North to Alaska: Lebanon, TN

Not much happened today except driving. I’m glad to see gas prices dropping as we get closer home. I have always complained about my car getting lousy gas mileage. As we got in a thinner, cooler atmosphere, the car got much better mileage. Around home, it did well to average 18 mpg. The best it had ever gotten was 22 mpg on a trip back from Charleston, SC. Several days on this trip it has gotten over 25 mpg. Today was hot and a heavier atmosphere and it got 22 mpg. During most of the trip, I had no complaints about the mpg.

With the current unrest, we had been given instructions from Joy, Jen, and Judi to arrange to be at St. Louis in the middle of the day and to keep driving. As it would happen, right as we needed to change from one interstate to another, there was construction involving detours. Our Garmin did not know about the detours. We ended up going by the Arch but did not stop. Danny did get a couple of pictures of the Arch. I was driving so I just kept following the detour signs and finally the Garmin caught up. No problems. Traffic was heavy there as expected.

Most of what we drove through today looked like we could have been driving down 220. We did cross the Ohio River. It is fairly wide where we crossed it. We stopped at a rest area (a real one) in Metropolis, IL, the home of Superman. Everything was calm so Superman wasn’t needed though I did see a picture of him.

Traffic was worse in Nashville than we had expected. We had decided we were staying tonight in Lebanon, TN. Somewhere between Nashville and Lebanon, traffic stopped; I mean stopped, parking lot still. We sat there for a while before it finally picked up. We never saw anything that would have caused the hold up. We were in four states today - Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

There is another change in plans. We had planned to go to Joy’s house for the Labor Day weekend. When we left Canada, we thought we would get there Friday. But this trip has gone much faster that the outgoing trip. We are only 326 miles from Joy’s house now so we would get there tomorrow, Wednesday. It is pointless to go there in the middle of the week when the girls have school and Joy and Rock have to work so, we will be going home and going to Joy’s house for the weekend in two or three weeks. We may stop in Pigeon Forge tomorrow or we may go home. Compared to the 326 miles to Greenville, we are 436 miles from Stoneville.