Homeward Bound

Beautiful morning when we got up.  I’m sure the water was just as clear and the sand was just as white as yesterday, but we must now turn toward home.

In keeping with Eastern Time, we were up early and were out of the campground by just after 7am local time.  The GPS said we could be home by about 11pm if we just drove and never stopped.  It’s tempting to just get it all over with but then reality says it will be a lot longer than that because of fuel, food, and rest stops and simply because we don’t drive the posted speed limit.

And it’s a good thing we didn’t try because we didn’t come even close to making the progress we expected.  Traffic on I-65 through nearly the entire state of Alabama was very heavy.  And there were numerous slowdowns and accidents.  The first accident was a semi truck that apparently drifted into the median, plowed through the cable guard rail, and came to rest in the southbound lanes of the freeway.  The southbound lanes were completely closed at the next interchange, stopping traffic for miles.  It slowed the northbound traffic for quite a while also.

The next slowdown we could see for a couple miles as we crested a hill.  The GPS suggested exiting and taking an alternate route.  So I did.  And about 50,000 other cars did, too.  Now we have a two-mile line of traffic waiting at a stop sign.

These and other slowdowns (many for no apparent reason) probably delayed us a good three hours.  Uggh.  We found a note in a journal a couple of years ago that said this route had hardly any traffic on it and we made good time.  Well, not this time.

We stopped for the night at a Cracker Barrel just south of Nashville.  It’s considerably colder here, 43 degrees, heading down to 31, so the afterburners are on and tomorrow we’ll have to break out the heavier clothing again.  Gotta get used to the cold all over again.

441 miles covered today.  The GPS suggests that this will take just under seven hours.  It took us about 12.

This is the route so far.  We are at the checkered dot in the middle of Tennessee.