The Last Road Trip with My Father

A tribute from Cody's personal archives.


Movies aren't the focus in this article, although there is some movie talk because it's something I wrote and I don't go long without referencing movies. This is actually a compilation of journal entries that I posted on Facebook back in the summer of 2013, when I went on my last road trip with my father, who made his living as a long haul truck driver. My father would have been turning 66 this week, but unfortunately he passed away back in 2017 at the age of 63. So this seemed like an appropriate time to pull these journal entries out of the archives and post them here.

July 8, 2013 - 11:31am

On a trucking trip with my father for the first time in 14 years. Indiana to Minnesota, then it's eastbound and down to North Carolina. I wish Jackie Gleason was around to chase us in a comedically overzealous manner.


July 8, 2013 - 11:33pm

"Welcome to Illinois: 488 traffic deaths this year."

Day 1 of my travels included a stop at a Chicago hospital/indoor city, a side trip that culminated in a quirky character leading a test subject into a old part of the building, down dimly lit hallways, past machinery under flickering lights. "Research is all we do here."

Highlights: Olga, the hospital receptionist who won my obsessive compulsive heart by giving her work space a long and thorough cleaning with alcohol wipes. "Bruce" the MRI tech. The girl who casually dropped the text abbreviation "GTFO" during a verbal conversation. Lady trucker "Fallen Angel". A sleepy service dog. The bakery name "Two Girls and a Cupcake". The windmill farms near Paw Paw.

And now my dog and I are resting in a Comfort Inn, dreading a 5:30am wakeup call.

July 9, 2013 - 11:02pm

"Adopt a Highway. This Section Available."

I usually only stay in a hotel during a rowdy horror convention, so when in a hotel room I'm used to hearing the sounds of loud talking, laughing, yelling, and people running down the hall at all hours of the night as I attempt to sleep. By contrast, my stay in the random Wisconsin Comfort Inn last night (where I ended up after a place reminiscent of the Bates Motel proved to have no vacancy), was shockingly peaceful and quiet. At no point during the night did I hear any evidence that there were other people in the place. It was a good atmosphere to sleep in, and I would've liked to have been able to continue sleeping in it beyond 5:30am.

But that's the ungodly time at which Day 2 of my trucking trip began, and at 6am we were on the road for a long, foggy, rainy ride through Wisconsin.

My impression of Wisconsin is that it's a pretty state, and a pretty empty state. My view from the interstate was of vast areas that have yet to be developed by chains and corporations, of farmhouses sparsely scattered among fields, forests, and bogs. It was nice to look at. For a while. I like countryside scenery, but hour after hour of it gets rather tedious, and the lack of sights combined with my lack of sleep had my head falling back and forth like a Pez dispenser as I nodded off throughout the day. My dog and I even put the truck's sleeper to use for a while.

The countryside of Wisconsin seems like it'd be a good place to shoot movies, from drive-in era style road trip pictures to horror films. Most of the news stories I see come out of WI are quite strange, and feeling like I was in the middle of nowhere as I travelled through the state, it was easy to imagine the sort of isolation that helped produce someone like Ed Gein sixty years ago.

Our route through the state didn't take us anywhere near Plainfield, the hometown of the man whose real life actions influenced the creation of characters like Norman Bates and Leatherface, although we did go right through Madison, the state capital, where Gein spent his last days in a mental hospital. I couldn't resist wearing my Ed Gein T-shirt during my day in Wisconsin. Appropriate in some ways and inappropriate in others, but none of the locals I encountered seemed to notice anyway.

Day 2 ends in Virginia. The town of Virginia, Minnesota. After bouncing around from place with no vacancies to place that doesn't allow pets, my dog and I now sit on the fourth floor of an old hotel that welcomed us in only after a $100 pet deposit was agreed upon. They really should be paying me for allowing them the privilege of housing my dog for the night, but they don't know any better.


