Well, the girls had off for the week and the Mrs. took vacation time, so I did, too. We decided to motor directly east 1,100 miles to visit my mother-in-law in Hilton Head, South Carolina. We hadn’t been there since summer 2019, and she was celebrating her 80th birthday just after Thanksgiving.
To be honest, the trip had its ups and downs. The
biggest up was my nine-day respite from work, especially after the intense
effort I had to put in the week prior to get ahead of the curve on my return.
Other ups? The drive east was remarkably fun.
Relaxing, scenic, low-pressure. I’m used to taking I-95 south from New Jersey
to South Carolina to get to Hilton Head. That involves about a half-dozen toll
booths, long patches of 55 mph speeding zones (the entire state of Delaware,
for example), and driving through several megacities. The 10 miles before and
after hitting Washington DC would take us two hours to get through with all the
unpredictable traffic. This eastern commute through the northern parts of the
Deep South held none of that.
On the way east. Coming back west, however, we were
stuck driving in a raging gale force storm all afternoon, so that was a quite
unpleasant white knuckler.
North-South was an 865-mile trip for us, and we’d do
it in about 15 hours. This time we broke up the trip into two days, stopping
about two-thirds in at a Marriott or a Holiday Inn. Going there we stopped in
Montgomery, Alabama, and had a pleasant dinner in a bar and grill walking
distance from the hotel. Coming back we stopped in historic Vicksburg, Mississippi,
but, try as I might, I could not locate the Civil War battlefield before we
were out of the area. I’ll have to get back there again sometime in the near
future.
Speaking of historic Vicksburg, I did put away 190
pages of Carl Sandburg’s biography of our Civil War president, Abraham
Lincoln: The War Years. And I also found a trio of other paperbacks
thrifting on the island with Patch: a gnarled, well-worn biography of Einstein,
a gnarled and well-worn copy of Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and, believe it or
not, a gnarled and well-worn Treasury of Greatest Poetry, the latter of
which I read profusely before bed each night.
As usual, we ate like royalty. I had fish and chips,
linguini bolognese, shrimp and grits, fish tacos, and, on Thanksgiving, the
Mrs.’s awesome pumpkin pie (of which I ate perhaps 3/4). Thrice I did a morning
walk listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, trekking along the
perimeter of the cove where we stayed, and once Patch and I did an evening walk
on the docks. The room we rented had a Bingo board game, which the girls had
never encountered before, so we had to play that as a family three or four
nights, complete with stupid challenges and duel-like allegations of cheating.
The little ones also assembled a thousand piece puzzle. It was fun.
And yes, I did do some deep thinking.
Nana had a great birthday. My wife hooked her up with
some Chanel bling and I bequeathed her my copy of Ken Follett’s The Pillars
of the Earth. (Nana is a retired architect and current reading enthusiast.)
The downs were the aforementioned drive home in the
rain (much like driving with a fire hose blasting at your front windshield for
four hours), a week of overcast and cool weather, a senior citizen who went
horn happy on me as I was backing up out of a parking space. Our room was above
a wine bar, and one night a patron tourist had a bit too much of the grape and
woke my daughter up barfing below her bedroom window. But it was still great to
be back on the island.
We’re staying local next month for Christmas, though
we may drive out to see my sister-in-law and her family in Austin one day. This
would be a return to where I saw the Museum of the Pacific War back in July.
Though this time I’d like to check out something a little more … spooky. The
Marfa Lights are way too far west (420 miles) but … the Museum of the Weird
is located right in downtown Austin! Now if only I can persuade my family to go
…
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