Road Trip To Memphis

Hampton Inn Morning

It's 7:10, and I'm sitting in a Hampton Inn, drinking coffee, watching TV alongside a few other early risers. We have a seven-hour drive ahead to Memphis, cutting through Cincinnati, Louisville, and Nashville.

Friday was a busy morning. Up early as usual, I wrote the blog and had breakfast while letting Evie sleep until 8:00. Around 9:30, I went for a paddle, just to get some exercise.  Evie had a hair appointment in Lakewood at 11:00, so while she was gone, I vacuumed the living room, got the house squared away, and had our bags packed and loaded in the Kia. We were ready to go the moment she walked back through the door. We left at 11:45 and arrived in Mason five hours and fifteen minutes later.

The drive was a mixed bag. We hit a torrential rainstorm on Route 271 near Mansfield — maybe ten minutes of fury — but that was the extent of the bad weather. The real headache was Route 71 through Columbus, where construction forces you off the highway and through city streets before letting you rejoin somewhere west of town. We stopped once for gas and made do with hard-boiled eggs, cheese, and crackers for lunch, neither of us feeling particularly hungry. As always, the sheer flatness and scale of Ohio's farmland left us both a little awestruck — those endless green fields couldn't feel further from the snow we've grown used to back home.

Fertile Ohio

I was convinced the March Madness game tipped off at 6:00, so we didn't linger at the hotel and drove straight to the recommended Rusty Bucket. We lucked into two seats at the bar — only to discover the game was actually the following night. Idiot. No matter. The place was hopping for Good Friday, barely an empty table in sight, with at least six TVs showing the Cincinnati Reds opener. 

Bar Hopping

We ordered beers, soaked in the crowd, and genuinely loved our food: a barbecued chicken salad for Evie, fish tacos for me. The restaurant sits inside an upscale open-air district — shops, eateries, the works — and we capped the evening by wandering through a Whole Foods in search of dessert, eventually settling on blueberry scones.

Dinner At The Rusty Bucket Bar

Back at the Hampton Inn, we caught the UConn/South Carolina women's semifinal — South Carolina won — then read for a while before turning off the light.

“We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” he said, referring broadly to the country of roughly 93 million people. DJT