#150: Marquette to Germantown in 17 hours…
Last night Andrea and I were talking about the return trip to Memphis. We decided to see if we could make it all the way home in one shot… Since she is flying out for a conference on Thursday morning, we wanted to get back early on Wednesday… so that meant driving Wednesday morning from Fond du Lac wouldn’t work. Our original idea was to go down about 12-13 hours and then get a room. With 2 dogs and bikes on the back of the car, it is sort of a hassle…
We left this morning about 7:50 am (eastern) and headed south. Stopped in Escanaba and grabbed some Baroni’s spaghetti sauce (made up in Calumet, sort of a taste of the U.P. thing). On the way down we stopped by Fond du Lac to pickup some water bottles we left at my brothers (only 2 miles off our route) and get some New Glarus beer to take back (three 6-packs). Somewhere just south of Normal, IL we hit the rain… about 150 miles of it.. lightning and all. We drove out of it probably 40 minutes before St. Louis. There we stopped to eat south of St. Louis around 7pm and the tail of it caught up with us… it only took about 20 minutes to clear that part of it. The worst part of any trip is usually the end. The last 100 miles up I-55 to West Memphis took the both of us to knock off without falling asleep. We ended up rolling into Andrea’s around midnight. 975 miles. 17:15. 56.5 mph.. probably close to 50 gallons of fuel.
I am glad I have tomorrow to recover from this trip. Vacation is a very good thing.
