The Long Drive Home

Leaving the cabin is always difficult.  There is a procrastination that sets in, delaying an inevitable return to reality.  Most Sundays before we head home, we take a boat ride around the lakes.  This ride almost always takes longer than you think, but nobody seems to mind; it's as if staying on the lake pushes back the laundry waiting at home.  Eventually, though, you dock and tarp the boat, take the long trek back up the stairs from the lake shore to the house, and you pack the car as tightly as you can.  It always seems more full on the way home, probably because you hastily repack what you so carefully packed for the trip up.

Today was no different.  We wanted to hit the road by 3:00, but we didn't dock the pontoon until about 2:45, so we didn't get on the road until about 4:15.  (I'm learning that everything, including leaving, takes much longer with a child in tow.)

Even leaving at 4:15 with a gas and dinner stop, I had expected to be pulling into my driveway no later than 7:15.  I had figured that holiday traffic would have thinned; the resorts check out between 11:00 and Noon.  Road construction, while in full swing, didn't seem bad during the drive up.

I figured wrong.

Our drive took just over 4 hours.  After gassing up and starting the bulk of our journey at 4:30, we traveled 157.2 miles in 3 hours and 55 minutes: roughly an excruciating 40 miles per hour.  There was construction at both ends of the drive; the last one I detoured around, backtracking and upsetting the ghost of my father.  There were two rainstorms bringing traffic to a halt.  And there were idiots on the road, doing 62 in a 65 in the left hand lane, matching the pace of the cars in the right lane.

Anyone who's driven with me knows that this was torture at a cellular level for me.

As I got off the freeway and turned onto the road that leads home, I leaned over to Stacy and said, "Look!  Open road."  I was able to drive freely for the last half mile or so.  Pulling into the driveway never felt so good.

Now off to tackle the dishes I left from Wednesday.