It takes 12 hours to drive from our house to Crick and Colby’s door in Kalamazoo, Mich. We made this annual trek last week. Crick Haltom, SPHS Class of ‘70, is Rupert’s longtime friend and our families have become close as we have visited them and they have traveled here.

Our route takes us 700 miles through seven states, crossing the Mississippi twice each way.

I’m the chief navigator (which is troubling) but this was our 18th trip to see them, so there isn’t much confusion anymore about which exits to take.  

It’s a relaxing drive, interstate all the way. Easy for me to say. Rupert did all the driving, as usual.

I entertained myself with Peggy Walker’s license tag game.

Peggy, our “It’s Friday” columnist, wrote about the game she invented for long road trips.

I forgot to review her rules before we left, so I just made up my own. The object, of course, is to see how many different states you can find on car tags along the road.

I thought I should wait until we got out of Mississippi before I actually recorded a Mississippi tag. It just seemed too easy. So I followed that rule the whole time, not recording the tag of the state we were currently in.

So I got Mississippi as soon as we entered Tennessee. I got Arkansas in Tennessee and then I got Tennessee in Arkansas.

Eventually I listed tags from 34 states, three Canadian provinces and the Cherokee Nation.

You wouldn’t believe how many transport trucks have tags from Maine and Ontario.

I got California, Washington and Oregon, but was not so lucky with most New England states and the Carolinas.

In Effingham, Ill. we stopped for gas and I looked at the car next to ours. It had a DeSoto County tag. This was on our way home, after South Panola had knocked Olive Branch off their throne a few days earlier. I tried to cover up our South Panola Education Foundation tag by standing in front of it, just in case the driver was a sore loser. Turns out he was a nice guy who had actually moved to Illinois but maintains close ties with home.

We spent the night in Mt. Vernon, Ill., where I found a Pennsylvania tag in the Buffalo Wild Wings parking lot.

At our hotel we found a Mississippi State University tag on a maroon van. I kept thinking we’d run into someone else with a southern drawl in the elevator, but we never did. Rupert wanted to write “Hotty Toddy” with his finger on the back window, but he refrained.

As we pushed on down I-57 through Illinois, I was determined to find Utah. We passed a transport truck with a Utah address painted on the side, but that doesn’t count, according to what I remembered from Peggy’s rules. You have to verify the tag. So Rupert pulled off at the next exit, giving that truck a chance to get in front of us again. We pulled right back on the highway and caught up with the truck. It had a Maine tag. Go figure.

When we crossed the state line back into Mississippi, I was sure I wouldn’t see any more noteworthy tags.
Sensing my disappointment, Rupert pulled through the I-55 rest stop in DeSoto County, just to give me one last shot. Would you believe I got Colorado and the Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma) in the parking lot, side by side?

And then, just inside Panola County, there was New Hampshire.