Reports From The Road #1: Long Drives

Our vacation is underway, as Debbie and I set out from our Chattanooga home Sunday morning about 8:30 am EDT. We reached our first day goal of Shreveport, Louisiana, some nine hours later, and after finding a decent hotel room, settled in for the night. It was all interstate driving, something we avoid usually. To us, taking the “backroads” (meaning US and state highways) is worth the additional travel time, because seeing the ever-changing landscapes, farms, towns, or even cities of America is the real reward. However, COVID-19 has changed our usual vacation approach, and we stayed on the interstate. Even choosing a hotel is affected. We usually book our hotel rooms “on the fly” using smartphone apps, and Sunday was no exception. However, our first hotel in Shreveport was unacceptably dirty - it was clear that it had not been occupied or cleaned in quite some time. We asked for and received our money back and found a different hotel - cleaner than the first but still far from ideal. We spent the night there anyway and set out for Austin, Texas, this morning.

For today’s trip, we decided to take backroads to get to Austin. The reason for this was to avoid traveling anywhere near Dallas, which is a very hot “hotspot for COVID-19. Obviously, we are nervous about being in Texas at all right now, so anything we can do to take precautions is a good idea. The drive was quite enjoyable vent with some intermittent rain. Both the rolling plains and the flat prairies of Texas are a joy to see from the backroads. Our road, US 79, was both flat and straight with little traffic - a fun drive in our 2007 VW Rabbit.

We arrived safely at our AirBnb about 3:00 pm and have settled in nicely. We went out for dinner at an Italian restaurant that had outdoor seating and braved the mid 90° heat. There was a market adjacent to the restaurant that had an interesting sign that demanded to be captured, so I took out my Minolta XE-5 on shot two frames of Ultrafine Extreme 100.

Tomorrow will have adventures of its own, so stay tuned.

Kevin