July 10, 2013 - 10pm

"STOP Hitchhiking Zebra Mussels"

The third day of my trucking excursion started off in a refreshingly peaceful manner, as my father spent the morning dealing with the business side of this whole trip, allowing me to sleep in until a decent hour and take my time getting myself ready and rousing my dog from his 12 hour slumber to take care of what he needed to do.

One of the first sights of the day was of a man dressed in full gunslinger cowboy regalia walking down the city sidewalk. He wore a black hat, long black trenchcoat, black gloves... I'd like to think he also wore spurs that jingle jangle jingle, but I couldn't see or hear them from my vantage point.

Soon enough it was time to get back on the road, heading out of Minnesota, the land of lakes and skeeter bugs. We drove past and over bodies of water with names like Whiteface, Paleface, and Hellwig. We went by a sign advertising Timber Ghost Realty; apparently the term timber ghost has something to do with hunting, and I can't believe it hasn't been the title of a horror movie yet. I spotted a two-part homemade sign, the first part reading, "Want to know how the Nazis happened? Look in the mirror." I wasn't quick enough to read the second half and find out what point the crafter was trying to make.

Then we were back in Wisconsin, heading out on the same interstate we rode in on. The state did seem to be slightly more populated and developed when viewed in bright sunlight, but my dog and I still needed a nap break in the middle of the day.

As day 3 draws to a close, we are still in cheesehead territory. Unlike the previous two nights, we were able to secure a hotel room quickly, easily, and cheaply tonight, and after that was done we went over to a restaurant for our first and only proper meal of the day. As I made my order, the waitress spoke the line that I've heard roughly one million times in my life: "You're so quiet!" She followed that up with a sweetly delivered "Cheer up, buttercup." Which reminds me, I have to take today's dose of antidepressant as soon as I get this posted.

License plate of the day: DIE 2 LIV

July 11, 2013 - 11:52pm

"Hit a Worker: 10,000 Fine, 14 Yrs Jail"

The "land of skeeter bugs" comment I made in reference to Minnesota yesterday was actually something my father said. Personally, I had no mosquito troubles while I was in that state. I did get bitten a couple times on Monday night, I was besieged by a bloodthirsty swarm last night, and both of those encounters were in a state other than MN: every mosquito that has attacked me so far on this trip has been from Wisconsin.

Before the fourth day of the trip could start, my father had to get some worn down tires replaced on his trailer. Watching how stressed and agitated he got last night just thinking of the process ahead, even though all he had to do was make a simple phone call, it was clear where my anxiety issues came from.

But the situation was dealt with, four new tires were put on the trailer, and at 7am we were back on the road, heading out of Wisconsin and into a place that looked much more like home to me: the dryer, flatter farmlands of Illinois, with plenty of very developed areas to go through. As my father said about how some areas have changed over the years, "They took out the cornfields and now they grow houses."

The plan for day 4 was to get 530 miles further along our way, almost enough to cover the entire state of Illinois. Back past the windmills near Paw Paw, past a series of signs that delivered a pro-concealed carry message: "In jail he sits / For attempted crime / I had the gun / He does the time", in and out of Ogle Country, through and past some towns with the same names as towns around my home in Ohio. As we covered this distance, I've become very weary of this trip. Getting up early to sit in a vehicle and push yourself to drive as far as you can every day is not the life for me. The idea was that we would have covered 300 miles by noon. I would've rather have gotten 300 more minutes of sleep by then. I'm ready for this excursion to be over, but we're only at about the halfway point. I look forward to getting back home, my dachshund Zeppelin and I both miss our chihuahua buddy Cheech and six month old dachshund puppy Zoso, Zeppelin's protégé. A low point was when we went by a city called Mansfield, and it wasn't the Mansfield I'd like to be at.

At least the day ended in an interesting place - Metropolis, Illinois, "the home of Superman". After getting a hotel room, we went into town to check out the Super Museum and the Superman statue that stands in Superman Square. That was pretty neat. And then I ate at a Sonic for the first time in my life.

