Driving Memories

By George W. Hondros

Memoir/travelogue along with observations on family, friendship, fatherhood, and the good old USA. A feel good story that sends a message that if you have not experienced this great country by car, that you should. And take someone special with you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George W. Hondros
• Release date: Nov 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370339877

George W. Hondros

George Hondros lives in Silver Spring, MD. with his wife Nancy. He has two grown children.

Book preview

Driving Memories

Memories of Two Car Trips Across the Country

George W. Hondros

Copyright 2016 by George W. Hondros

All Rights Reserved

Published by George W. Hondros

TXu-2-013-498

Smashwords Edition

Licensing Notes

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Dedication

To Alex and Julia with all my love.

In the end, you may not remember how many breaths you took, but hopefully, you will remember the moments that took your breath away.

May you both have many moments in your lives that take your breath away.

Contents

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Day Six

Day Seven

Day Eight

Day Nine

Day One

Here I was driving toward a motel in Staunton, VA on a Friday night at 11 p.m. in the worst rain storm I have ever driven in. For about a hundred miles I had been straining to see the road while trying to maintain a decent speed limit so as not get in a wreck with one of the tractor trailers that travel in abundance on I-81 S at over 60 MPH, no matter what the weather is like. My back was stiff from the tension of driving hunched over and the stress driving in this weather was causing me. My daughter, Julia, is sitting next to me in the car unwilling to take the wheel because she is unsure of her driving skills in this weather. We were just beginning a cross country trip to move my daughter and her car to Los Angeles. Since she is my only daughter, and we are pretty close, we decided to make a ten day trip out of the move, and jointly drive her car to the west coast, and see part of the country at the same time. We were driving a Hyundai Elantra that Julia had recently purchased. It was roomy, comfortable, handled well, and had a large back seat and trunk, so it made sense to drive it cross country instead of Julia flying out west and buying a new car once she got out there.

However, this was not my idea of how this trip should start. In fact I had already broken my first rule regarding this trip; no night driving. But we had a schedule to keep, so we had no choice but to leave our house during this terrible storm, and at night no less. Now I was on I-81 S, one of the busiest and longest north south interstate highways in the U.S. In Virginia, the route parallels the Appalachian Mountains and is considered the most dangerous road in the state. Trucks own the road. I-81 has double the number fatal accidents as I-95, which carries twice the number of vehicles on a daily basis. Trucks account for one out of every four vehicles on I-81, and these trucks can average 80,000 pounds, so when they collide with cars, you can imagine what happens. On top of that, truck drivers like to travel in groups of three, four, or more on this road and, if they catch up to a car they will bring their rig right up behind the car and tail gate you before changing lanes and passing you. Truckers like to travel in groups because they consider themselves professional drivers, and feel more comfortable surrounded by their own. They despise car drivers, because they don’t trust their driving skills. I had read that since 60,000 vehicles travel I-81 daily, and there are so many accidents, the government of the State of Virginia does not even try to document all the accidents. So here I was trying not to become one of those undocumented accidents. Get me to Staunton is all I kept thinking to myself while I was driving straining to see ten feet in front of me.

But trucks were not my only problem. We were in the middle of a terrible storm that had hit the east coast. It was called the October 2015 North American Storm Complex. That was the real name of the storm - The October 2015 North American Storm Complex. And a storm complex it was. We would not see blue sky until we crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas on Sunday, two days from when we departed. Feeding off of Hurricane Joaquin, which had hit the southeastern part of the U.S. at about the same time, and storm brought heavy and continuous rain to many of the states in its path, including Virginia and Tennessee, our path to going cross country. The storm had totally flooded Charleston, SC to our south, and now we found ourselves in the middle of this storm complex, headed in the direction of the hurricane. And I had some very precious cargo sitting in the passenger seat. All I wanted was to arrive safely at our hotel, get a good night’s sleep, and then get on I-40 W the next day so that we would finally be headed west and away from this storm. How had we gotten to this point? I was trying to remember it all as I drove, to help pass the time.

My daughter was born twenty-three years ago and is my second child. I cannot describe Julia without mentioning the importance of water in her life. She has always loved the water, whether it was a bath tub, swimming pool, or the ocean. It started when we took her to day care at the YMCA and they introduced her to swimming at the age of two. That is where she gained her affinity for water, as they introduced her to swimming twice a week during day care. I remember a birthday party we had for her at our house when she was about four. We had all sorts of games set up in the backyard including horseshoes, sand castle building, and a slip n slide. We even had a pony brought over for the day. But we also had a kid’s pool set up. Julia was in the pool for most of the party, but she did venture out to try kick ball and sand castle building in the sand box. But after about twenty minutes of being out of the pool, she turned and ran back to it and jumped back in the pool. She was most comfortable in water. By the age of nine she was swimming competitively with a club team three days a week. Achieving swimming success in competitive meets in the summer and fall at that young age spurred her interest in swimming, and by the time she reached high school she was swimming six days a week, five of them two-a-day practices. For two-a-day practices she had to be at the pool at 4:45 a.m. and then again at 4:30 p.m. At each practice she would swim between 5,000 and 6,000 meters. In her senior year of high school she was captain of the swim team and then went on to swim in college as well. Swimming made her tough, organized, and established physical fitness as a priority in her life. You have to be tough to swim that many miles a week, and organized to pull it off and still get your homework done and still find time to spend with your friends. She has maintained a focus on staying healthy and fit even after she left competitive swimming, which was after her sophomore year of college. At that point in her life she had realized, as she said to me, that she was not going to the Olympics and she wanted to do more during her time in college than go to swim practice for nineteen hours a week. So she quit the team and rushed a sorority and went to London for three months of study abroad. After graduating college with a degree in Design and Merchandising, she got a job with a Japanese retail company as a store manager and was earning a good income. But she felt it was in a dead-end job. The pay was good, but she felt there was no opportunity for advancement into the Japanese corporate office in Japan where she might better utilize the design aspect of her degree. Her friends were off doing their own thing, with some close to getting married and settling down, so there was a need to do something new. In addition to an affinity for water, Julia had fallen in love with California when she was a teenager. I don’t know why exactly, but I encouraged it. It is something you want to do with your kids – encourage them. Because she liked California, I introduced her to The Eagles Hotel California album, and especially, the titled song of the album, which I think is still one of her favorite songs. I even bought her a poster for her room of the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is featured on the album cover. So I was not surprised that she kept talking about living in California, and specifically, Los Angeles. Where else would you live if you liked the water, wanted to be near water, and you had a degree related to fashion?

But there was something else going on here. Julia is a Millennial. Born in 1992. She is a smart phone carrying, app loving, impatient, and narcissistic millennial. This is not a bad thing, but it’s not the