Woke up this morning (Tuesday) to birds singing and temperatures soaring.
Seriously, it is actually 80 degrees outside with just a sprinkle of rain possible. (More was predicted) I don’t mind though, we are actually here in the “sunshine” state finally, even if it turns into liquid sunshine for our first day.
Our road trip (four days) wasn’t quite as wonderful as I remembered from our trip down in 2017, which was thoroughly enjoyable, by the way.)
To explain, our phone GPS sent us on some extremely curvy, narrow mountain roads twice (the kind where you have to drive off the edge of the pavement when you meet a vehicle coming from the other direction), and sent us way, way out of our way a couple of times which added many hours to the trip, and that meant four days of driving to get to Marlene’s in Ocala, rather than the three we had planned on.
I firmly believe there is an evil gremlin lurking in our GPS program. When we stopped for the night at a motel, the next morning, it tried to send us on another wild jaunt through the mountains rather than east on the highway, from our motel just one exit to the road south that we needed to take…
Jack figured that if we had followed the GPS, it would have meant about an hour and a half trip to reach the same spot, but by then (our last day on the road) we were a little wiser and found our location on a google map before we followed the route through the mountains that the GPS gremlin wanted us to take.
This trip certainly was quite an adventure, and a good reason to make the investment into a good Rand McNally Road Atlas (the easy-to-read version), which has already arrived via Amazon of course!
That should make our trip home next month a bit more enjoyable and much less stressful.
The plusses to our crazy trip were that we saw some beautiful scenery, rather than miles and miles of freeway filled with semi haulers, so that wasn’t so bad. We also found some incredible places to eat nearly every day and met some interesting people, most that mentioned that they wished they could do what we were doing…(wandering all over the midwest actually).
We sure had some yummy meals. Southwest of Jackson, right there in Michigan, our first meal stop, at M60 Grill lunch near our old home in Concord yielded a couple of the tastiest bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches we have had in years.
On our second day on the road, a quick stop at a gas station led to us noticing the little attached restaurant, the EZ Stop Café and Gift Shop, where we shared some “ homemade melt in your mouth” roast beef (I had a sandwich, Jack had the dinner, complete with potatoes, gravy and carrots. We shared a pumpkin roll for dessert but we had to take it with us, we were so full!
I just have to give them a shout-out. It was on Highway 555 (at exit 42) in Willisburg, KY. Didn’t look like much, but Brandon Bishop, who said he wasn’t a manager, but he just did “everything that needed doing around the place,” told us it is owned by a lady named Goldie Singh.
Anyway, the service was excellent (thank you Brandon) and the food was even better.
Those weren’t the only great eats we found, just two of the very best that made this trip a memorable one despite the crazy detours. They made up for the troubles we ran into on the trip and saved us from the incredibly horrible weather our friends and family back home were facing this week.
I felt like we made a “great escape.”
