January 4, 2021
Good morning. Instead of research news updates or commentary on whatever strikes my fancy, this one will be a travelogue. It may be somewhat boring, so feel free to delete it. There is nothing unique about people traveling cross-country from Minnesota to Florida. Each trip, however, has its small tales; here are ours.
Kathy and I have talked for at least a couple of years about getting out of winter for a couple of months each year. The conversations were about hypotheticals because Kathy was still working. When the University offered a Retirement Incentive Option last fall, Kathy decided to take it. She'd planned on retiring at some point in the not-too-distant future, so the incentive was welcome and she retired on 9/11 (19 years after the infamous 9/11, but it makes her retirement date easy to remember). The question of becoming snowbirds went from the abstract to the distinctly possible. I don't know that we would have rushed into leaving Minnesota during Kathy's first months of retirement, but the prospect of being cooped up inside the house because of the pandemic, unable to have company or visit friends or dine out or go to a movie or a concert or any gathering was unappealing. So we made the decision to go to Florida; Kathy, our Airbnb wizard, found a house in Bonita Springs.
It is amusing that in our circle of friends, when we tell them we are going to Florida, they ask where—and most of them know approximately where Bonita Springs is. If we told them we were going to some town in Kentucky or Arkansas or Oregon, they'd probably have to look at a map. A lot of Minnesota people (who have sufficient resources to have been there during the winter, often several or many times) know Florida.
There were two challenges before we even left Minneapolis for our two-month stay. First, what to pack, and second, when to leave.
On the first topic, now that we have been in Florida for a few days, we realize we brought way too many clothes to accommodate cool or cold weather: too many jeans and sweatshirts and jackets. We had read, a few days before we left, that the temperatures in south Florida had dipped into the 40s; that, along with a psychological inability to imagine a warm outdoors, led us to be over-prepared for cold. Heavens, I brought flannel pajamas—which I suppose I could wear if we turned the air conditioning setting low enough at night. Since we arrived, I have worn one light jacket over a short-sleeved shirt—while also wearing shorts, in the early morning.
One of the (few) virtues of driving down, rather than flying, is that we could be far more liberal in bringing clothes and other stuff. We didn't use suitcases (except for a small one for hotels on the trip); we used cloth and grocery bags so that we could cram things together in the trunk and the back seat. We also brought our Keurig and a Costco box of coffee packets, a crockpot, some of our own pots and pans and spatulas, along with paper napkins, tin foil, spices, crackers, noodles, rice, and a variety of other non-perishable foods that could sit in a car for four days. Plus, it goes without saying, books, jigsaw puzzles, and laptops.
Despite the fact that we brought much, we still had to go to the grocery store on the way to our rented house to get basics for meals (that is, perishable items like chicken and fresh vegetables and milk) and to Target the next day to get what we forgot or didn't know we needed. $400 in food and stuff. Yikes. We also bought a card table for Kathy's jigsaw puzzling; the kitchen table was not going to work for her back.
On the second topic, when to leave, I want to note that about a decade ago I vowed I was done with cross-country driving. If I couldn't fly there I didn't want to go. I apparently changed my mind, with help from my beloved spouse. I don't think flying, at least on Delta, was particularly risky, but the airport drill puts you in contact with a lot of people that is worrisome. We read quite a bit about how to travel (ignoring the general advice not to travel at all) and it appeared that driving was at least as safe, if not safer, than flying. Besides, driving did allow us to bring more stuff. More to follow on that last point.
Anyway, the plan had been to depart Tuesday (12/29) and drive three full days, arriving in Florida on Thursday evening (12/31) or maybe Friday morning (1/1/21, when our place was available), depending on traffic, road construction, and who knows what all else might happen. By Sunday afternoon (12/27), however, we were getting nervous. The weather forecast for Minneapolis for Tuesday was increasingly ominous, with much snow possible starting mid-day. The forecast for Illinois on Tuesday and Wednesday was no more encouraging, with the potential of rain, icy rain, and snow. I did not want to be white-knuckle driving through crappy and potentially dangerous weather. So Sunday afternoon we decided to leave the next morning, to beat the weather, and scurried to get everything packed. Sunday was suddenly a busy day.
