Driving From Semi-Closed Rhody To Mostly-Open Texas
“Northeast truck traffic was heavy, suggesting the economic recovery is gaining strength up there. We found four-times more people in our hotel than when we stopped in May. Many other observations from our trip. ”
It was time to get organized and plan our drive back to Houston from our summer home (hide-out) in Rhode Island. Doctors’ appointments dictated we leave on Thursday, October 8. As we contemplated heading home, the National Hurricane Center in Miami issued its first advisory for Potential Tropical Cyclone Twenty-Six at 5 pm Sunday, October 4. Our alarm bells went off.
The advisory announced a disturbance that had formed over the Central Caribbean, which was expected to become a tropical storm and strengthen further over the Northwest Caribbean Sea. Talk began about the storm eventually becoming a hurricane, crossing Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and into the Gulf of Mexico and targeting the Louisiana coast as a Category 2 or 3 hurricane.
We knew we needed to closely watch the storm’s development as it might make us alter our travel plans, heading west further north than on the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately, we were scheduled to get our front door replaced on Wednesday, something we had ordered in May, only to find out how much the door manufacturing plant’s output was impacted by Covid-19 and the housing boom that erupted across America, stressing all construction suppliers.
As Tropical Storm Delta (all the 2020 storm names had been exhausted, forcing the use of Greek letter designations) made its way toward Cancun, the projections showed the storm track taking it to a direct hit on Lake Charles, the target of Hurricane Laura six weeks earlier. If Delta hit Lake Charles, it would be similar to Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne that targeted Florida’s East Coast in 2004. Frances came ashore as a Category 2 hurricane near Sewall’s Point. Jeanne made landfall three weeks later as a Category 3 hurricane near Stuart.
Exhibit 3. Two Hurricanes Land In Florida In 2004 SOURCE: clickorlando.com
Delta’s projected course was amazingly similar to Laura’s path, and it certainly had residents in the area, who were still struggling to recover from the earlier storm, on edge. There was only one thing for us to do, which was to watch the weather news and advisories, while considering alternative routes home. Once before we had been forced to abandon our normal route. That was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which paralyzed New Orleans and the Mississippi coastal region.
Exhibit 4. Two Hurricanes Targeted Lake Charles SOURCE: clickorlando.com
After going out for a last Rhode Island dinner, we loaded the car Wednesday evening, during a brief rain storm. Fortunately, the next morning brought sunny weather. We quickly learned what happens when you install a new front door. The weatherstripping was so tight, you really had to slam the door to enable the electronic security lock to operate. As we discovered right outside our neighborhood, the lock hadn’t locked. We had been having connectivity issues with the security system, but decided to return and make sure the door had locked and that we were not getting a false message. We finally secured the door and it locked properly, so we were 20 minutes behind schedule.
Surprisingly, the traffic was light going south on I-95. Equally surprising was that the traffic heading north was heavy, especially with trucks. We made good time driving through Connecticut. We observed a huge back up on the northbound side at the Darien/Stamford line, as a highway maintenance crew had one lane closed. That was when the large number of trucks heading north became clearly evident.
We also watched the trend in gasoline prices in the service plazas along the route through Connecticut. They reflected the cost of living increase that becomes evident the closer one gets to Fairfield County and New York City. Regular gasoline prices for the four service plazas open on the south side of the highway were as follows: $2.249, $2.239, $2.439 and $2.459. No surprise.
We had been reading about the slowing of the economy, but based on the truck traffic we saw in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, that narrative seemed inconsistent with our reality. In fact, my wife commented that she had never seen so many trucks. At one point in Pennsylvania, as we reached the top of a rise while traveling alongside numerous trucks, we saw the most amazing sight. This was a three-lane highway, in which trucks and buses are banned from the most inside lane. As we crested the rise and began heading down into a valley, we saw the two right lanes solid with 18-wheelers all the way down and then up to the next rise. That was approximately 1.5 miles of visible road. As we were driving past the trucks, my wife said we should have been counting them. We have never seen such a long line of trucks in all our trips.
