The Wrong Way... Part 1

Waking up at 5:00am is never very much fun, even if you are getting ready to go on vacation. Today's early rise was no exception. While I very much enjoy driving early in the morning, I was going to be a passenger, and completely without control of navigation. I really despise driving in a car for long periods of time and would much rather have a short flight somewhere than spend all day in a car getting there.  But I cannot describe how much I abhor having to ride in a car all day long.

To make matters worse, we cannot take a direct route to our destination. Rather, a song by Sublime comes to mind, "The Wrong Way", as we have to take the backroads through rural Kansas in order to make a stop in Great Bend. Now I must admit, the scenery along secondary highways in Kansas is much more interesting that what you will see on the Eisenhower Interstate system, but that doesn't make up for the time lost. Despite my father-in-law's claims that we made slightly better time than staying in the Interstate, I think we lost between 45 and 60 minutes via this "shortcut."

I had planned on getting some work done in the car to make the time pass by. Much of my work, however, requires connectivity. I had prepared to be able to use my Sprint Aircard up through I-70. Instead, going through rural Kansas, while I did have a connection, it was excruciatingly slow; no work was able to be done. Maybe this will be a work-free vacation after all.

And so the trip began with me in a bad mood, hungry, without my morning coffee, and crammed in the back seat of a vehicle shared with my wife Sarah and my daughter Sydney in her baby seat. What I thought would be the worst part of the trip, a 3-month old screaming her head off, ended up not being much of an issue. Other than her screaming a little when she was hungry, she slept for most of the trip. At least that is what I thought until we hit the intersection of CO-470 @ I-76 just outside of Denver International. Sydney bursts into uncontrollable crying and we pull off at a rest stop to quiet her down.

At this point we were trying to reach a decision between two routes to go for the remainder of the trip. One takes us up through Loveland on US-34. This is the more scenic route, but is 10 minutes longer than getting off on CO-66/US36. Needless to say, the in-laws are much in favor of the longer route, despite the screaming baby, which has been temporarily appeased by changing a soggy, drippy diaper.

We're not there yet. We of course decided to take the long route, because it is much prettier but is "more highway."

...to be continued.

-RMz