COLD FRONT.(travel)(Column)

When I was a young woman in Iowa, one quality I considered indispensable in a prospective mate was the willingness to drive to a coast. Over the years, there were trips to every conceivable coast, including Puget Sound, Niagara Falls, and Santa Barbara. Thus it was that, in January, 1984, when my daughters were five and a half years and fourteen months, it did not occur to me to worry about our journey by car all the way from Ames, Iowa, to the southern tip of Florida and then back up the coast to Sag Harbor. We just told several friends we were heading their way, threw some things into the back of the Chevy Cavalier wagon, and strapped the girls into their seats. We didn't look at the weather report. Perhaps, therefore, we should not have been surprised when we were overtaken by sleet and snow an hour later and forced to stop far too soon at a Holiday Inn only a hundred miles or so from our house (twenty-nine hundred miles to go). When we got up in the morning and went out to the parking lot, the sun was suspiciously bright, but to us it seemed that Florida was just over the horizon.

There was snow all the way to Nashville, where we stayed with my uncle. In gratitude for his hospitality, my husband shovelled my uncle's two-hundred-and-twenty-foot driveway. The neighbors came out to watch, and we soon discovered why--Nashvillians didn't mind being snowed in, and, anyway, as soon as the sun came out in the morning the snow began to melt. But we were Iowans, and Florida was just over the horizon.

Crossing into northern Alabama, we admired the ice-covered trees, the graceful sweep of the highway through the hills, and the bright grass by the roadside that seemed to be strewn with shattered glass. We were alone on the highway with our snow tires. Not even road crews had come out with sand. We didn't intend to be reckless--it simply never occurred to us to stop. At the end of a very long day, we reached Montgomery, where we pulled off into the parking lot of the first motel we saw.

Once we got some food, and unpacked a few things from the car, and visited with some friends who lived there, it was midnight. At this point, the fourteen-month-old decided that she was going to learn to walk. She staggered back and forth ...