Good grief, was that a long drive home!!!
So we ended up hitting the road around 10:30am yesterday morning with the mindset that unless road conditions and/or our collective sleepiness just got too overbearing, we would try our best to make the 1,400-mile commute home from Michigan to Florida without stopping for the night. It’s something that I think I’ve only ever done maybe once in my life – probably when I was young and dumb back in high school – but as much as I would’ve preferred to make it a multiple-day journey (usually I would stop once mid-way, although last summer for our big road trip we actually stopped three times), our schedules for this week were just too hectic and it seemed more sensible somehow to get back this morning and just sleep all day, rather than instead arrive home around 10pm and just be exhausted tomorrow morning!
Anyways, road conditions themselves were in reality kinda mixed – as you’ll see below, they weren’t so great for pretty much all of Michigan and part of Ohio, but after that we just had high winds to deal with pretty much until we made it to Tennessee. In retrospect, I think the wife and I did a pretty decent job of splitting up the driving:
- Michigan (all – 5 hours) – Scott
- Ohio (partial – 1 hour) – Scott
- Ohio (partial – 2.5 hours) – Sara
- Kentucky (all – 3 hours) – Sara
- Tennessee (partial – 0.5 hours) – Sara
- Tennessee (partial – 2.5 hours) – Scott
- Georgia (partial – 3 hours) – Scott
- Georgia (partial – 3 hours) – Sara
- Florida (partial – 1 hour) – Sara
- Florida (partial – 2.5 hours) – Scott
- Total – Scott: 14 hours
- Total – Sara: 10 hours
Payback for having such clear, open roads through Michigan coming up, we kinda got off to a sloppy start – luckily, the roads weren’t too slushy, but it did make it hard to see for a while…
Further south in Michigan, the snow turned to rain … and honestly, that probably made the driving even worse because although snow sometimes slows people down, rainy driving seems to bring out the assholes on the road!
It finally stopped raining near the Michigan/Ohio border, but the gloom stuck around for a while longer…
The photo didn’t really capture it best, but the sun started peeking through the clouds here in mid-Ohio in about a dozen different places at once, which made kind of a cool-looking effect off on the horizon!
Night-time driving in Kentucky – kinda hard to believe that we’d only been driving for, like, 9 hours at this point…
Atlanta at 2am – we actually avoided the bypass and drove right through the city because, well, it was two o’clock in the morning! Pretty lights and nice views when you’re not stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic across six lanes… 😉
We stopped for a quick breakfast about an hour into Florida at 8am – not in a long time have I been so excited to actually start seeing road signs naming Tampa as a destination once again!
Clear skies, non-freezing temperatures – welcome home. 🙂
Our full route, all six states, 1,370 miles, and 24 hours of it! Back to reality, we were … but not before a very big nap, of course…