driving through the night

 A friend of mine and his son are driving to Florida to attend a family memorial service.  They left this evening and will be taking turns and driving through the night.  That caught my attention because my husband was a great believer in driving through the night and I have many memories of those drives.  Most of these drives took place when we were young and so were our children. We were traveling in our VW bus camper conversion in those days.  We traveled in that van for 13 years, and many many miles, eventually visiting every state in the contiguous states.  Often our motivation for driving through the night was to leave as soon as my husband got off work in the evening in order to get every minute possible out of our two week and later three week vacations.  Usually our night drives were heading west and driving through the flat states.  Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas (depending on if we were heading north west or south west) were states that we could drive through in the dark without feeling like we were missing too many stretches of fabulous scenery.  Since we were from northern Indiana where we do flat very well, we were anxious to put flat miles behind us and get to the mountains.  I do remember a couple of interesting incidents during those drives.  Once, on a perfectly straight, innocent looking stretch of interstate, when I was driving, something, I think it was a wild hubcap, flew up from the side of the road and broke our right headlight.  I am proud to say that I did not loose control of the car although I was startled, but we did waste part of the following day getting the headlight replaced.  The other incident that I remember clearly was coming to a ford over a river (I believe my husband, who was driving, had decided to take a short cut) only to discover that the ferry was closed for the night.  Since we were in our camper it wasn't a hardship to sleep there for the rest of the night, and I didn't mind it at all.  Drive carefully, all you night drivers.