milage

I drove more than 800 miles last week to make sure that DMV employees in offices all over the state are doing the very best job they possibly can for the Wisconsin taxpayer by auditing their procedures. I’m happy to report they are. (The best part about the trip was that the employees were so nice to me even as I was auditing them. Not that they aren’t nice to me anywhere else; they are. It’s just that it’s always such a pleasant surprise.) It worked out to about 18 hours of driving over three days. That’s a lot of windshield time.

The first leg of our trip took us from Madison to Ladysmith, a distance the Google tells me is 252 miles and takes 3 hours 45 minutes. The mileage is accurate as far as I can tell, but it took us five hours, not just under four. My best guess as to how that happened: Google doesn’t include slowdowns for construction and stops to pee in their calculations. I’m sure the first one is almost impossible to account for, but I would suggest they could ask how old you are to get a more accurate figure for the second one: Over fifty and they add fifteen minutes to each hour of travel. Bonus points if they put a star at exits where you can find a public restroom.

From Ladysmith to Ashland we went another 104 miles and took us about two hours. When I climbed out of our car in Ashland the feeling of using my legs to walk was so unfamiliar I had to slowly unbend myself from a sitting position with each step. A time-lapse photo of me would’ve looked like that drawing of the ascent of man, a crouching ape to a hunched-over Neanderthal to a fully erect modern human. I did a few deep knee bends every time I was out of eyeshot, just to keep the circulation in my legs going.

We stayed in Ashland overnight and drove from Ashland to Hurley in the morning, just 38 miles down the road. The skies were clear to the east so the sun shone through, making it a very pleasant drive. We passed through the town of Saxon on the way; one of the women who lives there and works at the Hurley DMV told us she saw some snow flying that morning. So glad I wasn’t there to see it.

Our next stop that day was the Iron River DMV, back the way we came. Skies in the west were cloud-covered and dark as cast iron, so the drive was a bit more somber. We stopped in Ashland for an early lunch at The Black Cat coffee house (I recommend their egg sandwich). Hurley to Iron River is 65 miles, most of it along the coast of Lake Superior, the first time I’ve seen the big lake since I was in college when I went hiking in the Upper Peninsula.

Our last stop that day was Superior, which is 38 miles from Iron River, making Wednesday the day we spent the shortest time at the wheel, about three hours. I spent the rest of the day looking out the window of my hotel room, which perversely faced traffic racing past on the highway, while I worked at the desk to complete the paperwork of the offices I audited.

Fun Bit O’ Trivia: The hotel where we stayed in Superior is just off the highway that feeds traffic to the bridge across the Mississippi River into Duluth. I missed the exit and we had to drive across the bridge into Minnesota to turn around. That’s the second time I’ve done that while we’ve been auditing; the first time was in Prairie du Chien, at the extreme southern end of the state.

The last day was our longest behind the wheel when we drove two-hundred thirty-some miles from Superior to Madison in an almost uninterrupted shot. We stopped about every ninety minutes to switch drivers, get some fresh air, stretch our legs, use the rest room, and we pulled off the highway in Eau Claire to enjoy lunch at a sit-down restaurant, but altogether we were driving for about seven and a half hours.
I have never been so grateful to get out of a car.