GNAST: Day One

Starting: Charleston, SC
Destination: Jamestown, KY
Distance: 505 miles / 9.5 hours

We are here with Aaron's parents, who are kindly giving us a place not in the permanent thunderstorm to sleep. YAY. We have eaten fried chicken and mostly are just happy to not be driving. It rained. The entire. Damn time. We had maybe 1.5-2 hours of intermittent not-rain. (It was dry and sunny for my favorite stretch of I-75, so win?) It was basically 9.5 hours of a continued prayer that God meteorologically clear the way for us, and given the amount of supercells, severe thunderstorm warnings, and flash flood warnings that we ducked (dip dove dodged wait), I think it's safe to say He did! We threaded many a stormy needle, ducking right between cells, or watching giant MCS's collapse just as we encountered them. Pretty neat. Very relieving. No one wants to drive through 200 miles of solid thunderstorms and ponding highway full of semi-trucks.

We did not go hike the Smokies. The original plan featured a detour along the Blue Ridge Parkway and Highway 441, but given the nasty weather and sloppy ground, we bypassed. 441 fell down a mountainside within the last two years, and the trail we wanted to take is really steep and the last couple hundred feet is a rock scramble. Definitely better saved for a dry day. As it turns out, between the rain and the construction delay in Tennessee, it still took 9.5 hours. Uuggghhh.

Fortunately, this is one of the longest days on the road. Aaron really loves Banana Box. It's spacious, but I'm used to low-slung all-wheel drive, so a big boxy front-wheel drive took me a while to get used to. I have to drive responsibly on the winding mountain roads! BORING. I miss my sports car suspension! I zipped all over these roads in Penguin (my Subaru Legacy), wet or dry, so I can't say I share his Banana Box enthusiasm. It's a good car. Just not my favorite to drive. (I still got to go like, 85 through northern Tennessee, so hey.)

Lessons learned: 1) We stop at every state welcome center and walk around, then RUN a couple dozen yards, enough to get our heart rate up, and stretch. This has made a WORLD of difference in how we physically and mentally feel. We've done 10-hour, all-day drives before, and we feel orders of magnitude better after getting out and moving regularly.

2) Quaker blueberry rice cakes are still freaking delicious.

3) We saw an iridescent cloud! I couldn't take a picture because I was driving, and Aaron was on the wrong side of the car. But I had a thought about rainbows being the symbol of God's promise (theme of this trip, because this trip had a thousand reasons not to happen and yet here we are, because the Lord hath ordained and thinks it would be fun). We see rainbows and we lose it over the grandeur and the beauty, the contrast between ugly weather and glorious perfect arcs of bending light. Yet we can only see a fraction of the full spectrum of light, and are further limited by our personal assortment of rods and cones. But we see that rainbow and it's what, 4-6 colors on a good day--we receive a blessing or a promise and think it's the most amazing thing--and we can't even fathom the half of it. Our minds are routinely blown by a bowl of Fruity Pebbles.

I'm ready for a nap.