Homer's Travels: Key West Roadtrip 2023 - Epilogue

Sunday, February 05, 2023

Key West Roadtrip 2023 - Epilogue

I enjoyed our roadtrip but it was tough, emotionally and physically.  There is no way to visit three Civil Rights Museums without being torn up emotionally.  These are not happy places.  The rest of what we did - Key West, manatees, NASA, diamond digs, visiting family - didn't quite balance it all out.  It's hard to balance so much injustice.

Our roadtrip felt a lot harder physically than other roadtrips we've done in the past.  This one was 4,360 miles (7,016 km).  The longest, probably our Route 66 trip, was longer but not by much ... 300 miles or so longer.  That one went from Omaha to Chicago to Santa Monica, CA to San Francisco and back to Omaha.  I don't remember it feeling as hard as this latest roadtrip did (this could be selective memory's doing).  Part of it may have been age ... Route 66 was almost twelve years ago ... but I think how we arranged activities and driving was a major part.

On this trip we arranged the activities for the mornings and saved all the driving for the afternoons.  I think this made the driving portions too long.  If we did it again, planning the activities for the early afternoon would work better as it would split the driving into morning and afternoon legs.  The activities, be they digging for diamonds or visiting a museum, would break up the long and tedious driving.

There is evidence for this.  The days between Birmingham, Memphis, and St. Louis were all shorter than four hours driving and none of them felt terrible.  It was the ten, eight, and seven hour driving days that exhausted us.

Things don't stay the same.  We are getting older.  What was once easy may not be so easy anymore.  Live, learn, and adapt.

I've gone back and updated the Roadtrip posts.  I added pictures to a couple and altered the text a little bit on a few more. I added pictures of the mangrove kayak and the manatee snorkeling to my 2023-01 Key West Roadtrip Google Photos album.

No comments:

Post a Comment