The Houghs vs. I-75, Pt. I

It's been a hell of a 36 hours, folks.


We're currently at a Super 8 motel about an hour north of Dayton, Ohio. It smells like stale cigarette smoke and unwashed buttholes, and the four of us don't smell any better after being stuck in the van for the last day and a half. As we take turns bathing and changing into clean clothes, allow me to spin a yarn about what the Houghs have been through on I-75 thus far...


Yesterday after work, I drove home and began locking up the house and packing up last-minute items (Kris had been loading up the van throughout the day, so by the time I got back it was practicaly done). Unfortunately, we couldn't find the charger for the GameBoy Advance SP, which meant we could only play the damn thing for the duration of its charge (not cool for a 24 hour trek in the car).

We set off out of Orlando around 6pm, and, with the exception of having to watch Finding Nemo back to back, it was smooth sailing all the way out of Florida into Georgia. We had reserved a room at a Super 8 Motel in a town an hour north of Atlanta, and we were making pretty good time so we were anticipating pulling in for the night around 2am.

When we got about 10 miles away from the motel - where showers, beds, and television awaited us - disaster struck. A back-up on I-75 had caused a gridlock miles deep, all caused by two semi-trucks which had crashed into each other around 5pm that evening. There was evidently 'freezing rain,' which had caused the two trucks to smash into each other and cause a complete shutdown of I-75 from 5pm, when the accident happened, to 2:3oam, when the Houghs arrived on the scene. We saw absolutely no rain, nor ice, to speak of, and knowing that our motel was only ten miles away (literally, the next exit), was torture.

We were stuck in our van, lodged between several semis, for three and half hours. Both girls were hysterical, as they couldn't fall asleep in the van, and Kris and I were exhausted and pissed from having to put them through such hell when our motel was ten miles away. Eventually, after we watched Finding Nemo and Frosty the Snowman a few more times, Alayna managed to fall asleep on my chest in the back seat, while Abby slept on the floor of the van between the two pilot seats.

Sometime around 5am, we started moving again. For about an hour, we were chugging along at a solid 10mph, and then traffic slowly started to return to normal. After a series of failed attempts at finding a place to stay at the next exit (even our reserved motel was filled up - they gave away our room due to our no-show, and only refunded our money when we threw a tantrum), we continued north until we came to a rest stop south of the Tennessee border. There, we all took a two-hour power nap in the van before, once again, setting off on ol' I-75.

Driving through Tennessee and Kentucky is a lot easier than Georgia. Georgia is boring, and I'm convinced there's something in the water down there that makes folks retarded. While the mountain folk of Tennessee and Kentucky are by no means the scholarly sort, their mountains sure are scenic, so driving through them is a little easier on one's stamina behind the wheel. The road conditions were beginning to worsen, but being seasoned winter drivers (from a land where 'winter' means mountains of snow, and not a 2-inch dusting that creates miles of back-ups on a major interstate), it wasn't anything Kris and I couldn't handle.


Having cleared the mountains (after some confusion as to how far along we were, what state we were in, etc. etc.), we broke into the "Butthole of the U.S.A." (Ohio) and really got into crap driving conditions. It wasn't so much the weather, per se, but instead the fact that our windshield wiper fluid sprayer-thing stopped spraying windshield wiper fluid. Completely. That meant that the accumulation of salt and grime from the roads made visibility next to nothing, so these last four or five of driving were pure hell.


And that brings us to Bumblescum, Ohio, where we're currently hosing down and decompressing from what has been a pretty typical adventure up I-75.

Here's hoping the last five hours up to Midland go well...

- Brian