Our one-month summer road trip is over. We’ve returned reluctantly, but quickly. The irony of this always puzzles me. We don’t want the journey to end, yet when it is indeed coming to a close we rush home. We covered a little over a thousand miles in two days.

In the past, I’ve said I wouldn’t do that. It’s particularly hard on Patrice, but we’ve discovered something that many of you probably already know – naps in the afternoon. By pulling over when we get groggy, just about when lunch has digested, when the day is warmest, and fatigue sets in, pull over for a nap in the trailer. We’ve found, well I’ve found – since Patrice isn’t quite as convinced – that when I wake I’m refreshed enough to drive until it is good and dark. In the summer that is around 9:30 p.m. Then we pull over for the night; get a good sleep and an early start the following morning. I think this can be repeated for quite some time and seems to me to be a safe way to cover 500 or 600 miles each day.

Or so I think, after we left Madison and were driving southwest on Highway 151, about 30 miles from Dubuque, where we came upon the aftermath of an accident. At the bottom of a long steep hill, a tow truck was pulling a trailer up onto its wheels. The mangled shiny mess wasn’t immediately recognizable, but as we went by, we saw that it was an Airstream. It had rolled like Kick the Can down the embankment. A sobering reminder that safety can’t be taken for granted.

Out of all the roadside rests we used our vote for the best were Nebraska’s. They were often well off the Interstate and usually segregated RV parking away from trucks. They were also well kept and as pretty as the ones in Missouri which we gave second place to.