Day 1: Tennessee to Wisconsin
Sean ready to
start the drive- note how clean everything is.Thursday, August 21st, 1997
Sean ready to
start the drive- note how clean everything is.It's a hectic, tired day at work. I wrap up a bunch of loose ends and spend a lot of time just feeling nervous. This is a huge trip we are about to undertake and a lot can go wrong. I was up until 2:00 this morning doing final packing and wiring (for CD player and GPS) in the cab. My stomach is doing flips from excitement and nerves.
After running some last minute errands, I arrive home at 3:50 to find Sean playing basketball in the driveway. He's itching to get started. We take a picture of the freshly washed truck and throw a few final items in. We're off at 4:32 pm.
Odometer reads 131,570 miles.
As we drive through Knoxville I program waypoints into the GPS receiver while Sean drives. This is to become a common practice since I don't have a PC connection for the GPS and we have over 200 waypoints that I have retrieved from the internet. It is a slow process because I must enter every number and letter of the coordinate and name by scrolling through the entire alphabet, numerals 1 thru 9, and a bunch of punctuation marks. I can only stand to enter 40 or so waypoints before I need a break, so I am usually only a day ahead of us as we travel.
We stop for dinner north of Knoxville and Sean is disappointed when I suggest we break our agreement to eat the food we brought already. Feeling a bit unsettled, I just can't stomach the thought of cold ravioli just yet. We order chicken McNuggets- not exactly health food but pretty easy on my stomach. Back on the road the driving is quick and effortless at this early stage. The truck feels good and so do we.
I sleep first- Sean does a double shift (two tanks of gas instead of the usual one tank, which lasts about 3 hours) which leaves me pretty fresh at 4:30am. It's getting pretty darn cold up near Chicago this time of night.
We go by a friend's exit near Winnetka, Illinois at 2:00 am. We had discussed stopping here briefly but I thought it would be 6:00 in the morning before we made it this far. We are doing very well.
