Hubby’s Family Reunion Chapter 2

Asheville is a 6 hour trip from Cincinnati. If you leave for Asheville after work, you will arrive in Asheville sometime after 11 p.m. and will be all snuggly in your hotel room around midnight. That is if everything goes well.

My first task prior to leaving Cincinnati was to take The Sherm to the kennel. The Sherm loves to ride in the car. The Sherm does not like being taken to the kennel. The Sherm does not like being betrayed by her favorite dog parent. The Sherm will have a week to plot her revenge.

My second task prior to leaving Cincinnati was to help load up the car. Because I have a tendency to travel with several small bags, I bought one huge bag to put the small bags in. Hubby was upset that I bought the bag, until he saw me carrying it to the car filled with my book bag, my knitting project bags, my writing stuff, and the rest of my traveling security blanket. Unlike our usual pattern, Hubby and I didn’t have any pre-trip incidents.

We made it Lexington without incident. We stopped in Knoxville supposedly so I could get some Starbucks, but the Starbucks was closed. I got some caffeine at the gas-mart. We drove on to Asheville without too much problem.

The problem with driving to Asheville in the dark is that Asheville is in the mountains. To get up the mountain, you must drive winding roads along side semis. To get up the mountain, you must have sack. The kind of sack that lets you hold your car on the road, in the dark, in a narrow lane at speed, instead of driving all kinds of different speed and sloshing your wife around in the passenger seat to the point that car sickness seemed the best option.

The worst was to come. Before embarking on a journey that ends with you sleeping snugly in your hotel room, it is best to actually get directions to said hotel room. Before embarking on a journey that ends with you sleeping snugly in your hotel room, it is best to check the directions one has printed off from Mapquest to ensure that the destination is the hotel where your room is booked and not some apartment complex up some dark road where you swear you hear banjos playing and pigs squealing.

Once you have stopped at the Fed-Ex Kinkos to get revised directions, after you have sprung for the 20 cents a minute for internet access, please for the love of god and all that is holy spend the extra dollar to actually PRINT the directions.

Up to this point, I had refused to admit that perhaps this leg of the trip was cursed, when we walked into the hotel room at 1 a.m. I was convinced. The room was billed as non-smoking, but had the distinct smell of burned tobacco substance. The bathroom also had some six legged visitors. Replacement room thankfully had no burnt tobacco smell or bugs, but was full of mold and mildew from the leaking air conditioning unit from the upstairs room. That would have been bearable had the bed not been made from cinder block. Oh, I forgot the special ambiance created by the air conditioning unit that sounded like a WW II turbo prop taking off, that was more effective than an alarm clock waking one up every half hour on the half hour.

At least we made it to Asheville.