We had loaded Pop's metallic-gray Chrysler 300 with our luggage and set it to cruising southward, down Interstate 95 across Virginia and bound for the Carolinas. After a stop at the Cracker Barrel in Fredericksburg, Va., for a "good ol' Southern breakfast" that included grits, biscuits and gravy, the miles began to roll by.
Driving down the interstates of the East, you realize how much of the commerce of this country is moved by truck. Besides all the independent-owner/operator truckers we passed, there were also the rigs of the major trucking lines like Navajo, Roadway, J.B. Hunt and the big, medium-blue metallic, Freightliner cabs hauling 40-foot trailers for Werners.
Because we were doing our traveling in May, before school had let out and the hordes of vacationers had hit the road, the big rigs seemed to take up a large part of the room on the interstates. In a totally unscientific poll, I counted every fourth vehicle as an 18-wheeler as we drove across a section of Virginia.
In addition to the big freight lines, there were moving vans from United, Allied, Mayflower and others, proving America is indeed a country on the move. Fed Ex and United Parcel Service semis readily illustrated that a lot of packages are also moved by means other than rail and air. I don't even want to mention all the fuel tanker trucks, flatbeds and gravel haulers that are out on the roads.
When you see an ad that asks you to be considerate of truckers because you'd live in a totally different world without them, believe it.
We continued south through Richmond, once the capital of the Confederacy, and picked up I-85 at Petersburg, site of yet another major Civil War battle. Soon we were in North Carolina, and we noticed that the number of police running radar at the bottom of hills or in other spots where a driver's speed might increase hadn't fallen off any. There seemed to be more speed enforcement throughout the South than in any other section of our trip. However, since once again our speed control was set at only slightly above the limit, it kept us out of trouble.
When we rolled into Spartanburg, S.C., we discovered that the Fairfield Inn - a hotel where we had reservations, because it is near our friend Cotton Owens' shop and home - was without power. They moved us downtown into a Marriott hotel at the same rate.
I'd first met Owens in 1965. Besides being a close family friend, he is truly one of the Legends of NASCAR. In 1956, after a very successful career running what were known as modified stock cars throughout the South and picking up the moniker "King of the Modifieds," he switched over to the Pure Stock division of NASCAR, as the Nextel Cup cars were known then, and won the Daytona race. He had already won the Daytona race for modifieds twice.
Cotton then retired from driving and began building and running cars as an owner. Among the many who drove for him was Ralph Earnhart, Dale's daddy and present-day hero driver Dale Junior's granddaddy. In 1966, Owens' Dodge won the NASCAR Championship with David Pearson behind the wheel, and in 1969, at Talladega, Ala., his Dodge Charger with Buddy Baker at the wheel was the first stock car to be clocked at over 200 miles per hour.
Besides building race cars, Owens ran a salvage yard and a repair garage. My first car was a slightly wrecked 1965 Dodge that had been rebuilt in his shop; I've probably owned four or five different cars that have all visited Owens' shops before coming to my garage.
Any trip to the Carolinas always necessitated a trip to Spartanburg to see Cotton and his wife Dottie and their grown children. Some of the most enjoyable times of the whole trip were just listening to Pop, Cotton and some of the other "good ol' boys" spin yarns about what NASCAR was like when they were racing truly racing stock cars as they came from the manufacturer.
After a night at the Marriott, we switched back to the Fairfield Inn; they had restored the power only an hour after we had left the previous day. We also stopped at the Spartanburg Chrysler dealer to have the oil and oil filter changed in Pop's car; our accumulated mileage told us the stop was scheduled.
Another item on my list of desired meals was some Southern barbecue while we were passing through the Carolinas. Now, Carolina barbecue is a breed all by itself; it's pulled pork that has been cooked with a vinegar treatment of some kind. We all got in the car and, following Cotton's directions, drove to the Little Pigs Bar-B-Q where I had my requested pork sandwich, hush puppies, coleslaw and a big glass of iced sweet tea. There were three squeeze bottles of sauce on the table marked Mild, Hot and Secret. I mixed the hot and secret for a very tasty gratification of my barbecue craving.
At the same time gas back in Seattle was running $3.35 per gallon, we filled up in Spartanburg at $2.85 per gallon.
ONCE AGAIN, we put the cruising gray landshark back on the road and headed farther south. As we got deeper into Georgia, we began to see dead armadillos along the side of the interstate. It's somewhat interesting how various sections of the country have differing road-kill. In the Midwest, there were opossums and skunks.
When we got to the Florida state line it was a welcome sight to see palm trees growing in the wild again and not where some landscape architect had decided they'd look attractive growing. Gasoline at the Florida border was the cheapest we'd find on the whole trip: $2.63 per gallon.
We left the interstate south of Jacksonville and cut across and down the state on a well-maintained two-lane through forests of pulp wood. We now had the pulp wood logging trucks to deal with; a single truck could haul 20 of the skinny logs in one load.
There is a national cemetery along I-75 in central Florida where my mother's ashes are buried. Pop will eventually end up there, too.
We stopped and, after a bit of searching, were able to locate her headstone. On our return trip back up the peninsula, we'd stop again and leave flowers on her grave.
Once again, we had to deal with numerous bugs obscuring our vision out the windshield. Across Nebraska and Iowa we'd hit a lot of big bugs, so many that when we got to Michigan you could barely read the license plate.
When we got to Florida, we began running into the infamous "love bugs," so called because they all seem to be mating and each one you hit is actually two stuck together. They also have an obnoxious body chemical makeup wherein if you try to simply clean them off using just the windshield washers and wipers, you soon end up with a greasy opaque mess. The only way to clean the windshield is to stop and by hand, take a windshield cleaner with a rough nylon scrubber on one side and a squeegee on the other, and use a lot of elbow grease.
We pulled into Sun City Center, Fla., where my parents lived until my mother's passing. This would be our trip's southern- and easternmost terminus - everything from here on would be headed back toward Pop's new home in Las Vegas. We stopped to see a number of Pop's former neighbors and tried to hunt up someone with cable TV so we could watch the NASCAR All-Star race being held that night.
Our search ended in, of all places, a multi-screen sports bar that had just opened in the retirement community. They didn't have more than a dozen customers, and it was a simple matter to request they change one of the screens to the car race. We spent three or four hours there and ended up closing the place just as the race ended. We were the only customers left.
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