The drive home was mostly a blur of wind, semis, and open fields. The scenery had lost some of its allure by that point, and selling my car to pay for a plane ticket home began to seem like a better and better idea. I made it to Iowa, near the Indiana border, when I decided to stop for the night at a Motel 6. It was cheap and I was broke and tired enough to accept the smell of old cigarettes and human waste that permeated the hallways.
Still, I cocooned myself in a couple jackets and did my best not to actually touch anything in the room. I've stayed in some cheap places, but usually I do my research first so I find the decent ones. This had been a last minute stop, since I'd originally hoped to make the entire nineteen hour drive in one day.
The next morning I was greeted to a surprise ice storm that stayed with me for the next several hours, turning what should've been a five or six hour drive into an all day event. At one point an ice chunk fell of an overpass and landed on my driver's side windshield wiper as the blade was wiping the window. It wound up denting the wiper right in the middle and exposing some of the metal, conveniently rendering it useless right in the middle of the storm. I stupidly kept trying to use the wiper, and I now have a giant scratch across the middle of my windshield as a souvenir from the drive.
I tried to nap for a bit in a Wendy's parking lot after calling April and finding out that the weather sucked there, too. If I wanted to make it home that day, I was just going to have to take it slow. Easier said than done when you're desperate to get out of the car, but I made it in one piece nonetheless.
Up next-- what I did right on this solo road trip, and what I'd do differently next time...
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