We awoke in Memphis at 10:00 and began the process of leaving the hotel, which took until an hour later because of the chronically understaffed valet service. Having determined a much better hotel route should we ever go across I-40 that far again, we left Memphis and navigated its traffic through the suburbs and across Tennessee. Our route today is pretty much the exact reverse of our first two days of the first Great American Road Trip, so in many ways our day today—and our overall I-40 route back—have wrapped up these four trips in a way that indeed comes full circle. The traffic patterns moved like an accordion across many sections, where traffic going 0 one minute would be flying at 80 the next and then back again. We stopped for lunch at an Arby's outside of Cookeville, where we got things we knew—save for me, who had curly fries (I'd only ever gone for their potato cakes in the past) and an orange cream milkshake, which was so thick and so cold that it stayed chilly until I finished it off past the North Carolina border. The traffic thinned out and aside from some bits of road construction and a little rubbernecking, we made excellent time as we went along with the wall-to-wall traffic at a clip steadily five over the speed limit. Sunset darkened the sky after we passed Asheville. We stopped at a Food Lion for midnight snack and breakfast supplies, but we had gotten there a few minutes too late and they had just closed. We made our way to a Harris Teeter and were the only other customers in there save for a tattooed, yet very mild-mannered young couple and a convoy of three highly efficient couponing black women. We got home after 24 days, 20 states, 7,215.7 miles and 23.8 average MPG. Tomorrow: we sleep in after a long (and physically exhausting) trip. The past three long days back from Utah have been especially hard.