Road trip: barricades, troopers, BP stations

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 10, 2001

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like spending 28 hours of a 48-hour weekend driving -- half of it in the horrendous traffic resulting from a lemminglike need on behalf of a large percentage of Florida's population to return north in time to hide their grandchildren's Easter baskets in the snow.

The return half, of course, resulted in being surrounded by southbound college kids who have to drive 90 mph in order to be the very first in their fraternities to hurl themselves off a motel balcony.

I'd rather drive I-75 toward Gainesville on a football weekend with a Seminole license plate and a couple of those dopey looking fan flags fluttering outside my windows.

"Road trip" used to be such a fun phrase when it involved loading up a cooler with beer and driving to another town -- preferably one with a beach -- spending a fun weekend and then driving back.

But as always, I tried to make the mind-numbing trip from Dade City to Greensboro N.C. (visiting a weird college kid whose idea of a good time is staying behind and studying) count for something.

After all, when else do you get an opportunity to see the country that way and to realize the many gifts that are available in a nation that seems to be either paved or in the ("fines doubled when workmen present") process of being paved in a horizon-to-horizon vista broken only by the omnipresent BP stations, Cracker Barrel restaurants and pieces of truck retread.

Despite all of the modern advances available -- air conditioning, tinted glass, cruise control and, thank heavens, audio books -- auto travel isn't the adventure it once was.

Road maps are really superfluous once you get on the right road going in the right direction. Although I learned that a gander at a map might have helped this time.

My young office mates frequently make the same trip and, after my return naturally, gleefully pointed out how I could have shaved five hours off my time each way, primarily by avoiding Atlanta.

Atlanta, in case you haven't driven through or immediately around it lately, is now the world's largest parking lot. People who live there, I am convinced, would lust heartily for a chance to move to New Port Richey so they could laugh out loud about what we think of as traffic congestion.

"We'll eat as soon as we get out of this traffic," I said optimistically, not realizing that I might have to drive to Detroit to keep that promise.

Even if the Interstate Highway system has reduced the world to acres of flat asphalt, green and white signs and more plastic orange barricade barrels than there are people in some Third World countries, you still, at least, get the chance to see the free enterprise system at work. States with low cigarette taxes (and better roads than ours for some reason) want you to buy massive amounts of their product so that you can get lung cancer more quickly and leave larger estates for your children.

Gasoline prices tend to drop drastically when you get out of Florida, probably because of taxes, and you learn a neat advertising trick. The more ridiculous a state's gasoline prices are, the smaller the type that reads "diesel," or "unleaded," in little tiny letters right over the ridiculous prices on the billboards.

And I am also happy to announce that, while the Florida Highway Patrol blames many of its problems on being underfunded, underpaid and undermanned, the highway patrols of our neighbors to the immediate north are alive, well and developing writers' cramp. I saw so many blue-lights from the state line to our destination that I felt like I was traveling with a police escort, and there were still morons weaving in and out of traffic at 90 mph.

My friends have offered to share their special route north with me, but I am relying on good old I-75 -- south.

I'll leave Dade City, drive until I see the sign that says airport exit and, even with unconscionable delays and lousy service, be where I am going a lot sooner and a lot fresher than I arrived last weekend.

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