Almost Home

The final leg of our journey took us through Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. One of our pit stops was a dream world for my husband. Many of you know how much he follows Reds minor league baseball... we got to see another stadium and practice in Dayton, OH. So on our list of Reds minor league ball parks at the moment we have:

Billings Mustangs-- Rookie League?
Chatanooga Lookouts-- Double AA?
Dayton Dragons-- High A?

(I need my husband to make sure these are the correct leagues.)

After we left Dayton (which was a pretty cool town), we drove through the mountains of West Virgina. It started to rain! It rained hard! I was driving. It was scary! After we stopped for dinner in Charleston Matt took over the wheel and we pushed forward to Roanoke (just 4 more hours).

My brother's van has a gas gauge and an estimated amount of miles left before you run out of gas. It said 50 some miles when we left Charleston, so we thought we would drive down the road a little ways before stopping. This was a bad idea! Interstate 77 is a toll road with lots of tractor trailers, is extremely moutainous and curvey and it was pouring down rain so hard that we could barely see out the windshield at times...

About 15 minutes after leaving we saw a sign that said 38 miles to the next town. Our gas gauge read 37, we thought we could make it... I was nervous! Matt was calm! We felt like Kramer and his friend on Seinfeld. We kept going and I had my eyes on the gas gauge like a hawk. It would dip down lower than the estimated miles and then above them. Every exit provided another iota of promise for a fill up, but unfortunately the gas stations were closed this late at night and hard to find in the middle of the WV mountains, so we pushed forwards.

We were almost to one of the I-77 oasis' and thought we saw a gas station so we pulled off (probably because I had been freaking out for so long.) But the lights of promise turned out to be another toll road (did I mention that the gauge read 3 miles left at this point). I could sense that Matt was even getting nervous at this point. We were on another highway.

Ok, AC off, lean forward, coast, pray!
Zero Miles-- no gas station!

Then, on the left a blue sign Exxon! A huge sigh of relief left both of us as we pulled in and filled up our tank. It was finally time to relax and drive the last 3 hours to my parents house.