Ungraceful Travel

“The essence is to travel gracefully rather than to arrive.” - Enos Mills

I’ll try to put this delicately: that quote can go ahead and shove it.

This is what happens after an nine hour and change drive from the Twin Cities to my parents’ house in the U.P. I get a little cranky. Travel gracefully? Humbug! Just get me there!

In the summer this should be a seven hour drive. However, holiday travelers and snow lengthened it out dramatically.

The first step was getting out of the cities. To be honest, this could have been much worse, as I managed to get on the road by 2:30 in the afternoon, and traffic was relatively light. It thinned out as I began to make my way north on 35. However, that was when all of the seventeen year old males wearing their hats sideways got cocky and began to speed up and slide into the ditch. Traffic would slow down to a crawl, and eventually I would see a seventeen year old male, standing on the side of the freeway and looking at his beached cars in a very confused manner, as if either trying to figure out just how it happened, as he was only driving eighty miles an hour on slushy roads, or what he were going to tell his parents when they got the bill for the tow.

I’d heard that Duluth was going to get hammered with snow, which wasn’t that much of a shocker, since it is Duluth, and I decided to take 70 into Wisconsin. At this point the highway was snow covered and slushy, but so was the freeway. Avoiding Duluth turned out to be a good plan until I got stuck behind a plow and another truck which were going 35 miles an hour. This lasted for approximately infinity minutes. (I truly believe I was stuck in some sort of time warp between Grantsburg and Spooner, where once I’d just about gotten to Spooner, our whole mini-convoy was instantaneously transported back to Grantsburg, where we had to do it all over again.)

Several years later, I made it to Spooner, sporting a full beard, and headed northeast on 63 towards Ashland. I was soon caught behind another convoy of cars driving agonizingly slow, but soon they all finally chickened out and turned off. Now it was just me and the highway and the slush that kept sucking my car all over the road in whatever direction it felt like. Fun! But with my veins pumping what at that point must have been eighty percent coffee, I pressed on.

By the time I hit U.S. 2, I’d mastered driving the slushy roads and was making decent time. This meant, of course, that I would get stuck behind a three mile chain of jittery drivers going 30 miles an hour into Ashland. Several decades later, I stopped at Holiday to refuel and gnash my teeth

From there, traffic thinned dramatically and the roads got a little better. I settled in and happily listened to Jim Gaffigan, feeling like I’d made it through the worst.

Of course, I’d forgotten that I was traveling to the U.P., where there obviously would be heavy snow and wind. Hooray!

Somewhere after Bruce Crossing things got bad. Poor visibility, slippery, snow-covered roads, and deer running all over the place, as if they had bets with other deer to see who could cause the most accidents. I meandered all over the road, pulled by the snow, hitting rumble strips left and right, my fingers digging into the steering wheel. I passed several cars that were going thirty, as I figured if I was going into the ditch, I wanted to get it out of the way sooner rather than later.

At some point it became a grudge match between Mother Nature and me. I wasn’t going to give up, given my stubborn heritage, and neither was she. I got angry at being on the road for so long and decided I would show her a thing or two about perseverance. I put Kid Rock into my CD player and cranked it up, my veins now about 95 percent coffee. I pressed on, a glint of insanity playing in my eyes.

Twin Lakes. The Mosquito Inn. Painesdale. South Range, where a deer was running down the middle of the road, slipping and sliding all over the place. Then Houghton! I let out an audible ‘Woo-hoo!’

I chugged up Quincy Hill, Kid Rock shrieking in my ears. I plowed through the drifted snow across the road by the airport, where I knew it would be, because it’s always there.

Finally I hit Calumet. I laughed loudly but passed on giving Mother Nature the double bird.

Then the Wolverine Market. I blew past the Last Place On Earth, wondering if I would eventually need to be pried out of my seat with heavy equipment. Allouez. Ahmeek. Snow was everywhere. The Wood’n Spoon!

Then I was home. Nine plus hours later.

I made a mental checklist: new tires and go to the bathroom, as I’d ingested an estimated fourteen gallons of coffee.

But I’ve arrived and its time to reap my rewards. More coffee. Turkey. Stuffing. Family. Pumpkin Pie. It’ll be fun, just as long as my fingers relax at some point and I’m able to put down this steering wheel.