Day 12 - 479.2 miles to home

Today was a long driving day, from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to home in Philadelphia. We left our hotel at about 9:00 am and arrived home, tired but happy to be home, at 7:50 pm. We traveled a total of 479.2 miles without any road trip museum stops, though I was severely tempted in Smithfield, North Carolina, which happens to be the home of the Ava Gardner Museum, a classic road trip museum if there ever was one. It also turns out that Gardner was a close friend of Ernest Hemingway, so a visit would have been a nice bookend to our visit to the Hemingway House in Key West. But Clare and Conor each strongly vetoed any idea of paying even a short visit to the museum, and I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Gardner (though I recognized the name of course), so, after getting appropriately fueled at  Starbucks, we got back in the car and made a beeline for home, stopping only for lunch and gas at a Wawa in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and for periodic bathroom breaks. On the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, I also spotted a sign for the National Cryptologic Museum, operated by the NSA, but it was too late in the day for a visit. Besides, if I had tried to stop, Clare and Conor would have driven home without me. It was a successful road trip (more thoughts later), if bittersweet, as it may have been our last, at least for a while.


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