deliriouslove1970. The life & times of Gary and Denise Flanders. (Free and worth every penny. If you would like to compliment the editor, send to garytheflan@deliriouslove1970.com. If you would like to complain, call your mother.)

Back in the winter of 2020-2021 we had an epiphany: ‘Boyhowdy, Michigan winters are dark and with the humidity, they are constantly uncomfortably cold’. Having been born and raised here we should have remembered this sad fact. But after living for over three decades in places with sunshine and dry cold…our memories of crappy winters had atrophied. Ergo, we made the decision, ‘ain’t gonna live through another Michigan winter.

Denise sat down at the trusty iMac and began planning the great escape adventure. She spent hours researching places and prices. What sounded good…what would give us warmth and access to connections…what could we afford…and dang it, what would be fun? Fourth quarter thinking influences us nowadays. If we don’t do it now, what will we regret? After months of dreaming we hit the road on December 30th, 2020.

Being amateurs at this concept of traveling in the Midwest during winter, we searched for every weather prediction we could find. Thursday the 30th looked ok, not great but perhaps we could out run any poor weather heading to Detroitish. We did the final pack and headed out at 6:30 a.m.

We had such fantastic weather and the roads were clear and calm so we kept driving and made it further than we planned that first day. Instead of St Louis we made it to the edge of Missouri and stayed in Rolla.

Our initial plan was 4 days with 3 nights on the road. We had booked a stay at a Marriott resort in Palm Desert California. Our kids and grandkids were going to meet us there. Things started going sideways fairly soon on the second day of the trip. The roads remained clear and it was good sailing, even had stretches where the speed limit was 85. So we went farther then we thought we could and ended in Amarillo Texas for our second night.

We started earlier than usual the next day and had in mind, heck, driving through Texas and Arizona will be a cinch. They don’t have bad driving conditions here…wrong.

We had hope and trepidation that the next day would be better. But we had to make it past Gallup New Mexico which had some elevation so the possibility of more crappy driving was real. We weren’t sure if we could drive the last leg into Palm Desert in one more day. When we awoke in Winslow it was 7 degrees and it took me a while to scrape the frost off the car windows.

A stretch of desert motoring and a stop at an outrageously busy gas station/gift shop to pee brought us close to our destination. The first thing we did in Palm Desert was to get the car washed. Now you could finally see the Michigan license plates on the car.