Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The 20 Hour Drive Part I

So after finally packing the car (and leaving some things behind) we hit the road!
Personally I was dreading this drive very much. I actually hate driving AND riding. I'm not exactly sure why but I just don't like it. If I had to choose, I would choose to ride, but only because as soon as I am in the car I get sleepy. My mother is the same exact way. It could be in the middle of the day and I could have had three cups of coffee, if I sit down in the car and the car starts moving, whether I'm driving or not, I immediately get tired. Its so weird, kind of like the me falling asleep during every single movie I try to watch too, maybe its the sitting still part, I'm not sure. So I was so worried about this drive because I normally can only drive for about 30 minutes before I have to pull over to take a nap so that I'm not risking falling asleep at the wheel. This is why Mr. Hunt usually drives everywhere.
With 20 hours ahead of us, I knew Mr. Hunt couldn't drive the entire way, I had to contribute. So off we went. Mr. Hunt started off driving because even before getting in the car, I was exhausted from packing the car. Our initial plan was to drive 9 hours to somewhere in Alabama and then the remaining 12 hours on Sunday, but Mr. Hunt had another plan. He decided that we should drive as far as we could drive that first day just to "get it out of the way." I agreed, thinking that we wouldn't be able to go that far anyway seeing as it was already 4:30pm by the time we left the house.
I decided it would be fun to take a picture of the state sign in every state that we crossed into and share it with y'all. Well, it proved to be a little harder than I thought. You wanna see what I got?
This one below was supposed to be South Carolina. If you squint and look at the right top corner you can see it. I made the mistake of trying to look at the screen on the camera instead of in the view finder. The combination of that and the sun setting, I couldn't see the sign coming, so I nearly missed it. Mr. Hunt started laughing at me.


So I tried to make up for it and tried to take a picture of the welcome center instead. Not a great picture, but you can at least tell what it is.


Then I took a nap, and I told Mr. Hunt to wake me up when we were about to cross into the next state, and he did. I forgot that I was messing with the shutter speed before this and never changed it back so while I was half asleep still and crossing into Georgia, I took this picture.


HUGE FAIL! So I quickly tried to change the shutter speed back and wait for the welcome center to fly by, but first I tried to take a picture of another sign again to practice, and I got this....



Then this....what the heck? How did it get the sign and the dashboard? I'm not sure.....


Then the welcome center flew by without me taking a picture because it was up in the woods.
This is where I gave up. Yeah, I didn't try too hard did I since we still had to pass through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas? But I had messed up so bad on the first two, I just didn't even wanna try anymore. Plus it was going to be dark for the next few so I knew it would be hard to get the right picture anyway.
The first day/night of driving I drove three hours straight. I think it was from 10pm to 1am. Honestly, I'm not sure how I did it. It was probably a combination of the book on tape that I was listening too and the fact that I had slept for about 6 hours in the car before it was my turn. I even got to drive through the time change zone (is that what its called?), so when I finished driving it was only 12am where we were so it seemed like I had only contributed 2 hours.....hmmmmmm.
This first day in the car the fur babies were angels. I'm sure it helped that most of the trip, it was their bed time. After the first few hours, they just slept the remainder of the way.
Mr. Hunt drove two more hours after I had my turn and we finally said it was probably time to call it a day/night at 2am (3am EST). That means we drove 11 hours.....GO US! Or really, go Mr. Hunt! He drove 8 of those hours.....wow! What a trooper! We stopped at the nearest LaQuinta right off the highway so that the next morning we could just hit the road easily again. The LaQuinta was in Mississippi somewhere (can't remember) and it was a dog friendly hotel. It wasn't until we were in the hotel that Mr. Hunt informed me that we were only allowed to have one dog that was under 50lbs in the room with us. We had two dogs that we both WAY over 50lbs. Yikes. It wasn't very hard to "sneak" them in when it was 2am, but the next morning was a challenge. We snuck them out and hit the road again.

Come back tomorrow for day two!

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