License plate of the day: LIVLIF2

July 12, 2013 - 10:43pm

"Move Damaged Vehicle to Shoulder If No Serious Injury"

Day 5 of the trucking trip started off at a decent time, a time which my father said was the latest he had ever started a day of trucking: 9:30am. Worked just fine for me. Besides, we can't deliver what we're hauling until Monday, so we have all weekend to cover the distance between Metropolis, Illinois and our destination in North Carolina. Today we took it easy. We made our exit from Illinois, went over the swollen Ohio River, quickly made it across Kentucky, and then entered Tennessee, passing the Clarksville that The Monkees sang about, going through Nashville, right by the Grand Ole Opry.

Usually the only people talking on the CB channel of choice are my father and his pilot car or rear escort drivers, but when some road closure confusion was being discussed, suddenly a fellow trucker piped in out of nowhere, some helpful insight from a man who sounded just like Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade.

When we decided to call it quits for the night, we had gone just 230 miles and it was around 2pm. We got our hotel rooms, then went over to a nearby movie theatre to see if we could come to a consensus about what to see. As far as I could figure, there were only three viable options. I wanted to watch Pacific Rim, but nobody else did. I would've been willing to watch Man of Steel a second time, but nobody wanted to see something I had already seen. So we settled on the third movie, which no one was really amped for, but it was something to check out and a screening was going to start in just 10 minutes. We saw The Lone Ranger. And I could swear that the same kid who is in the segments of the film set in 1933 has been playing kids in movies for at least the last 25 years.

Over-protective pet owner guilt: Today also marks ten days since I left home. My dachshund Zeppelin, the dog I have with me on the trip, is eleven years old, and over the course of his eleven years I've only spent, I think, nine full calendar days away from him. This is the first time I've been away from my six month old dachshund puppy Zoso, and since he visited me on the 4th, that means I've now already spent the same amount of days away from him as it took me so many years to rack up with Zeppelin. And those absences from Zeppelin were never longer than one day at a time. So I'm kind of feeling bad about being away from Zoso... But if you take into account the fact that Zeppelin was a month older when we got him than Zoso was when we got him, I guess Zoso has some extra days banked.

I'm not the only one who would much rather be at home right now than on this trip. My father feels the same way, and said as much this morning. He has myelofibrosis, a blood and bone marrow disorder that is a form of leukemia. He was diagnosed with it last year, which fortuitously was also within the first year of a treatment for his stage of the disease becoming available. He took that medication for almost a year and it worked for a while, but his body soon developed an immunity to it. Around that same time, a second medication entered clinical trials. He's now in a limbo between medications, weaned off the first, waiting to be given the second, and he's not feeling well at all. He wanted to get this one last job done before taking time off and seeing if the new medication does him any good, and I was brought along to provide some sort of moral support. What used to be his normal way of life is now beating him down, he gets exhausted easily, he has said that he's "in a world of hurt". This morning he told me that all he wants to do is go home. He said, "I never should've come out here in the first place." And when his doctor called to check on him this afternoon, she agreed with that. He shouldn't be doing this, we shouldn't be on this trip, but we have to see it through at this point. Only a few more days.

Favorite Illinois town name: Goreville.


July 13, 2013 - 11:09pm

"Scratch Made Biscuits"

Yesterday I heard a Billy Bob Thornton Sling Blade soundalike over the CB radio, and he wasn't the only celebrity double I've crossed paths with over the six days of this trucking journey. On another leg of the trip, there was a man who was either Vin Diesel, his clone, or just the biggest fan of the Fast & Furious series that I've ever seen; a muscular bald man ripping down the interstate in a customized Ford Shelby Mustang, his rear bumper proudly proclaiming that he is a "Street Racer". This afternoon, there was another familiar voice on the CB - a man who could easily be mistaken for Arnold Schwarzenegger was talking to a fellow driver and sharing stories about their young children and grandchildren. Those kids are, as he pronounced it, little "whoopasnippas".

Day 6 was the easiest day of the trip yet. We only went around 150 miles through the Tennessee hills before stopping and getting a room in a section of the state that's all about Davy Crockett. But more interesting to me than the King of the Wild Frontier is what happened in a town about 20 miles from where I'm sitting right now.