As we drove through Maryland, West Virginia and into Virginia, the truck traffic remained heavy. It began to thin out as we reached the middle of Virginia. We were intrigued that all the truck weigh stations were open in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and all the trucks were forced to enter. Often times these stations are closed, but we assume the governments are desperate for any source of revenue.
The Pennsylvania and Virginia truck stops were pretty full all day. By late afternoon, they were about 80% full and overflowing by 10 pm. We noticed that at one Virginia rest area, the state had painted parking lines for trucks along both shoulders of the entrance and exit ramps. We assume they had determined that official parking spaces would maximize the number of trucks that could use the rest area, rather than relying on the truck drivers to figure out the spacing. Truck parking shortages are another indication of how the new hours-of-work restrictions are impacting the behavior of over-the-road truckers.
Exhibit 5. Travel Jam Coming Out Of New Orleans SOURCE: theconversation.com
The truck traffic was not as heavy as we turned west and drove across Tennessee from Knoxville to Memphis. The truck traffic was fairly light through Arkansas, also. We wondered whether this was due to truckers not wanting to venture too far south and into the area exposed to the weather from Hurricane Delta, especially as we were only hours away from Hurricane Delta making landfall. It was also Friday afternoon, so some drivers may have already reached destinations and were no longer on the road. By taking this northern route, we knew we were avoiding the scenes of huge traffic backups on I-10 as people escaped the impending hurricane. Thursday night, the weather channel had pictures of the Louisiana traffic jams.
Eating is always an interesting experience on our trips. We traditionally stop at McDonald’s, not only because the food service is quick, but one can always count on the bathrooms being clean, and it provides a nice break from being inside the car for so many hours. However, in Pennsylvania, Covid-19 policies ban eating in at fast-food restaurants. Only drive-throughs are available. Therefore, we opted to stop at a Cracker Barrel, remembering from our May drive to Rhode Island that they allowed dining inside. In fact, all their billboards have been redone with the message: Dine-in, Curbside or Delivery.
We pulled into the Cracker Barrel in Hamburg at 12:45 pm, only to find a 25-minute wait. After we signed up, we received a text message from the restaurant about the wait time. When it expired, we were texted to come in. That evening in Christiansburg, Virginia, the wait for a table was 30 minutes. When told how long, we hopped back in the car and went to fill it up, and then returned to complete our wait. We noticed a Help Wanted sign as we drove into the restaurant, suggesting either that rehiring workers was complicated by the extra unemployment insurance payments many of them are receiving, or people don’t want to work in the hospitality industry with its potential Covid-19 risk.
According to the hostess who sat us, the restaurant’s capacity is restricted by adherence to the 6-foot social distancing requirement for table placement. That restriction limits the capacity to half the number of tables, which was evident from the areas where tables had been removed. Several tables had been set up outside, but no one was using them at dinner. Not all the tables were being used, but the restaurant was set up for roughly 50% of its normal seating capacity. We are guessing that the wait may have had more to do with staffing shortages and not seating.
Our hotel on Thursday night was a repeat of our trip north in May. We stayed at the Hampton Inn in Bristol, Tennessee. After making our reservation on the Hilton app, we called and asked to be assigned to a room that had not been used recently. We were assigned a room on the 5th floor, just as in May, and on the end of the hotel closest to the highway (noisier), but not down the corridor quite as far as the room last May. We commented when we pulled into the parking lot that things looked a lot busier than in May, as there were many more cars at this hotel, as well as at the two neighboring hotels. Travel was clearly higher than in May.
Friday morning before leaving, we had a conversation with the lady manning the front desk at the hotel. In May, we were the 13th guest, but now we were among 56. With 91 rooms, the hotel has seen its occupancy rate improved from 14% to 62%. We were told that the prior three weekends had been race weekends at the nearby Bristol Motor Speedway, so the hotel had been completely booked.
