Today, for me, simply began at midnight as the clock rolled over from one day to the next. No sleep for me tonight and so no clear separation between the days.
Dominica managed to get most of a night’s sleep during her normal sleep schedule which was good. Liesl pretty much slept through the entire night as well making the trip a minimal impact for her. Another reason why driving straight through really helps. If we were to stop for the night we would have to wake up Liesl and bring her into a hotel which would make her really awake and cause us to lose hours rather than running in and crashing and getting up and going again. Very inefficient and it always is needed, because hotels don’t normally have rolling check-in times, at the most inappropriate time for long haul driving. If I could just get a room from six in the morning to one in the afternoon, that might work. But that isn’t very reliable and you never know if you will really be tired at six or not anyway or where you will be.
On the drive I started “reading” the book The Disappearing Spoon which turned out to be so engaging that Dominica, who thought that it would be boring as she thinks everything that I read must be, was unable to go to sleep and stayed up just to listed to the book. It is a really fascinating book of science history from the perspective of the periodic table of the elements. How could that not be exciting?
Today was my first time driving through Kentucky since I did a north to south trip heading from Ithaca or Rochester to Birmingham in 2000 or 2001. Overall the drive went well. Nothing much to say about it. It was long and exhausting but only as long and exhausting as a straight-through drive can be. I drove the entire way, I was never tired enough that I needed Dominica to drive.
It was late evening when we pulled into Frankfort. There was a lot of snow on the ground, an odd site to us Texans. The entire drive took just over twenty seven hours. Not too shabby for this old man driving straight through. Francesca and Bennie traded off with Francesca doing about twenty four hours total and Bennie doing about five – they have a longer drive coming from Houston.
We all stayed up for several hours. It takes quite a while to wind down from a drive of that long. It seems like you would just fall into bed but that really doesn’t happen. You need hours for your body to turn off the “must stay awake” response.