Holiday Travel, Part 2

In November 1990, I retired from the Air Force and we decided to take Douglas, Michael and Christopher to California for Christmas.

We had agreed to let Douglas stay with friends in Summerville to finish his senior year in high school.  We tried to find a way to get him to Memphis, but couldn’t find any.  We couldn’t afford for him to fly, he had a bad experience on a bus so that was out and the train wanted to get him from Charleston to Memphis via Philadelphia and Chicago, and that would have taken a chunk of his Christmas break.

I left Memphis on Thursday and spent the night with my Mom in Loudon then left Friday morning to arrive in Summerville just as Douglas was getting out of school.  We packed up his stuff and drove straight back to Memphis.  We got there at about 4am and Sue packed the car while I got a couple of hours sleep.

She woke me up at 6 and we hit the road for California.  We knew the weather was going to be touchy through Arkansas and Oklahoma but I felt we could beat it.  We didn’t.  The system picked up speed and spread through the plains quickly.  Before we got to Little Rock, we heard that there was ice and snow falling in western Arkansas so we made a snap decision to drop down thru Dallas and hit I10 in west Texas.

We didn’t make Dallas.  Before we got there we heard on the radio they were getting ice too, so we dropped south thru Tyler to Austin.  We then cut across the hill country above San Antonio to catch I10 near Kerrville.  We thought we could knock off at least 50 miles.  We drove the last hour through ice as it had beaten us to south Texas too.

Finally, I found a rest area near Fort Stockton to pull over for a couple of hours sleep.  The weather was clearing up, we would soon be down into the low country, and the worst was behind us.  At this point, I had been driving for close to 20 hours straight and all but 2 hours of the last 40.

Later that day, when we were west of Phoenix, one side of the interstate was almost solid headlights and the other side was almost solid taillights.   They had closed I40, the road we were originally on, and if we had not dipped down into Texas we would have been stuck somewhere in the mountains of northern New Mexico or Arizona.

For what it’s worth, we did finally learn how to travel over the Christmas holiday.  Four years ago, we flew to Hawaii to visit Amy and the girls while Tony was in Iraq.  We flew above the weather and Hawaii in December/January is heavenly.