It began at the ungodly hour of 4.30am - but I'd actually gotten out of bed an hour and a half earlier so that me and Sabrina could finish loading the car (I love that car - that car is a beast and a half) and then have a little time together before we had to say goodbye.
In all honesty I didn't want to go. That wasn't going to stop me but - notwithstanding that this journey was the first step in breaking myself and Sabrina out of a life of impoverished entrapment - I really didn't want to go. In fact I'd been dreading it because I was pretty sure it was going to be bad.
Actually I was completely wrong on that one. It wasn't bad. It was an utter fucking nightmare from start to finish. At times Hobbs's tail-lights were reduced to thin smeared blurs on the fat ass of his thyroidal SUV, no more than five feet ahead of the Merc.
The trip had been projected to take between eight and ten hours, it took fourteen, twelve and a half of that fourteen on the road, in the vilest, most atrocious, most unimaginably bad driving conditions I've ever encountered - all in the company of Travellin' Hobbs, my Father in Law.
He came on the trip to help me find a place for myself, Sabrina and the dogs (he doing the legwork of looking during the day, while I was at work) and to wave his magic credit card at any problems we might encounter on the way.
Hobbs is sixty nine. He has stents in his heart. He takes a barrel load of pills every day just to keep breathing. Among his family he's known as Travellin' Hobbs because of his absolute, unbounded determination to get to wherever he's going - no matter what. He'll drive through tornadoes. He'll drive through blinding snow. And he'll drive through the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia as the wind rips branches from trees and sends them hurtling at you, as fog turns the air to milk, as rain slams down so hard and fast the wipers can't clear it from the glass and you might as well be driving under water. And he'll do it at seventy miles an hour.
Hobbs doesn't feel important unless he's in sole command of every major family undertaking. Even when it makes much greater economic sense to take one car, when it makes sense for an old man to navigate and spare himself the stress of driving.
But no. Hobbs was in charge. So he drove, often at breakneck speed, for twelve and a half hours - and I followed him, naturally at the same speed to avoid becoming separated from him. Nothing short of the appearance of God himself on the road ahead was going to slow Hobbs down, and even then he'd have thought twice about stopping.
Only once before have I been as shit scared as I was going through those mountains. And that had occurred at 5.30 that morning on I90 leaving Ohio, when we ran into the first of a seemingly endless succession of monstrous rain-squalls, and a constant stream of huge trucks that had to be got round because of the huge clouds of spray they threw up behind them, spray that hammered the Merc as he passed by.
It was that car that got me through, and because of it I'm going to sing the praises of my Mercury Cougar XJ7 V8 Special Edition before I end this.
That big bad boy climbs mountains at 75mph without the rev counter twitching above 3000, without the temp guage being more than a hair's breadth above normal. He eats mountains for breakfast. He spits on hurricanes. And, as two souped-up, fat-assed, lardy-boy Ford trucks found out on 250 West in Richmond, if you fuck with him he'll leave you choking in his exhaust fumes before you've had a chance to realize he's made you look like the pedestrian you actually are.
He's a lean mean motherfucker of a Beast. And he's mine.
