Alaska 2008

After a night with some heavy rain, we got a beautiful day for a 500 mile drive. We left Streetsboro under cloudy, misty skies. Once on the Ohio Turnpike, the skies cleared and stayed that way for the rest of the day.

The route today concerned me because we had to go through the congested area around the metropolitan Chicago area. Our GPS and other mapping software directed us to drive to the Madison, WI area by getting on the Ohio Turnpike (I-90/I-80) and stay on I-90 when it splits from I-80 around Gary IN. Having driven around the Chicago area previously I was not looking forward to following that route. I decided to use the Tollway (I-294) to bypass I-90 which runs closer to downtown. Using I-294 only added a few miles to our trip so I felt that we would still do better in terms of the time it would take to get through the Chicago area. What I didn't count on was the amount of construction that limited our speed to about 45 miles per hour. I think our average speed on the original route may not have been any better. We look forward to this stretch of road on our way back to New York in August (not!).

So, at the end of two days we are now about 1,000 miles from New York and a lot more to go. These two days are the longest rides of the entire trip. While there are some 400+ mile days coming up, most our driving days have shorter runs. When I planned this trip, I used 10 hour days as the maximum I wanted to drive. I worked with a route planning/GPS software and through trial and error calculated runs that would stay within the 10 hour limit. Other than today, there should be only two days that exceed nine hours on the road. Some of these longer runs are on the Alaska Highway where the choices of overnight spots are limited.