It seems our family vacations never go as planned. Something always happens that changes the whole mood of the trip. Oh we start off with the best of intentions but somebody gets sick, or something breaks down, or sometimes mother nature has other plans. This trip was no different only we had mother nature, car trouble, and technology bugs against us.
We left early Christmas morning from Minnesota headed for
the Alabama Gulf Coast. One last big
family trip before our daughter, Alison, graduated high school. We had planned to spend a few days on the
beach, even if the water temperature was only around 56 degrees. Taking in a dolphin tour and then heading to Huntsville
to the NASA Space Center, so our son, Jim, could see some rockets.
We packed a cooler with some lunch meat, bread, some water
and chips; knowing that there weren’t going to be to many places to stop for
lunch on Christmas day. We made it through
Wisconsin and into Illinois by 10:30 am.
We had heard about winter storm Goliath, but mostly what
impact it would have on the weather at home.
We thought we’d be ok if we put as many miles between us and it as we
could. I checked the weather in Mobile
before we left and it said rain, but rain was better than snow, right?
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| Picnic lunch in December |
We had driven most of the day only stopping for gas, when Al
decided to stop for lunch around 3 pm at a rest stop in Effingham, Il. (Its a real town, look it up) It was a chilly 52 degrees outside, but we
needed to stretch so we grabbed the cooler and had a picnic at one of the
tables outside the rest stop building.
As I pulled out the lunch meat I packed; I noticed there wasn’t as much
in there as I thought. Looking at the
package date I realized I grabbed the wrong package and the lunch meat was
about 3 weeks old. Not wanting anybody
to get sick, I threw it in the nearest garbage can. Luckily Al had packed some summer sausage and
I bought some peanut butter at the last gas station we were at so we were able
to put together some kind of lunch.
Once back on the road we heard about the flooding that Goliath was
causing in the south and wondered how it was going to affect us, but we pressed
onward to Paducah, Ky. As we got closer
to Paducah, the weather reports weren’t good.
Severe flooding in Alabama and parts of Tennessee and it was only going
to get worse.
We spent the night in Paducah in a motel room with 2 double
beds and a sofa sleeper. Being on the
heavier side of the scale, Al and I prefer a king bed, we can both fit on a
queen, but there was no way we could both fit on a double. I volunteered to share a bed with Alison,
since Al was doing all the driving and needed his rest, and Jim claimed the
sofa sleeper. But the beds were still too
narrow for Alison and I to share; so she decided to sleep on the sofa cushions
on the floor.
Our only choices for dinner that night were Applebee’s,
where there was an hour and a half wait, or Subway. Hungry from our measly lunch we decided on
Subway, where we saw an Amish family eating dinner. Huh?
The Amish eat at Subway; who knew?
When we left to go back to the motel one of the kids asked me where
their buggy was. I figured since it
looked like they were there with an English family, that they must have come in
a car and since there wasn’t anything else open, what choice did they have.
Back at the motel room we watched the weather and saw that
high winds had shut down a fishing pier in Mobile and that Huntsville had
gotten 4 inches of rain in a matter of minutes.
It was pretty clear right there that we weren’t going to make it to the
gulf.
The next morning, we got up and decided we’d try doing some
cave tours instead and headed for Bowling Green, Ky. Al checked the map, and I set the GPS on my
phone and off we went. Only it wasn’t
that simple. Al was trying to follow the
map and I was trying to give directions from my GPS and before we knew it; we
were lost. I reset the GPS for the
fastest route and instead of taking a freeway or highway, it chose to drive us through
every small town and backroad it could find.
Eventually we got there only to find the cave tours were
closed due to flooding also. Ok, yeah I
get it, underground is probably the last place you want to be when it’s
flooding. So we settled on the National
Corvette Museum instead. What could go
wrong there?
We walked up the ticket counter and I was floored by the
price. $35 for the four of us to go look
at some cars? But where else were we
going to go; so we paid for the tickets.
Just off to the side of the ticket counter was a convertible corvette that
they allowed you to get in. I thought it
would be fun to get a picture of the kids in the driver’s seat and had to wait for
the family in front of us to finish their turn.
The grandpa, got in, they snapped a few photos and when he tried to get
out, the door wouldn’t open. They told
him to unlock the door and then try it, but it wouldn’t budge. Then they tried the outside handle and
nothing. Next they tried both the
outside and inside handles together and it still wouldn’t open. The old man was getting frustrated as his
family tried to hold back the giggles. How
does somebody lock themselves in a car and can’t get out? In a convertible no less. The kids decided
they didn’t want to mess with it and we went to go look at other things. We never did see how they got the old man out
of the car, but we had a good laugh about it the rest of the day.
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| 1953 Corvette |
The corvette museum was ok if you’re into that kind of
thing. It was kind of cool to see the
old styles of corvettes, since all I know are the styling from the early
80’s.We got to see the room and cars
that fell into a sink hole in 2014.
