Vacation begins

We left for vacation at about 8:30 this morning. I had hoped to leave the house by 8, since we had to drop the dog off at the kennel, but that didn't happen. Oh well, half an hour off schedule isn't that big a deal, right? We would still get to where we were going by around 6:30. We were on our way to Frederick, Maryland, where my cousin is being married tomorrow. The morning was cool, but fairly bright and relatively sunny. We planned to picnic for lunch (and maybe for supper, too) but when we were finally ready to stop, it was still pretty chilly out and was getting pretty cloudy. Since we were wearing shorts and t-shirts, we had an indoor picnic instead. Back on the road, 20 miles outside of Cleveland, I jokingly say to Kevin that I bet it will be raining by the time we get to Pittsburgh. He has commented before that it always seems to rain when we drive through Pittsburgh. The words were just barely out of my mouth when the rain began. I didn't think it was raining all that hard in Ohio, but apparently everyone else on the road did, because the times I was able to come even close to hitting the speed limit were few and far between. I had planned to turn over driving duties to Kevin before we left the Ohio Turnpike, but Alison fell asleep and I didn't want to wake her up by stopping, so I kept on driving.

The rain got worse the further east we went. When we got on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the signs said that there was ponding water in some places. Great! Just what I want to hear. Alison woke up when we stopped to pay the toll to get on, so I decided we'd switch drivers at the first rest area. The road was getting pretty bad.....I felt the car start to hydroplane a few times....and I couldn't wait to get out of the driver's seat. Two miles before the rest area we came to a complete stop. It looked like a car had hydroplaned and gone right into the median wall. Ten minutes later we made it to the rest stop and switched places. When we got back on the road, we had a decision to make....stay on the turnpike, with all the truck traffic and construction, or head down towards Morgantown, W Va and go across I-68. We decided to head towards Morgantown. We no sooner got off the Turnpike and the traffic backed up again. We crawled along for a long time without making a whole lot of progress. Finally we got to the source of the problem. We were being routed up the off-ramp and back down the on-ramp and the going was slow because the police had to periodically let the traffic on the road we had to cross clear out a little bit. The reason for this detour? The highway was flooded! This was not the only place where water was covering the road, but I think it was some of the deepest. During this time I was in contact with my parents, who, along with my brother and his girlfriend, were getting ready to leave to meet us in Frederick for the wedding. I let them know what was going on and told them I couldn't recommend one route over the other.

At 6:30, we stopped for dinner at a Burger King. Did I mention that we were supposed to already be in Frederick by 6:30? Well were actually in Morgantown, a whopping 83 miles from the rest area where we had stopped at to change drivers. It had only taken us 3 hours to get there. We opted to actually eat inside the restaurant. We all needed some time to be out of the car, especially in light of the fact that we still had a looonnggg way to go before we were off the road for the night. We ate, Alison ran around a little bit and then we got back on the road. After another bout of torrential rain while we were eating, the rain seemed to let up a little bit.

Now we were driving through the mountains. It was really strange, but it seemed every time we went up a steep grade, the rain would be almost stopped by the time we got to the top. Then, when we went down on the other side, the rain was horrible again by the time we got to the bottom. Oh, and we also had to deal with fog as we approached the top of the steep grades, and there was a lot of wind. Throughout all this, Alison was quite the trooper. She sat back in her car seat and just read books....until it got dark, then she started to get cranky. About the time it got dark, the thunder and lightening started. To keep Alison from associating it with fireworks, we pretended to be Ernie pretending to be the Count on Sesame Street. When Ernie was "Count for the day," he would shout "Thunder!" "Lightening!" when he reached the point in his counting where the thunder and lightening would just happen for the real Count. So when the lightening flashed, we would say "Thunder!" "Lightening!" just like Ernie. It worked pretty well.

We finally made it back to I-70 and by the time we got to Clear Spring (where my aunt and uncle live) we decided to stop for gas and a diaper change. Good thing we did, because Alison would have leaked out her diaper if we hadn't. I checked in with my parents after we got back on the road and they were about 140 miles behind us....they had opted to take the Turnpike. Alison fell asleep shortly after I got off the phone, and slept for the last 45 minutes of the trip. At 9:20, nearly 13 hours after we left home for our 10 hour car trip, we pulled into the parking lot of our motel.