It is Saturday and today we are driving from dad’s place in New York as far as we can get towards Texas. I have been so tired and so short on sleep for the last week that I had to just sleep in this morning as much as I could, which was until around nine thirty, and then I took a long, relaxing shower. Today is going to be a long day and I am feeling rather tired and run down.
When I was showered, Dominica already had Sharon and Leo’s Malibu all loaded up so that we could set off right away. I drove all of us, including dad, up to the Rochester airport so that we could get to Enterprise and pick up the rental car. We accidentally went to the wrong location first and thought that the car was from the location across the street from the airport but it was actually from the airport itself. So we had to quickly drive back to the airport and get dropped off and deal with it there. But it was all quick and easy.
We rented a little Hyundai Accent in red. It fit us pretty easily and drove well. I am decently happy with this rental and as always Enterprise was great to deal with.
We stopped at McDonald’s before even getting onto the highway to grab breakfast. Dominica is always impatient and hates not getting right onto the road but this always saves a lot of time and makes everyone happy. So we did that and got a good start on our drive.
We had a good driving day. It was after noon, but not quite yet one, when we got onto the road and the weather was perfect and we made great time all the way through Pennsylvania and down through Ohio. Getting started so late made it a bit tough as we needed to wrap on the day on the early side. But I felt good and we were making pretty good time all day long.
Luciana was really interested in our travels and asked to be alerted to every new state that we came to. I found her a kid’s travel atlas of the US states at one of the gas station stops that we came to in Ohio and got it for her. She liked that a lot and tried to follow along with what state we were in.
Nothing really to report. Our only “mishap” was missing a detour exist where Interstate 71 goes over the Ohio River in downtown Cincinatti and we had to loop back and take the 471 bridge instead. We lost about five minutes there, but that was about it. Not bad at all.
I was feeling good and doing well around midnight, but we looked ahead and the hotels were full in Nashville and it would be far too late if we tried to push on to central Alabama. So our only good choice was to stop for the night in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Thankfully the Hampton Inn there had a few rooms left, or at least one, which we got.
It was about two thirty in the morning when I finally managed to drift off to sleep. All of the driving and caffeine makes it hard to just get to the hotel and pass out. I did set up my laptop and catch up a little when we got to the hotel. I’m so happy that this new laptop is really working now. Today was my first test of it.