First notes…

… the first two days of travel have been brutally long… yesterday, it wasn’t completely clear why other than some slow spots of traffic… on Tuesday, the trip was 2 hours longer than indicated by google maps when we started out… yesterday it was three hours longer… and this was the indication as we started the trips!… what we had planned to be 7 hr days of travel were, in fact, 9 and 10 hours respectively… we are at 19 hours of a trip that was supposed to take 21-22 hours total… it’s going to be closer to 30 hours… we have been going from point to point with no time to explore along the way… the only thing we have experienced off the beaten track was the result of detours through the countryside… one such detour took us through what looked like poor, sharecropper farmland in South Carolina… … we are told by friends who travel the route frequently that today will not be much better…

… i am going for a 6:30 AM start in hopes that we will miss some of the predicted awful traffic… we have a choice of three routes… two travel highways and are projected to take about 7 hours… one does not use highways and is projected to take closer to 9 hours… we are tempted to do the 9 hour one in the hope that it will be more interesting and with fewer delays…

… one of the thoughts i keep having is how inefficient it all is… when so much of the nation’s goods and workforce flow over the apparently inadequate roads of the nation, so much time is lost…