Hey, Dad, only 10 miles to the next Stuckeys!

If you asked most people if they'd enjoy driving 1400 miles in two days, they'd probably respond they'd rather have their teeth drilled without novocaine. But there are a few of us, Jeff and me included, who were born with a combination of wanderlust and a love of driving. The enchantment began when I was a child. Our family vacations were always via car.

In his lifetime, my father never flew. My mother's first flight was from St. Louis to Chicago to view her week-old grandson. Our family treks took us from St. Louis to Florida, or St. Louis to Colorado, or to Arizona or New Orleans, etc., but not on expressways with fast-food chains at every exit -- those expressways didn't exist. Nor did the fast-food chains.

Interstate roads, like Route 66, went through small towns and big cities, and offered much more to see, like houses and gardens and downtown squares. There were no hotel/motel chains in the 50s, just mom and pop motels along the route. We'd look for one that had the diving girl on the motel sign, indicating there was a pool included. As we passed through towns around lunch or dinner time, we'd keep a sharp eye out for a cafe with the frosty blue "air conditioned" sign in the window. When you traveled across country in open-windowed cars without air conditioning, dinner in a cool cafe was a real treat. Adding to the fun of road trips were the clever Burma Shave signs and, of course, the Stuckeys candy stores -- famous for pralines and divinity -- that were scattered every 25 miles or so throughout the south. If Dad drove past the first few, we could start pestering him again to please stop at the next one, a short distance down the road.

My cross-country drives in other people's cars began in my 20s, while I was gainfully employed at the Chicago Tribune. Two office mates and I, by happenstance, ended up driving a dealer's customized van (a unique offering in those days) to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and from there on to Los Angeles where he needed to have it by a certain date for a photo shoot. How fortunate were we that our boss let three of his 10-member staff go off on that adventure for two weeks.

News of that trip spurred a fellow employee, who was being transferred to the New York office, to ask me if I'd be interested in driving his family's second car, a Volkswagon Beetle, to New York. But of course -- via Canada! And so Judy, one of my office mates and fellow travelers in the New Orleans/Los Angeles caper, and I traveled with stops in Toronto and Montreal (where a couple of the Detroit Lions football players, arriving in town for an exhibition game, invited us to party in their hotel room; yeah, right, we were young and naive, but not stupid). We traveled through Vermont and spent a day in Concord, NH, where we met the governor's assistant who followed us to Boston, MA, and bought us each a lobster dinner.

Let me tell you, two single girls traveling across the country meet a lot of interesting people. Those two trips set in motion my fascination with long-distance driving -- of zipping past palm trees in the morning and through mountains in the afternoon. That beats the view from my office.

And on March 31-April 1, my drive from southern Florida to Chicago offered multiple opportunities to stop and savor the scenery. As stated in my previous blog entry, it's the weekend of an annual mass exodus from Florida, and the stop-and-crawl pattern repeated heading in and out of Atlanta (nothing new about that; I remain convinced the only convenient time to drive through Atlanta is 4 a.m.); in and out of Chattanooga and, worst of all, for what seemed an eternity through Nashville.

But each trip delivers some new bit of wisdom and here's mine from that recent trek: if you want to live in a city with no rush-hour traffic jams, relocate to Louisville, KY. One caveat: I didn't see a single Stuckeys.