I had an itinerary in mind but Kathy and I agreed that we'd have no fixed plan. We were not worried that hotels would be full so felt we could drive each day and decide mid-afternoon when we would stop. Because three different friends who travel independently recommended Hampton Inns as excellent places to stay due to their COVID protocols and because they were decent quality hotels, we chose them. As the driving day wore on, we'd find a Hampton Inn where we wanted stop.
(As a general proposition, I eschew national chains (of any kind), but like many of us, relying on them is sometimes necessary (e.g., Target, Home Depot, Marriott). When traveling domestically, however, and doing so by driving, I'm the kind of person who wants to know what my bed will be like each night—and I want to know that there will be a bed. I wasn't worried about the latter on this trip but at least for me it's comforting to know that the quality of the lodging I'd be getting when we stop driving for the day will be acceptable, so the Hampton Inn corporate standards were welcome. I knew what the lodging would be like and that it would be of decent quality at a reasonable price. Traveling overseas, on the other hand, we use Airbnb or stay in local, non-chain establishments. I don't want American standard when I'm outside the country!)
My imagined itinerary, once we decided to leave on Monday rather than Tuesday, was this; the driving times were provided by the Google (which I have found typically to be remarkably accurate):
12/28 Mpls to Champaign IL 7.33 hours
12/29 Champaign to Chattanooga 7.33 hours
12/30 Chattanooga to St. Petersburg 8.5 hours
To get ahead of my story: Just because we left a day early did not mean our rental house was going to be available any earlier. It wasn't; Kathy checked with the owner. We suddenly had an extra day on our hands in Florida. We became social butterflies. We have friends in St. Petersburg, Cape Coral, and Port Charlotte, all of which are on the road from northern Florida to Bonita Springs. I contacted all of them and said we'd love to see them. They were glad to get together. I got my Florida geography a little messed up, however, so we ended up going from St. Petersburg south to Cape Coral and then back north to Port Charlotte—but oh well, it was only an hour each way and time was not of the essence. Not only did we see friends on three occasions, we also had a Zoom New Year's Eve event with the friends with whom we always have New Year's Eve dinner.
One of my long-time friends and I have been exchanging episodic emails about politics and about life in a pandemic. Of course he knew about the Florida plans, and he poked fun that morning when I told him about how we were spending the extra day.
Your plan for today is hilarious. You just finished a boring and perhaps stressful three day drive and on the very first day of several months you schedule four separate events with friends. That deserves some introspection--and the only conclusion I come to is that you are experiencing the exuberance that I hope we will all get to. The virus isn't over and your events are all masked (except the last one, Zoomed) but you have been desperate to see people and you're driving to various cities all in the first day. I don't mean to sound critical; I'm very positive and supportive and it tells me what a relief it will seem to be to get some level of normalcy.
I did have to tell him that I liked his explanation but that the more pedestrian and more accurate reason for our burst of social activity was simply the weather. We would have made no such plans on the drive down had we left when we originally planned; there would have been no extra day. We would have gone straight to Bonita Springs. We planned to see these friends while in Florida, and expect to see them again before we return home, but not on the first day we arrived in the state.
Thus it was that on day 290 of our 2020 pandemic quarantine, December 28, we left the north and headed for the semi-tropics. We didn't even know for sure that we'd like being snowbirds, gone so long from home, but we resolved to give the adventure a try. It didn't get off to a promising start.
The first day of travel had me think the trip was jinxed. We got on I94 heading to St. Paul and eastward bound toward Wisconsin, no more than a couple of miles from our house, and within seconds the car started vibrating alarmingly as I hit freeway speed. I got off a few exits later when the vibrating didn't stop, checked the tires, kicked all the excess snow out of the wheel wells, and got back on I94. Same thing. I'm now worried about a tire out of alignment or about to come off or heaven knows what. So I drove under 50 mph for awhile (couldn't go much faster anyway on a workday morning through St. Paul on I94). We got off on White Bear Avenue and headed north toward Kline Volvo, where I normally take it for Volvo maintenance. But I was not optimistic we were even going to get out of town that day; Kline (and most other places) can't just get you in to the shop on a moment's notice. I was starting to get depressed.
