Driving through the Wilderness

Here's some travel advice: never leave for an 11-hour road trip unless you have some basic idea where you are going. 

If that tip seems mind-numbingly obvious to you, then, well, I wish you would have been in the car with me the last time I drove from Nashville to Washington, DC.

We were set to embark at 7:00 a.m., but due to the breakneck pace at which I tend to live my life, I didn't even have a chance to start packing until 11:00 the night before.

My cross-country flight connected through Dallas, where my connection home got cancelled.  I raced to a distant terminal of America's most poorly organized airport in a failed attempt to catch an earlier flight, which I ultimately missed by just four minutes, because I had to go through a long security line when I switched terminals. Then I had to return back from where I started (passing through security yet again) to sit around and wait for a later flight that barely got me home that night at all. 

When it did, I was shuttled to the airport parking lot in the driving rain and dropped off in the downpour only to find that I had forgotten where I had parked.  (Answer: nowhere near where I was dropped off).

Once I got home, in my exhausted state (Tennessee), I was so focused on packing what I would need once I reached my next destination that it never crossed my mind to figure out how to actually get there. There's probably a metaphor in that somewhere, but I certainly didn't have the mental energy to think about it then.

I might have thought of it the next morning, but my wife and I overslept and had to scamper to load the car and get moving in order to get there before it got too late. We hit the road, and about three hours into the trip, when we hit the intersection of I-75 and I-40 in Knoxville, that it occurred to me that I had no earthly idea how to get to Virginia, and that while I-40 would eventually get me to North Carolina, the two states were not, technically speaking, the same.

Although perhaps they should be.

My brief panic subsided when our portable GPS happened to be in the car we were driving. I don't like helplessly relying on those things, but the alternative was stopping and buying an atlas, which would have cost money, made me feel silly, and further delayed our arrival.

Besides, we were making seriously good time, which as most guys know, is the most important thing about a road trip.

So we pressed on.  I-40 took us to I-81, which took us to Virginia where we passed a house with a confederate flag and a functional-looking cannon sitting in the front yard, pointing at the interstate.  If the Civil War ever resumes, and the Yanks come marching down I-81, at least one house will be prepared. 

We pressed on, anxious to get out of whatever weird subcultural domain we'd entered.  Before long we were in Central Virginia and according to our GPS, about 2 hours outside of the DC suburbs where we were headed. We were on pace to hit Alexandria in less than 10 hours, which would be the driving achievement of a lifetime. I was pumped.

It was then that things got interesting.

The GPS (We call her "Carmen" because she is a Garmin brand, has a female voice, and lives in the car) inexplicably told me to exit I-81 for another interstate heading toward Richmond, which was 120 miles away.  It didn't sound right to me, but I didn't have a map, so I followed orders.

I was temporarily relieved when Carmen told me to get off the interstate again in after a few miles. It was a small road, and it had just gotten dark outside, but at least she wasn't taking me on a 120-mile detour to Richmond.  We got gas and stopped for a bathroom, which proved to be the only good decision we made that night. 

The people hanging around the rural Virginia gas stop had the look of the cast of Deliverance and gave us suspicious looks as we walked in, but no one physically accosted us, and there was no immediate sign of cannon fire, so we labeled the stop a success. 

When we got back on the road, the lights of the interstate soon faded and it became clear we were on a windy two-lane road in the middle of nowhere with no clear idea of where we were going.  Right around then it occurred to me that a map really might have been a good idea.

At least the road was only 13 miles, and surely we'd hit some better road at the end of that dark and winding stretch.  We were driving a car with a slow oil leak and 185,000 miles on it, but as long as we didn't breakdown, we'd be ok.  Although this detour was surely costing us a lot of time. Carmen now had us getting in at 8:17 instead of 7:58, but there was no driving any faster than 35 on this rural two-lane deathtrap of a road. 

After the requisite 13 miles, we turned onto an equally deserted stretch of two-lane roads that eventually led us to a town, for some reason, called Orange.  It was cute enough, but when we hit its quaint downtown, Carmen instructed us to take the second right at the roundabout. 

We did that and soon thereafter heard: "recalculating."  Meanwhile Carmen had pushed our expected arrival back to 8:30.  We were in trouble. And once we got back on the interstate, I was going to smash Carmen into a thousand pieces in revenge for what she was doing to me.

We followed Carmen's instructions through another windy two-lane road in the dark night, only this one seemed to go straight up into a mountain.   The thick trees beside the road absorbed any hint of moonlight, and the constant 45-degree turns on the narrow highway kept me on the edge of my seat.  As my visibility shrank to about two car lengths, I prayed not to break down or run off the road, and suddenly became thankful we had already stopped for gas.  Meanwhile, our arrival time changed to 8:42.

At some point on the interminable 22-mile road, we crossed a sign that was too dark to read, but seemed to indicate we were somehow in a national park. I said words to Carmen at that moment that can never be taken back--words that will permanently damage our relationship--but they were words that had to be said. 

Our old car kept going, albeit at a very slow pace, given the darkness.  I barely managed to keep it on the winding, unlit road as the exhaustion of the day's drive set it.  The narrow mountain road had no shoulder, and with the fleeting amount of light drifting through the trees, I was sure we'd get rear-ended if the car ran into trouble and had to stop for some reason. 

My wife, meanwhile, notice that our arrival time had once again been pushed back, gave up her fleeting hopes of a nice dinner and made a peanut butter sandwich.  The only bright side was that the thick forest of trees beside the road protected us from any potential cannon fire.

As we neared the exit to this still unnamed national park, we saw the first road sign we'd seen since we got off the interstate.  Surely, this was our ray of hope, and civilization was near.  The long, harrowing journey through nothingness was about to end.  

The sign read:

"Wilderness: 8 miles."

We were stunned.

I stammered: "You mean there's an actual place called Wilderness?  And this isn't it?"  

Indeed, someone had looked at the deserted place we were in, and the place we were headed, and thought the spot eight miles ahead looked more like "Wilderness" than the land that became the national park.  And that was exactly where we were headed.

Through more twists and turns mixed in equal parts with prayers and curses at Carmen, we managed to make it to Wilderness.  To our mild surprise, it looked no more or less like "Wilderness" than anything else we had passed since we made the regrettable decision to leave the interstate.

We saw no indication of civilization there, but then again, I guess that was to be expected.

From there, we made a couple more turns and finally hit I-95 in Fredricksburg, Va, where we would have stopped the car and kissed the 6-lane highway under our tires if our little detour hadn't already added an extra hour to the trip. It was now scheduled to end at 9:02. 

Our literal detour through the Wilderness, from the time we left one interstate to the time we got on another, had taken slightly more than two hours, but it felt like two years. We could barely speak by the time we finished, and more than anything, we happy to be safe and in a car that was still moving. 

After a short trip up I-95, we hit our destination, thanked the Hand of Providence, parked the car and enjoyed our stay.

We had made it in safely, but the detour through the Wilderness cost us an extra hour of travel time, for which I vowed to compensate on the drive back home, when I would use a different route. 

And I would make sure to map it out in advance.