There was an outline on the floor showing where the sink hole and cave
underneath the floor was, and a window in one part of the floor so you could
see just how far down it was (about 20-30 feet according the museum website). That made me a little nervous, especially
with all the rain and flooding going on in the area. What if it were to happen again while we were standing there, but I’m sure they have some measure in place to keep that from
happening again. (The sink hole was filled during reconstruction.)
Next we headed for Union City, TN to go to something called
Discovery Park of America. We weren’t
really sure what it was since their website didn’t explain to much, but it
looked like it had some science type exhibits.
If Jim couldn’t see rockets, at least he’d be able to see something
science related.
Before making it to Union City, Al asked as a joke if we
wanted to go see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, TN, since it was kind of on the
way. I said, “What the hell, it’s not
like we’re ever going to see the real one.”
So we set the GPS for Paris.
We knew we weren’t going to get there before dark so I
called ahead and got us a room. Checking
in I asked the desk clerk if there was anything else to see besides the tower
and she said that was about it, but she thought they might have decorated it
for Christmas and gave us directions to the park. After settling into our room, we went to check
it out. No Christmas lights to be
seen. Just the tower under some street
lights. I was hoping to take some Christmas
light photos but at this point I didn’t care. I set up the camera and tripod
and took a few of the tower against the black sky. After we had dinner, it was still warm and
humid, so we went for some ice cream and sat outside to eat it. It was pretty clear to the locals we weren’t
from around there. We kind of stuck out
like a sore thumb. We didn’t talk with a
southern drawl and we were the only ones sitting outside the Dairy Delight in
short sleeves, while the locals sat inside with sweaters and sweatshirts on.
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| Paris, TN |
In the morning we got up and went back to the tower to take
a few selfies. Everybody was in a fairly
good mood for having our plans thrown out the window. As I told Alison, “Thank God for a sense of
humor, otherwise all we’d do is cry.”
Before leaving town we wondered where we could find some souvenirs, but
there was none to be found. Nobody sold
anything even remotely related to Paris or the tower. NO SOUVENIRS FOR YOU!
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| Union City, TN |
We headed off for Union City then. Discovery Park was more than I thought it was. Part history, part science, part children’s museum. You name it, they had it there. In the main building there was a section
devoted to transportation and military. A section for Tennessee history, an
aquarium, dinosaur bones, civil war uniforms and weapons. The top floor was for the universe, space and
energy and an interactive hands-on place for kids with a 50-foot sculpture that
also doubled as a slide. Outside there
was a settlement village, a barn full of antique tractors, a general store, a one
room school house, and grist mill with working water wheel. Another part of the park that we didn’t see,
had a church, Japanese gardens, a train depot, a maze you could walk through
and more.
Figuring this was all the further south we could get we
decided to head for home after leaving Union City. When Al missed the turn for the freeway, the GPS
took us down every backroad it could find to get us back to the freeway. We drove through areas no tourist was meant
to see. Down roads so narrow it was
difficult to stay on the road when a car came from the opposite direction. Threw areas where both sides of the road were
flooded almost up the road; we even came to an area that had to be detoured
because the road was flooded over. Eventually
we made our way back to the freeway and headed back toward Illinois.
We spent the night in Marion, IL. Finally, a hotel with a pool so the kids
could swim. Watching the weather that night;
snow was moving in to Minnesota, Wisconsin and Northern Illinois. Al wanted to try and beat the storm home, but
we still had a ten-hour drive ahead of us.
We went to bed early but nobody slept well that night. Alison slept in a hard uncomfortable recliner
and sometime in the night ended up on the floor, Jim chose the sofa sleeper,
but decided not to pull the sleeper out until after we had been asleep for a
few hours. Al and I had a king sized bed,
but there were sirens going off what seemed every 20 minutes and it made me
wonder what kind of area we were staying in.
In the morning after watching the weather, Al asked me if I
thought we should stay put for one more night or leave and see how far towards
home we could get. Knowing he wanted to
get home I agreed to leave, so we packed up and went. Along the way I checked out motel websites
and picked a few in different towns in case we needed to stop. The weather wasn’t great, rain and strong
winds, but it wasn’t terrible either so we kept driving. It wasn’t until our first stop that he told
me something was wrong with the car. He
said it wasn’t handling that great. I
had noticed it wanted to pull to the left, but I just assumed it was the wind
pushing us. It was a fight to keep the
car in our lane.
It wasn’t until we got north of Bloomington, Il that things
took a turn for the worse with the rain turning to sleet and you could see the
ice coating the trees as we went by. It
was in the middle of nowhere along I-39; where there’s only a truck stop and a
Motel 6; that we stopped for the night and it was only 1 in the afternoon.
