Surviving the (Thanksgiving) Gauntlet. ( December 2nd 2019 )

I posted these numbers to social media last night when we got home, but I'm doing it again:

• 4 days
• 4 nights
• 4 states
• 1300+ miles
• 26+ hours of driving
• 2 snow storms
• 10+ cars witnessed off the road
• 1 exhausted Trae

Thanksgiving weekend just happened, and honestly I am still dead tired even after a full night's sleep. Crysta and I... well... we did a lot for just a couple of days.

Like most years we drove down to my parent's house in the Milwaukee suburbs on Wednesday. We literally had a blizzard on Wednesday morning though, so roads on the way out of town weren't super terrific. We got there late, and on Thursday had Thanksgiving with a good chunk of my family. I think it was a total of twelve people crammed into my parent's not-super-large house? You cram that many people into that small a space it's always going to feel hectic.

On Friday we drove down to Ohio to see Crysta's sister and her dad. We hadn't seen them for a while, and we decided to make the trip just a couple of weeks ago. That drive wasn't too bad, but I think we were still wiped from Thursday, so we just sort of crashed when we got to our hotel. We spent Saturday visiting Crysta's dad and going out to dinner with her sister and (teenage) kids. It was all pretty great. Like overall it was a lot of fun, and it was nice to see people we rarely get to spend time with.

But then there was the drive home.

So Sunday we had to get from Franklin, OH back to Eau Claire, WI. If you look on a map... these places are not close to each other. We got up at 6:00am EST and hit the road around seven. Driving through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois the roads were all fine. It was actually a nice drive for a lot of it.

But then we got to Wisconsin.

This is where it was snowing, and the roads weren't awful, but they weren't great. They were the kind of conditions where drivers get overconfident, y'know? Where if you go slowly it's not bad at all... but even going five miles per hour faster will send you spinning off the road. We were on schedule to get home at like 5:30pm Central time initially... but because of the roads we didn't get into our apartment until a little after eight. You know how google maps will turn a route red if there's a massive slowdown? That was pretty much the entirety of I94 between Tomah and Eau Claire. And since the roads were so rough, that meant zero cruise control for hours. My leg literally still hurts right now because of it. It was a lot of fun, but I am just absolutely wiped right now.

So if we do this again, I am definitely taking Monday off. Oof.

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