My Adventure Driving Across The Country and Back

I just got back from the trip to New York City. I took the Buick Rendezvous this time and I did something really really crazy. I took the rear seats out of the vehicle, not only the third row seat but the second row seats also. Before I get on with this story I want to show you a cool picture of a brand new Cadillac CT6 that was filling up behind me.

While I didn’t have any plans to bring anything back having the vehicle empty I figured was a good idea to do just in case. What I also did was bring a blowup mattress with me. Not just any blowup mattress but a full-size blowup mattress. The back of a car is so big that I told my girl that I was going to put in cabinets. I think maybe a bathroom and a disco ball just like an old 1970’s custom van.

Of course that didn’t fly but as long as I’m not touching her car she doesn’t care. I did the trip which was 2590 miles each way.The way I went as I went is from Tucson down to El Paso and across Texas to Dallas and then up through Arkansas, Tennessee and up the Appalachian Mountains into Pennsylvania.I didn’t hit one toll until I got to Staten Island.

I choose this route because we are in southern Arizona and if I go North there is a chance that I would hit snow. This time of year it seems like either Flagstaff, Albuquerque or Oklahoma get freak snowstorms so I avoid at all cost no sense is a driving in that stuff if I don’t have to. It only adds an extra hundred miles on the trip so it’s not like I’m really wasting a lot of time and gas.

I didn’t have a set schedule for when I had to be in New York but I had to do an inspection with the insurance company again. FEMA opened the flood case and gave us some extra money nothing even close to what we were supposed to get but the extra money will be going to the bank. Who knows it may be for a classic Cadillac.

I left Tucson on Thursday morning at 6 AM and I drove until I got tired I ended up 13 to 14 hours later in Weatherford Texas about 100 miles west of Dallas. I only stopped for the night in a hotel because I had to use the Internet to do work on the computer.

The next day I got up around seven and I left the hotel around nine and I drove until I got tired. I guess around 9 o’clock at night I was in Memphis, a little bit East of Memphis I wanted to get to Memphis when it wasn’t rush hour. Every time I go through there seems like it’s crowded. I pulled over into a rest stop and I slept on the blow up bed for about four hours and when I woke up I was fully rejuvenated.

It was the middle of the night so I ended up driving another five or six hours to the other side of Nashville more towards the Bristol and then I took another four hour nap maybe five hours. Then I got up and I drove the whole entire way to New York City which was another 13 to 14 hours. I was totally exhausted by the time I got there and ended up I was there at Saturday night at around 11 o’clock.

So was a good 3 day trip I guess to New York City. I averaged about 24 miles to the gallon with the Buick Rendezvous which I was happy about. I didn’t have any bad weather or see any rain. When I left there was a storm in the Dallas area that was leaving I thought I was gonna catch up to it but I didn’t. There was also a storm behind me in California that end up fading out and going south so that never caught up to me either. I got very lucky with the weather again.

I stayed in New York City for about a week. I had to move everything else that was in the house because they are coming to raise the house. The house is going up over 10 feet closer to 11 and the Government is paying for it. If I didn’t raise the house our house flood insurance would be like $7000 to $8000 a year because the feds stop subsidizing the flood insurance, which we didn’t know they was subsidizing the first place. After spending a week in New York I decided to drive back.

Since I was in no hurry I took my time and stayed in hotels and never used the blowup mattress at all even though it was still fully inflated in the back of the car. My goal on the first day after running around like a maniac doing last-minute prep for the house was to get out of the city. I left New York City around 4 o’clock. Just wanted to get out the city so I would have a fresh clean start the next day.

I got in the car and was in bumper-to-bumper traffic in Brooklyn on the Belt Parkway. Then I was in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Verrazano Bridge. Then I was in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Staten Island expressway, until Waze gave me an alternate route and saved me 38 minutes. If you’re not using the Waze app I think you’re crazy. Besides giving you directions on how to get out of traffic jams also tells you where the cops are, for the most part. I can’t rave enough about the Waze app. It also gives you local gas prices and directions to the nearest station.

The first day I ended up in Carlisle Pennsylvania at an Econolodge hotel where I spent the night. I guess it was about a 6 or 7 hour drive out of New York City after all the traffic. The next day I drove down from Carlisle Pennsylvania and I stayed somewhere around Knoxville. I spent the whole time doing Choice hotels as I had the app on the iPad and it was easy to find hotel rooms on the fly.

I would normally drive about six or seven hours then pullover and then use the Choice hotels app on the iPad to find a hotel for the night a couple hours away. I averaged about $50 a night on the hotels being a choice hotels member, and using AAA hotel discount. Sometimes one deal was better than the other but most of the time the AAA rate was the better of the two.

After leaving the hotel in Knoxville and up driving across Tennessee and I stayed somewhere near Texarkana Texas. I had a little problem in Arkansas as soon as I hit the bridge in Arkansas and I used my turn signal, the dashboard gave me an indication that I had a directional light out. I quickly found an AutoZone in West Memphis Arkansas and they took really good care of me. I had to buy a screwdriver and change the light in the AutoZone parking lot. I wish I had gotten the ladies name behind the counter because she was good and made sure I was ok before I left on the road.

The rest of the trip was uneventful I was driving with the goal in mind of getting home by the Super Bowl. I’ve been an Atlanta Falcon fan since 1980, and after watching the fourth-quarter collapse I felt bad that I made it home to watch the game in the first place.

The last night I spent in a hotel in El Paso I stayed at Quality Inn near the airport next go to Rudy’s barbecue which was really really good because I love Rudy’s barbecue.

That was my trip in a nutshell so I’m back in Arizona and I’m waiting for my neighbors to send pictures of the house being raised. It has been of long four year journey, the paperwork was far worse then the flood itself. Our family lost about nine houses in general, but the important thing is nobody got hurt. Things can be replaced, people cant.

The lesson learned from the hurricane is if they tell you to evacuate do it you can always come back to the mess. There isn’t a damn thing you can do during the hurricane that will save anything. The only thing you do is put your life in jeopardy.

That’s it for my trip from New York City or to what I should say to New York City and back. I should write a little book up about the trip and what you need to do long distance wise to your car before and after.

I do have to find a guy for windshields out here as I have for 4 or 5 little divots where the rocks came up and hit the windshield nothing to write home about. But I need to address them before they get worse. If you have a glass guy in the Tucson area let me know.

Cadillac Forum

I hate to say it but after years of having the forum on the site I had to take it down. I didn’t get much action anymore anyway, a lot of people signed up but a lot of people did not know how to use the forum software and the forum was dying a slow death. The rise of social media, Facebook in particular is what really hurt traffic to the forum.

From this point going forward we will use the Cadillac Country Club page and the Cadillac Country Club group which I started with but I haven’t really promoted I will put links here for you guys to join. I would like to get the Facebook group running a little bit more so invite your friends. And I would like to have some comments on the Facebook fan page.

If you can comment on both of them I would be very happy. It takes a lot of work to keep the site going! Between coming up with new articles, new newsletters, and the technical parts of the website it has become a lot of work for me. I may be looking for volunteers to help out from time to time. Right now the best way you can help out is to share and use the Facebook pages.

Right now our email list is about 38,000 strong and our open rate to our email list is totally crazy it seems like everybody opens up our emails and reads them and enjoys them. I get a lot of comments back from the newsletters. And I enjoy that so much commenting on the page itself. I also get a lot of emails and answering emails takes up a lot of time but I enjoy them and I enjoy seeing the pictures so keep them coming. That’s it for this week the comment and share this newsletter with your friends.