My mother is attending her 60th (!) high school reunion in a small village right on the Wabash River that separates Illinois from Indiana called Hutsonville.
She and my father went to the local high school in town (go Tigers!) and not knowing how many of these reunions will happen in the future, she was awfully keen that she didn’t miss this one.
With Meghann working at a quilt show in Mebane over the weekend of the reunion and Benjamin being the ever dutiful teacher, that left us these choices:
- Put Mom on a plane to an airport rather far from her destination in Hutsonville (likely Indianapolis) and let her wander about on her own. Whilst she’s certainly capable, she’s not a huge fan of changes of altitude at the best of times and harrowing memories of seeing airplane parts strewn about on the side of the mountain that the airport in Nashville (BNA) hasn’t really done much for her desire to fly.
- Put both of us on a plane and then I’d drive her round but that does nothing for her dislike of flying and what the altitude does to her ears and was frightfully expensive to boot. Even though *I* love the actual flying, I’m much less of a fan of the security theatre and groping as well as being rather panoramic sized in sardine class and the airlines have certainly had their reliability problems. The last thing we’d want is to be stranded along the way!
- Hire a car and we drive halfway across the country and back. It’s certainly much cheaper and a whole lot more comfortable and even though altitude changes would happen no matter which way we went, it should be far less than what one feels at 30K ft MSL!
As you can imagine (and probably guessed by the featured image), option #3 was the overwhelming favourite.
A couple of weeks prior to departure, we planned on taking two days to drive out to Illinois with a stop at some random location along the way and two days back also stopping roughly halfway which gave us two days to tool about southern and central Illinois and do the reunion without adding soul-crushing exhaustion.
Looking at the options, it appeared that given our itinerary that hiring the car on the Monday prior to departure from Avis’ airport location would be ideal and allow us to return it fairly conveniently. With Steve Lehto’s occasional deep-dives on just how much Hertz and it’s related companies suck in terms of customer service, I figured Avis should be the safer choice. The fact that they were offering up Toyota RAV4’s which I really wanted to test drive after recently hunting a RAV4 and end up negotiating a Corolla for my brother’s lady…bonus! 🙂
So our two guaranteed waypoints were booked in Marion IL on 03 Oct 2024 (so we could meet with whatever cousins from my father’s side of the family we could wrangle) and Sullivan IN on 04 Oct 2024 just over the Wabash River after the reunion was finished.
We had reckoned on staying in Knoxville or Nashville on the way out and likely Knoxville on the way back but not knowing how much time in the seat Mom could take in a given day, we figured we’d stay flexible with our en-route stopovers and that’s why we didn’t book them in advance.
Mind you, you know what they say about the best laid of plans…
More than a little bit of the entire western part of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee was utterly destroyed by Hurricane Helene including I-40 which was going to be our main route to and from Illinois.
It was so bad that the NC Department of Transport actually took the very rare step of declaring that all roads west of Interstate 77 should be considered closed until further notice.
I had been watching Helene’s track and figured with her intensity, she had a better than average chance of being another Hugo-style cyclone bringing destruction to parts of North Carolina well away from the coast. Hugo maintained enough forward momentum at landfall that there was significant damage in Charlotte a couple of hundred miles inland.
That ended up being proven correct when most of the communities in the mountains were inundated by massive rain and subsequent flooding. A major dam on the North Carolina/Tennessee border failed and sent a massive flood into Newport TN and also took out the eastbound lanes of I-40 in the area that they’re not expecting to have mended until September 2025.
Asheville was utterly devastated by flooding from the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers and you know it’s bad when Biltmore Village which is higher than most areas of Asheville is completely under water.
Chimney Rock and Lake Lure (where “Dirty Dancing” was filmed, BTW) were almost completely destroyed (here they are in happier times):
I was already plotting a new route round all of the destruction that would end up completely avoiding the NC mountains and Tennessee. We could have returned back to I-40 via I-81 and shortened things a bit but as it was, our diversion into Kentucky ended up working out very nicely in terms of scenery and not a whole lot more driving than trying to get back to Knoxville or Nashville would have been.
So that’s the plan…two days to Illinois and two days back and lots of memories and scenery in between in this series of posts “The Tales From The Lincoln Trail”!
Let’s ride! 🙂