In late 1979, writer/director Sam Raimi, actor Bruce Campbell, and their cohorts came down from Michigan to shoot a low budget horror movie in a rundown, isolated old cabin in Morristown, Tennessee. The result of their endeavors was the original The Evil Dead, a favorite of mine, the film that I call "The Scariest Movie I've Ever Seen" because of my terrifying first viewing of it one dark night in 1993. The movie that group of young independents made out in the woods became a classic and launched careers that are still going strong today and have become very high profile. Sam Raimi went from making Super 8 movies with his friends to making blockbusters for studios, and his humble horrific roots are why he's one of my heroes.

I've been near Morristown several times over the years, but I've never gotten around to making the trek out to visit what remains of the Evil Dead cabin. I really want to see the location someday, but it's not going to happen on this trip.

License plate of the day: ZOMBIES

July 27, 2013 - 4:53pm

"Slow to Exit"

Seems that it's about time for me finish chronicling the trucking adventure I went on with my father, since it ended a week and a half ago. Obviously, I got distracted by some other things in life and neglected my journaling duties.

My lapse is writing was kicked off by the fact that Day 7 of the trip was not a day of trucking, it was merely a day of sitting around in our hotel rooms and hanging out in Tennessee.

I have family in the Evil Dead area, so the highlight of the day was when we got to give my niece a surprise visit at her place of work. After chit chatting with her for a while and snapping a family picture, we returned to the hotel to end our day by playing Yahtzee while watching the CBS show Big Brother.

Day 8 began very early, at 5am I think it was, and we hustled to get back out on the road. That was the big day, the one on which we were to accomplish what the entire trip had been about. The day we were to deliver the huge hunk of metal we were hauling from Minnesota to North Carolina.

First, of course, we had to get into North Carolina from Tennessee, which required crossing mountainous terrain. As the truck pulled the 200,000 pounds of trailer and cargo up those mountain roads, we reached speeds approaching 15 miles per hour. Hold on to your hats.

Guided by front and rear escorts, we reached our load's new home around noon, and then came the part my father had been dreading. With his trailer disassembled into one third the length, he then had to back it into a building nestled between two hills, down a driveway that sloped in from both sides. The angle would cause the load to lean over, and the danger was that if it leaned too far it would tip completely, flipping the trailer and the truck over along with it.

I was not allowed to be inside the truck while he was doing this, because he didn't want to take me with him if he were to flip and die. But given that I ended up sitting inside a vehicle that wasn't very far away from the truck and the load was tipping over in my direction, I'm still not sure I would've been all that safe if things had gone wrong.

Things did not go wrong, though. The delivery was successfully completed, and before long we were on our way home.

The drive home took us back through the mountains from North Carolina into Tennessee. On my timeline, there are pictures from this leg of the journey, as well as a picture of the thing we were hauling taken on the morning of day 8, so I wasn't entirely negligent when it came to updates on this stuff.

We crossed TN and continued on for a while before calling it a day in London. London, Kentucky. We got hotel rooms, and with my dog Zeppelin snoozing soundly in bed I spent some time chatting on my laptop while watching the latest episode of the TV series adaptation of Stephen King's Under the Dome.

Day 9 started off with a lackluster but free hotel breakfast, and then we made our ways out of Kentucky and into Ohio. It was such a relief to be back in my home state after two weeks away. The scenery that looked like home, the familiar town names. It was even nice to see the Ohio license plates all around me... But we weren't going to my home, we were going to my father's home, so I had to leave Ohio behind again for a while as we went on into Indiana.

And on the evening of day 9, the trip ended when we pulled into the driveway of the Indiana property. We were all very glad to be done with the whole ordeal, and after unpacking we settled in for some much needed relaxation.

It was a rough nine days on the road. I didn't want to do it, I wanted it to be over the whole time... but it was an adventure of sorts, and in the end I'm glad that I went through it.

If there's one bit of wisdom that I want to leave you all with at the end of this story, it's this reminder: "It is unlawful to urinate on state property."