amusing family memory

[cellio]

I was talking with a friend about an impending drive across the country, and this somehow made me think of my own family's cross-country move. I was three at the time, so I don't actually remember it, and anyway, I didn't have the interesting part.

My mother took the kids and perhaps the dog (I'm not sure who got the dog for this) and got onto a plane. They wanted to keep the car, though, so my father and a friend of his drove. The family folklore is that they made the excellent time that they did by simply driving straight through. According to what I was told about this while growing up, the car was pretty much always in motion and the passenger slept as needed.

Except that I just today put a few facts together. My father's vision is worse than mine; he has never been licensed to drive at night, and he's pretty scrupulous about that. They made this trip in November, when nights are longer than days. I strongly suspect that the other guy did not drive 14-hour stretches (I mean, how many people do, especially as part of a longer trip?). They were a couple of (roughly) 25-year-old guys.

Do I really believe that they drove through at the speed limit, rather than taking stops to sleep and gunning it? I may have to call my father on it, out of earshot of my mother. :-)

Comments

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

I strongly suspect that the other guy did not drive 14-hour stretches (I mean, how many people do, especially as part of a longer trip?)

I definitely have... both cross-country drives and PA <-> MN for Thanksgiving in 2003. It certainly involves driving at night though :P

[cellio]

It certainly involves driving at night though :P

Well yeah. What I meant was that for them not to stop, the other guy would have had to drive 14 hours or so straight (through the night, whem my father couldn't help at all), as part of a much longer trip. Depending on when they left, he might have had to do that for two nights in a row (though one would presumably be a partial).

Dani doesn't mind driving long distances and he drove from California to PA. He did it in either four or five days, though; he didn't have a spare driver, but I suspect even if he had he would have stopped to use real beds.