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Driving I-80 through the Midwest
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Road Trip
(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: MAY/JUNE 2003)
Family road trips with my father were always about making good time. On the long, mostly two-lane Kansas roads of my youth, Dad piloted a succession of Buicks as if he were still navigating over the Pacific at the controls of a B-24.
Dad didn't drive fast-he drove relentlessly. He stopped for gas and, if at all possible, no other reason. My mother knew the futility of complaining. My sister and I also knew. But, with parched mouths and weeping bladders, we protested anyway. If we complained loudly, Dad mildly looked at us in the rear-view mirror and turned the volume up on the radio. If we persisted, he dialed in a country-music station.
So here I am, 40 years later, racing west along I-80 through Ohio. It's early into the first day of my 1,312-mile cruise of the Heartland stretch of this highway. That's right, 1,312 miles, almost half of I-80's length from New York City to San Francisco. (No wonder it seems to take so long to get anywhere in the Midwest.) My assignment is to explore a few roadside diversions to help families maintain a semblance of sanity on our stretch of this motorway- "America's Main Street."
Right now I'm maybe 60 miles west of the Pennsylvania border on that portion of I-80 that's a toll road all the way to Chicago. I'm cruising in a rental Ford, eyeing the road over a sausage biscuit. And already Dad's ghost is riding shotgun.
He'd hate these toll booths, I find myself thinking. And so do I. Not only is I-80 through Ohio as busy as a city freeway, some of these toll-booth lines are five minutes long. There's no way a guy can make good time. But Midwest I-80 time can be made bearable.