As we were driving, Kathy called Kline and described the problem and said we were heading in their direction. The service guy said, "run it through a car wash first." Kathy told me that. I said, "WHAT???" Kathy said he told her that 90% of the time the problem is solved by getting the accumulated snow off the bottom and wheel wells of the car. So we drove around an area of the metro neither of us had ever been in while Kathy Googled and found a place with a car wash. We got the car washed and, optimistically, headed east rather than back west toward Kline. Kathy had gone in to purchase the wash; she said she bought the wash that did the most to the underside of the car. Remarkably enough, once I got on the highway, the vibration did not recur! Of all my experiences with car problems, a car wash is the most unusual (and miraculous and cheapest) solution. So we were only delayed an hour rather than a day or more. Phew.
The rest of the trip that day was uneventful. I94 to I90 at Tomah to I39 at Rockford south to I74 at Bloomington/Normal to Champaign. Any route that avoids driving through Chicago. Central Illinois is as flat as Nebraska. The Wisconsin DOT has electronic signs alongside and over its freeways with the message "Here comes 2021. Buckle up." I tried to determine if there was some profound meaning to the message: "You survived 2020, now make it to 2021." Probably not.
We got burgers at about 10:30 a.m. (!) at a Culver's in Wisconsin. Culver's is our go-to place for fast food on the rare occasions when we eat it, which is invariably when we're driving somewhere and don't want to spend a lot of time stopping to eat—and certainly not doing so during a pandemic. We then ate potato chips and other snacks until we got to Champaign. Great diet, huh? Once there, we went first to a grocery store, got food from their deli, and came to the hotel. Thank heavens for modern grocery delis; it's possible to get decent food to eat in a hotel room in a time of a pandemic. Kathy had the foresight to buy a small box of plastic forks. (I can report that we did eat healthier meals in our room.)
We learned that the advice about Hampton Inns was good. Even in the midst of a pandemic they provided breakfast items that one could take away. It is reassuring that they are proud of how the rooms are sanitized with Clorox, but it's also amusing because the news the day before we left was that sanitizing surfaces appears to be largely unnecessary in terms of slowing the spread of the coronavirus. (It was a worry at the outset of the pandemic, but now that they know more, they're saying you don't need to do it.) The blessing of car travel is that we could bring more; the drawback was that we had to bring the Keurig into the hotel room with us in Champaign because it has a water reserve in it that we couldn't figure out how to empty. It was only about 20 degrees in Champaign, so we couldn't leave it in the car with the risk that it might freeze and break the machine. The wonder is that we remembered it at all.
I commented to my emailing correspondent friend during the trip.
You recall that awhile ago we were bewailing the loss of a year or more in our social/family/sporting/cultural lives, a significant percentage of whatever functional time we have left. That thought returned to me yesterday while on the road: did I really want to spend three of the days left to me (out of how many we do not know, of course) driving across the country? Not really, but on the other hand, I didn't have that much important to do at home anyway. And I have the same level of contact with you and Elliott and everyone else that I did at home--all virtual--so I suppose it isn't that much of a loss.
We managed to exceed my goal on day two of driving: After 9 hours in the car, we made it to Ft. Oglethorpe, GA, about 15 miles south of Chattanooga. It was an uneventful drive other than a half-hour slowdown at one point because of road construction and an accident on the northbound side of the freeway. We dodged a bullet. The accident (which we couldn't see despite being forced to slow down because of the gawker syndrome) must have been a doozy because there were several cop cars and an emergency vehicle and down the road a bit the police were routing traffic off the freeway. Behind that it was backed up for several miles to almost a complete stop. That could have been us.
Shortly after we left Champaign that morning we encountered the Cross at the Crossroads, at Effingham, Illinois. From RoadsideAmerica.com:
Lording over Interstate highways 57 and 70, the "Cross at the Crossroads" was built for broadly noble religious reasons -- and to out-size every other big American cross out there, especially the giant cross in Groom, Texas, which was both its inspiration and its toughest competition. 198 feet tall and 113 feet wide, forged out of over 180 tons of steel anchored in untold fathoms of cement, the cross can withstand winds hurled by evilest of forces at up to 145 mph. The height of the cross was carefully chosen to exceed the dimensions of the Groom cross (which is 196 feet) but to still be below the 200 foot mark. "FAA regulations," said one of the volunteers. "You have to have a light on top if it's 200 feet. And there's no way in heck that we would put a light on top." Its builders did their job well, as the Effingham cross reined as size champion for 17 years, until a taller cross was erected in Missouri in late 2018. https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/10913
The height race abides; there are metal plaques in the marble floor of St. Peter's in Rome identifying the major cathedrals around the world and their height—all shorter than the dome of St. Peter.
