Days 8-9: Trip Home

We left Ponchatoula on Wednesday afternoon at 2pm and were headed home. We had to stop 10 miles into the trip to return the minivan at Enterprise and thanks to the rental agent being a real go-getter, the return took longer than we'd like. Allyson and I made a plan which was to get back to the Buc-cees in Athens, Alabama and then decide if we wanted to drive the rest of the way through the night, or sleep for a bit and finishing in the morning. We stopped a couple times along the way, and eventually made it to the Buc-cee's around 10pm.

Now I absolutely love driving the motorhome in almost any situation, but I must admit that part of this drive was not enjoyable. You would think that these areas of Mississippi and Alabama would see minimal traffic, but there actually turned out to be a ton of trucks. Combine that with construction and it would be a very congested drive. Once the sun set the drive became very draining because all the lights of oncoming traffic are coming at you from across the highway. The roads are so dark that everyone is using high-beams which are shining right in your face. It was not fun.

Once we got to Buc-cee's we decided to try and finish the 9 hours left on the drive. There were a couple reasons I wanted to do this. First, if we could pull off a drive through the night it would open up some new possibilities for vacation. For instance, we may be able to get down to Orlando in one day if we wanted to, so I wanted to see how tough it would be. And second, if we got up in the morning to drive we would hit traffic in either Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, or some combination of all of them. So we were going for it. We took a few minutes to convert the dinette to a bed in case Allyson wanted to sleep, and then we were back on the road again.

You know how sometimes you see signs on the highway in construction that say "Nightly Lane Closures" but you never worry about them? Well on this drive I got to experience many of them all through Tennessee and Kentucky, and what a pain those are. The workers were all over the road, and the temporary lighting they use is super bright. We eventually got north of Louisville and I needed to stop for coffee and some gas. The stop woke Nolan up and he was so fussy that we nearly decided just to sleep at the Flying J gas station we were at. Eventually he calmed down and we got back on the road. We made it past downtown Cincinnati as the sun was starting to come up. At this point I had Allyson drive so I could use the restroom and possibly get some sleep. Allyson did really good driving in some decent traffic. I nodded off for 30-40 minutes and then we switched back before finishing the drive. We eventually made it to our house around noon.

Right when we got back I would have told you it was definitely worth it to drive straight back, and even today I would probably say it was worth it. But boy did it take me a while to recover from the all-nighter, and that just made me feel old!

We were all glad to be back home, but we were also sad vacation was over. It was a good trip. While there were some challenges with behavior from a girl or two who I won't name, we were all thankful we got to get out of town, got down to pool/beach weather, and got to see these new places. Nolan had a rough first night, but after that he was pretty darn good. I mean, look at this guy....you can't be mad at him!

That's it for this trip. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!