it would be a great time to get out of town and take a road trip.
This is my first “retirement” road trip and the plan is to visit my brother and his family, hang with two of my old frat brothers from my days at Carolina, and to wrap up with my daughter Sally’s family, including a brand new grandson… This would be a trip across country from Iowa to North Carolina, landing initially in the Greensboro area, then a trip to Chapel Hill, concluding in Wilmington on the coast.
According to AAA, the trip would be roughly 16 to 17 hours by car, so I chose Winchester, Kentucky as my 2/3 of the way point across the country. I like to do the heaviest lifting on the first day of a trip. I took a reservation at the Hampton Inn in Kentucky… my experience is you can travel almost anywhere in the U.S. on the interstate system, stay in Hampton Inns and eat at McDonald’s or Cracker Barrel… Not 5 Star travel but works for me…
So what’s it like driving half way across the country? Initially traveling through Iowa and then Illinois, it’s gently rolling terrain dominated by cornfields and the occasional soy bean plot. I thought late summer, the road traffic would be thinning, but no, I was wrong… still a lot of folks on the road…
Cornfields out the right window… 
Busy roads in late August…
You know you’re making progress when the Mississippi is crossed heading east out of Iowa into Illinois! Then its endless highway for hours and hours where the geography barely changes and the frequent nutcase driver flies by or someone else blocks traffic in the outside lane until you hit Kentucky where small rock outcroppings suggest that the Appalachian Mountain chain is not far off…
The endless road… 
Crossing the Mississippi…
With about 650 miles done, the reward is a meal at the Cracker Barrel and a night at the Hampton Inn…
Cracker Barrel porch… 
An above average Hampton Inn room…
The second day of the trip is dominated by driving for hours through the mountains of Appalachia via Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and finally North Carolina. This particular day I spent much of it driving through pelting rain which made the mountain curves even more harrowing then usual…
Finally after two days behind the wheel… NC feels like home, but it’s not… I came of age in NC but spent most of my life elsewhere… still feels like home, but it’s not really…