Our third day of driving, to St. Petersburg, was also uneventful. I drove five hours nonstop from someplace in Georgia to St. Petersburg so my back was a little sore by the time we got there. We definitely noticed the transition from winter to green on the last day and we were startled when the car air conditioning suddenly kicked in.
We saw a large billboard towering over the freeway in Georgia:
Every tongue will confess
Jesus is lord
Even
the DEMOCRATS
There might be a few Democrats who disagree. Like Muslims, Jews, non-believers, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on.
On two occasions we defied Google's routing. It cost us; on both occasions, we got stuck in traffic. Fool me once, shame on you. . . . There wasn't going to be a third time. Google told us to follow I75 right through the center of Atlanta, which didn't make sense to me because there is a belt line/ring road interstate around the outskirts of the city. Typically those belt lines, in the middle of the day, are much quicker than the freeway that runs through a downtown. But this time we did what it told us to do and we whizzed right through the city, much to my surprise. We also dodged a bullet again: at one place in northern Georgia the police were again directing northbound traffic off the freeway (we couldn't see why), so the backup extended for miles and miles. We could have been sitting in one of those backups for hours had they been on our side of the highway. One of the risks of cross-country driving on interstate freeways.
We learned that face masks are clearly optional the farther south one gets, even though posted notices on the entry to establishments say masks are required. Why don't they post signs saying "no mask, no service"? Like the "no shirts, no shoes, no service" signs that we all grew up with that still appear on many doors? Maybe places don't enforce that rule, either. There were a lot of people in gas station convenience shops standing and chatting without masks. Our risk was probably still low because all we did was race in to use the bathroom.
Little did we realize, on March 13, that our dinner with Elliott & Martha and Martha's parents would be the penultimate time we would eat out at a restaurant in 2020. I don't know what everyone else was thinking at the time, but I had only a vague notion that we would have to quarantine for awhile—I guess I thought we'd get back to normal at some point in the near future. It wasn't until a few weeks later that I came to realize that the pandemic constraints were going to be in place for a long time. We decided to end the year on an optimistic note: We had lunch at a restaurant outdoors in Cape Coral with one of our friends. It was lovely to see and chat with her and it was lovely to be sitting outside having a meal (in short sleeves and with no bugs).
Unfortunately, I fear we're going to have to be leery about outdoor dining. With the discovery of the "more transmissible" coronavirus, and with at least one case in Florida already, it seems that everything we'd like to do is risky.
After nine hours in the car on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and four hours Thursday gallivanting around visiting, and another hour plus on Friday to go grocery shopping and get to Bonita Springs, I was done driving any distance for quite awhile.
After two days we had allocated space by function. The house has three bedrooms. One we sleep in, one is my "office" with my laptop and also the laundry-folding room, and one is the dressing and clothing-storage room which is where I also read in the evening. The living room is Kathy's jigsaw-puzzle-while-listening-to-podcasts-or-ebooks room, evening TV room, and my afternoon reading room. So we settled promptly.
Before we arrived at the house on Friday—we had time to kill before it was ready—we did our first beach walk on the Gulf coast. We walked about half an hour, at 1:00, in the sun. That was enough. We had sunscreen in the car that we put on, but it was in the car all winter so it froze at some point. We have no idea if it was still effective. At least I remembered to bring my Aussie hat! Being out in the sun even for that short a time made us both tired. Even though we wanted to be someplace warm and green, I doubt we'll be in the sun very much.
There is a piano in the house (that is actually reasonably in tune). Unfortunately, there is almost no piano music. I sat down and plinked out a few tunes from one book of greatest hits of some kind. It was really elementary keying but I still didn't do that well at it. Of course, I don't think I've sat down and played a piano for over 25 years—and before that it was only a couple of times a year for a few minutes, at most. I did find it fun. Too bad we don't have room for a piano at home; I'd take it up again at some modest level. I had piano lessons for about five years in elementary and junior high school, and I hated every minute of them. I rarely played again once my mother quit making me take the lessons. I didn't even practice much when I was taking the lessons. The highest level of accomplishment I ever reached was "lousy." Now it would be enjoyable to play.
That's the story. The next epistle will return to normal, I think. Unless I have an alligator story or something to tell.
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