We got two rooms at what Alison best described as an upscale
crack den. At least it was clean because
it wasn’t much else. We ate lunch at the
nearby truck stop and while we were waiting for our food the lights flickered
and went out. “Oh-oh”, I thought,” this
isn’t good”, but they came back on just a few minutes later and all was
good. As we were moving our stuff from
the car to the room, Al said “Maybe we should use the stairs after we get
everything in the rooms.” He was right,
shortly after setting in, the power went out again and stayed out for about 3 hours. Being out in the middle
of nowhere we wondered how long it would take for the power to come back on
since we weren’t a top priority.
When the power did come back on, we hung around the motel
watching TV until dinner time and then headed over to the truck stop for
dinner. The restaurant had closed during the earlier power outage, but there was a subway and the gas station sold pizza
by the slice. Just as we walked in the
door the power went out again. At Subway
they said they couldn’t take any new customers that they hadn’t already started
their order, so our only choice was the gas station pizza. They had one pizza with a slice missing and we
bought the rest of it.
This was about
the time our humor broke. We had spent
the last couple days trying to keep up good spirits; but this was just too
much. Jim was having a meltdown because
nothing had gone right the whole trip and the rest of us were just tired of
having to deal. Jim decided that now
would be good time to go off somewhere to pout and had us searching for him in
the dark with our cell phone lights, while the gas station attendants were
trying to call the power company, herd everybody out and lock the doors.
After a few minutes, we found him in the hallway that connected
the gas station to the restaurant. We
paid for our pizza and went back to the motel.
Al said, “It could be worse. We could
be stuck in the elevator.” Yeah, that
would be worse.
Before going back to our rooms, I stopped by the front desk
to ask for extra blankets since we didn’t know how long the power was going to
be out this time. Earlier Alison had
asked for an extra pillow and was refused saying there was already 6 in a room,
but our room only had 4 so I don’t know where the other two were. She asked how many blankets I needed and I
told her 4. She looked at me, and said
there’s already one blanket on each bed.
I wanted to scream, “REALLY? DO
YOU REALLY EXPECT US TO STAY WARM WITH ONE BLANKET AND NO HEAT! YOU COULDN’T EVEN GIVE US A PILLOW EARLIER!”
But I didn’t, I explained that we had 4 people in 4 beds, we needed 4
blankets. She handed them over reluctantly,
with a look like I was going to steal them.
“Yeah, that’s just what I came here for,” I thought as I walked back to
the room, “to steal ugly motel bedspreads.”
We ate the pizza in the dark. Then since there wasn’t much else to do Al
went to bed. Alison and I sat on her bed
staring out the window towards the interstate.
Where we watched an occasional semi drive by and the lights of the
nearby town off in the distance slowly dim and eventually go out. We knew then the power could be out for quite
a while.
I have no idea what time I fell asleep, but I woke up around
3 when I heard Al rooting around. He
hadn’t slept hardly at all because he uses a c-pap machine and no power means
no c-pap. About 3:30 the power came back
on, Al was finally able to turn his machine on and get some sleep, but me on the other
hand, I was wide awake. So here I sit, typing
on my phone.
We’ve stayed in crappy motels before, so it’s not like we
were expecting luxury accommodations, but an extra pillow and blankets would
have been nice to get without having to partially beg for them. We were never so happy to get out of a motel
as we were that morning. The thought of
spending any more time there than necessary was appalling, and Al reminded us to use the stairs because he didn't want to be stuck there in the in the elevator for another 9 hours. We spend $120 to spend the night in a dump
with no heat or electricity. I told Al
maybe we should ask for a discount, but he said it wasn’t really their fault
the power went out. Usually when we
leave a motel I try to tidy up, by making sure all our garbage is in the
garbage can and all the towels we used are in a pile on the bathroom floor, to
make it easier for the cleaning staff.
But at this place I didn’t care.
I left everything where it was and we were packed up and checked out by 8:30.
The roads were much better for driving that morning, although
the farther north we got the more the ground was covered in snow. We had gone from 70’s and humid in Tennessee to
20’s and snow and ice in Illinois in a matter of days. Al just wanted to get home so we pretty much
drove right through stopping only for gas and lunch. The kids slept most of the way home. We stopped at a rest stop just after crossing
the Wisconsin border, Alison woke up and looked out the window. “Yuck!
Snow!” she said. “What were you
expecting as we got closer to home?” I asked.
I offered to do some driving knowing Al didn’t get much sleep,
but he refused. He doesn’t do well in the
passenger seat. The rest of the way home we pretty much drove on in
silence. Al concentrating on the road
and me hoping the trip we planned for Florida later this winter goes much
smoother. Every so often Jim would ask
if we were in Minnesota yet. “No, not
yet, Jim.” I kept telling him. We pulled into our driveway around 5 pm, exhausted
from the long drive but oh so happy to be home and to sleep in our own beds. This was one vacation I don't think we'll forget, but not one we really want to remember either.
