After leaving Little Bohemia a little past 6 I loaded up home on the Garvin my parents lent me. (It was their idea and it proved to be indispensable.) The estimated time coming home: 11:30 p.m. I seriously thought the "half" of the trip from Cedar Rapids to the Twin Cities would take 3 1/2 hours. At that point I had no choice but to press on for home (forget about the strip club in Albert Lea), and I would have to come up with a lie on the way there.
Then I remembered the horrendous bottleneck I had to go through close to the Minnesota-Iowa border. I saw a sign that said "Road Construction, Next 4 Miles," and I still don't know if that means in the next four miles or for the next four miles. We were all driving stupid because we were all piled into one lane when the other lane, supposedly the one about the close, we left empty for some damn reason. And the cones disappeared before we saw any construction workers or lane closures or anything. I didn't see any reason we had to slow down, let alone we merged onto one lane immediately after we saw the sign.
There was an even bigger, longer traffic tie-up on Highway 57 West coming back from the eclipse. I should blog about that some time. But those two incidents made me come up with an idea: Tell my folks that I am in southern Minnesota, but I unknowingly got backed up. So I texted them around 7, which, if I do my math correctly, would have gotten me home by 8:30 if there was no traffic, which there wasn't. Father texted back, essentially, "Fine, just take your time and be careful." He didn't know I was in north-central Iowa. And to cover my bases I texted him an hour later saying that traffic was so bad I crawled only ten miles, to which Father replied "Take your time" again. Got home around midnight in a steady downpour, but neither parental unit was angry.
While I'm glad I got home in the manner I wanted to (largely; I still wanted to hit the strip club before heading home), I have to admit that the driving, both to and from St. Louis, got to me. For one thing, I have never felt my back feel this bad and in this way, if that makes any sense. It's as if someone snapped me in my lower back, the pain was that excruciating. And I got tired too, especially at night, when the glare from the headlights bothered me more than I thought it would. Night driving is something that never really bugged me until I had to drive 500 miles in one day. And oh, by the way -- those estimated times I got from Google Maps are bullshit. It said 8 1/2 hours going down through Des Moines, and eight going up through Cedar Rapids. More like 12 1/2 going down, a dozen going up. Yes, I took lunch and breaks. But it can't be 50% longer than estimated.
And now that I know the toll all that driving takes on my body, I now have second thoughts. I mean, I am glad that I did it just to experience it. Driving through farmland proves just how beautiful America is. But I now realize that travelling is something that is hard to do alone. And finances are another concern: I started thinking about roadtripping because the sale prices I usually get on a Southwest flight weren't available because of the eclipse. But even with an inflated airfare, it might have been cheaper than renting the car and filling up the tank five or six times. Maybe I'll be industrious enough to do the math.
So maybe a shorter road trip -- to, say, this human research lab in West Allis, Wisc, which keeps asking for paid volunteers to stay for a week for thousands of dollars -- would be a more tolerable sojourn. Otherwise ... eh, I'll have to think about it.
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