Celebrating the 51st Anniversary of My Driver's with a 1,400-Mile, 44-Hour Trip

On Thursday morning, December 17, my daughter Lisa sent me a text saying that should would be in Chicago on Saturday, December 19.  I had said months before if she was going to be in Chicago, I would love to see her. She lives in Minneapolis, but her now-remote job is in Chicago.  

Saturday, December 19, would be the 51st anniversary of my driver's license.  What better way to celebrate than to drive to Chicago for dinner and drive back.  

At 8 pm on Friday, the 18th, Nigel and I drove west across Pennsylvania to Cleveland where we stopped for the night just before 2am.  I like driving at night. So much less traffic.  

The next morning we drove to my daughter's apartment on the north side of Chicago.  She was pretty much packed for the move. We walked along the lake shore then ordered dinner from Mr. Dumpling.

After dinner at about 7pm Nigel and I started the 700-mile journey east. We stopped outside of Cleveland again.  By 4pm we were back in Lancaster: 44 hours, 1,422 miles. The car switched to metric units with one click so the journey was also 2,288km getting using 8.5 liters per 100 kilometers traveled. 

Just a nerdy aside, but we use a measure of how far we get per gallon of gas, the metric world, which means the rest of the world except the U.S., Liberia and Myanmar, use a measure of how much fuel they use to go 100 kilometers.  Fuel costs two to three times as much in most of the world as it does in America, so the emphasis makes sense.  

I like doing two-day circle drives. Each of my last three trips in Europe and Israel has included a two-day car trip of either side of a thousand miles.  In 2017, I drove from Paris to Nice and Monaco, then Turin, Zurich and back to Paris: 47 hours, 1,203 miles.  In the fall of 2019, I drove a circle of Israel from Tel Aviv, to Eilat, to Mount Bental on the Golan Heights, back to the coast, then to Jerusalem: 750 miles, 32 hours. I also did a five country loop visiting battlefields and the Spa Francorchamps racetrack that went from Paris to Luxembourg to Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and back to Paris: 45 hours, 900 miles.

I really am a motorhead.

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