We questioned the lady about the night clerk’s comment that he had been running out of rooms when we called to reserve an unused room. She told us it was because they had too few housekeepers – one was sick, another on vacation and something happened to a third one, so they only had two cleaning workers. A nice touch is that each cleaned room is sealed with a sticker detailing the cleaning that had been done.
The breakfast-to-go meal bag had a nice assortment of prepackaged food, which we ate when we were in the one and only traffic jam we experienced in the two-day drive. That was in Knoxville and it was due to an earlier accident, but as we idled, it gave us time to eat without risking an accident ourselves.
After discussing our experience and the details about the hotel’s situation from our May visit with the front desk lady, she acknowledged that not everyone had been rehired, yet. As a result, she commented that it remained a struggle to balance work shifts when people took vacations. But, as she commented, “We’ve been blessed” when referring to how the hotel and its workers have fared. We were certainly glad to see the hotel experiencing better times.
Friday was a very long day, although it started out pretty well. Other than the accident-related slowdown, the traffic moved well. With fewer trucks, there weren’t the large truck caravans to slow down the highway, although there was the occasional truck that decided to pass and tied up the fast lane for miles. That is when the “crazies” always make their move by passing on the right and then cutting right back into the traffic flow forcing everyone behind to have to slow or hit the brakes. We even saw a truck driver pass another on the right!
Our biggest challenge was navigating the navigation system. We wanted to change our route at Knoxville to take us across Tennessee to Memphis, then to Little Rock and on to Texarkana and down through East Texas (Marshall, Livingston, Cleveland, etc.) to Houston. For some reason, the navigation system continued to recalculate our route through Dallas. No offense Big D, but we had no reason to swing that wide to avoid the storm. In fact, other than a few stretches with showers, we didn’t hit as much rain as we anticipated.
Because we were going to be driving for about 1,100+ miles, we only went through a McDonald’s drive through at lunch for shakes to minimize the lost-time. Fortunately, we gained an hour due to the time zone change, but it still meant we didn’t get home until 1 am Saturday morning.
In East Texas, we passed a truck stop along US-59 around 10 pm, and there were still parking spots open. Again, we wondered if the storm had kept truck traffic down, or whether it was the impending weekend that got truckers home? Local police were out in force in the small towns we went through, especially with the rapid speed limit drops. On the entire trip, we saw only a handful of highway patrol cars, but almost always they were on the other side. There were two Tennessee State Police officers on a highway overpass on our side of the highway heading into Knoxville with a speed gun. A little further on there was a police car on the side of the road having pulled a driver over. Given the morning traffic rush, we can’t imagine what that driver was doing.
A couple of final observations. We saw only one Tesla on the road. It was, surprisingly, heading into Little Rock. We watched for political signs, as a judgement about the upcoming election. The overwhelming number were Trump signs, including numerous billboards – some sponsored by law enforcement or veteran organizations. We saw electronic Trump billboards (one for Joe Biden). We saw a trailer parked in a field adjacent to the highway painted with Vote for Trump and Keep America Strong. Surprisingly, the only political signs we saw in Pennsylvania were for Trump. We are not sure that this sampling is representative of anything about what will happen on November 3rd. We can say that the Trump supporters in Rhode Island – a notoriously strong Democratic state – were much more visible this summer than in 2016. In fact, there was a Trump rally about six weeks earlier at a state park in Providence. The Rhode Island State Police said in all the years that rallies have been held there, they have never seen as many people turn out as did for that rally.
Finally, throughout the trip, it seemed that the American economy was coming back – although not evenly. When we rolled into Texas and then reached Marshall, we pulled into a Whataburger and were surprised to see the dining room open for service. We were happy to be back to where life seems closer to normal that what we had been living with in Rhode Island this summer.