Still going after all these years.
One more journey, this one the shortest but the most important. Lisa and I are driving from her folks in NJ up to Boston today. We’ll spend tonight with our friends and close on our house tomorrow.
I expect that I won’t do a lot of blogging after this afternoon, because we won’t have high speed until Monday and my modem has been highly undependable on this trip. Look for more updates from me sometime early next week.
I made it to Lakewood, New Jersey about 3:15 this afternoon. The rest of the drive was uneventful, excluding all 359 miles of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which need a little work.
I have napped, had my face and hands licked by our excited dogs, and am drinking a Harpoon while I keep my eyes on various cooking things that are starting to smell good.
I talked before about some of the road toys that got me through the trip, but clearly the most important one was my Passat, which just came 3000 miles in four days and didn’t really break a sweat.
Now, dinner. Something not involving hamburgers, French fries, coffee, or carbonation added to soda syrup. (Carbonation in beer, on the other hand, is definitely in order.)
Cleveland.com: American Idol holding auditions here Wednesday. Apparently about three-quarters of the people staying in this particular Best Western are waiting for the auditions tomorrow at Cleveland Browns stadium. Sure beats karaoke.
One more day’s driving and I get to see Lisa and the dogs again. Today I go from Cleveland through Pennsylvania on 80 and then across New Jersey to her family’s place in Lakewood. With any luck, there won’t be a repeat of yesterday’s traffic snarl around Chicago. Then again, it’s already raining, so who knows.
I do have to give a big thumbs down to the loop around Chicago. The first 1600 miles of this trip were like some kind of platonic ideal of driving, where people stayed on the right unless they were passing, roads were well maintained, and you got plenty of room from your fellow drivers. Fast forward to the approach to Chicago, where I encountered my first stay-in-the-left-lane-for-six-days drivers, my first come-up-after-everyone-else-has-merged-from-the-closing-left-lane-into-the-right-lane-and-cut-in-front-of-me driver, and my first signs of the impending jaw surgery I’ll need from the rough ride.
Wah, wah, wah. I know. And yet I think it says something that I didn’t have to dust off my invective until today. For example, a little phrase I’ve taken to short-cutting as “Gootllysac,” lest “Get out of the left lane, you selfish ass-clown” be too long or harsh to pronounce. Try it, you’ll like it.
(For more left-lane angst and uses of the word ass, check out this classic post from 2002, now with working link).
Nothing outlasts…the cross-country drive. I have this funny feeling that I will be too tired, for a very long time, to post any blow-by-blow details of this trip. Suffice it to say that 2350 miles after leaving the Seattle burbs, I’m sitting in another cheap hotel with free internet, this one outside the Cleveland airport. (All together: Cleveland rocks!)
Odd factoid: not every room in these Best Westerns actually has high-speed Internet, despite it being advertised as “free” on the sign outside. I had to change rooms tonight to get the high speed connection.
Oh, and one minor correction to Dave’s post from a few days ago: the final destination of this trip is Boston—but the map on the first day’s post shows my interim destination, my in-law’s place on the Jersey Shore, rather than Delaware (a reasonable guess given the highly imprecise map).
I did get a chance to try out the iTalk (which I mistakenly called the iMic a few posts back) yesterday. It worked, mostly. I held the mic too close the first time and got lots of unlistenable too-loud audio. The second time was OK but I was incoherent. The third time? It didn’t record at all for some reason.
Which was too bad, as I was actually babbling something that would have classified as “seeing vapor trails.” (Technically the following could be considered a “spoiler.”) My babbling involved an elaborate reading of “Kill Bill” as an inverse Odyssey with the Bride as Penelope having to fight her way home to Odysseus, who is waiting for her with her child. Along the way she has many picturesque fights, including one with a cyclops. Finally the couple is reunited. And then Penelope kills Odysseus. (OK, so Ulysses it ain’t.)
Rough cut of the photo album for the first two days is up; notes as I get a chance.
Since I wasn’t able to dial up from the hotel in Livingston, Montana last night, I thought I’d post a quick update before I try to find a bite to eat. I’m currently sitting in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the Best Western has free DSL. <flavorflav>Yeah boooy.</flavorflav>
For those of you playing along at home, I’ve come over 1600 miles in two days. Just two more to go… Hopefully I can post more later.
I’ve never driven across country before, and certainly never done it by myself. So I’ve spent a lot of time getting ready. I got the car checked out on Wednesday. Most of it is packed full to the gills, and I’m not sure my framed photos from my office (for instance) are going to make it intact across the country. But I start driving tomorrow either way.
Here’s the route, or as near as I can get it in all the different online map programs that I’ve messed with. Tomorrow’s goal is Livingston, Montana. I’m hoping to get as far as St. Paul on Day 2, but we’ll see.
My companions? My digital camera; Roadfood; more Triptiks and maps and AAA guides than I can possibly use; ten years worth of mix tapes; my iPod (newly loaded with the free audiobook version of the 9-11 Commission Executive Summary and a not-free audiobook version of the Benjamin Franklin biography, plus about 8.5 GB of other stuff); and a Griffin iMic voice recorder that I’ll probably start using somewhere in North Dakota, which is when I imagine I’ll start seeing vapor trails and really talking to myself in earnest.
Maybe some audioblogging will come out of this. Who knows? All I know is that from this perspective the open road isn’t seeming too simple.
After a really good lunch at Salumi (about which I’ll blog shortly), I drove down to Portland on Friday afternoon to spend some time with Shel and Vik. Friday night was pretty relaxing, just hanging out at the McMenamin’s Rock Creek Tavern and then swapping music recommendations until late at night.
Saturday was spent first looking at some interesting properties up on Bald Peak, then down checking out some wineries in the Willamette Valley. The big winner was definitely Laurel Ridge, whose wines (ranging from Pinots to Champenoise style sparklers to fine ruby ports) were all spectacular, full flavored, individual and wonderful.
After the afternoon’s tasting, we took a brief pause to rehydrate and then headed out to dinner at a “conveyor belt” style sushi restaurant, followed by Kill Bill Vol. 2 over beers at the Laurelhurst.
Sunday was a little more leisurely, dim sum in Chinatown followed by a quick stroll through downtown, ending (as it always does) at Powell’s, where I escaped with only one new volume, a hardback 1958 printing of Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I then had a long, long drive back, with stop and go all the way from two miles inside the border until Tacoma.
I got some interesting pictures along the way. The album from this weekend starts at Salumi and then heads straight south, including both phonecam and CoolPix photos. In some cases, I shot the same scene from both cameras to illustrate the difference between the cameras (my new two fisted camera technique is unstoppable!). Obviously the CoolPix has the edge on resolution, by a large margin, but there’s still definitely a place for the weird, high intensity colors and impressionistic smudginess of the phonecam. Take a look at the four pairs of comparison shots.
Long drive today back from Portland. I have a backlog of stuff to write about; hopefully I’ll get to cover at least some of it tonight.
Lisa and the dogs are spending some time in New Jersey with her family, and I’m on my way back to Seattle. Along the way, I’ve landed in Arizona—a personal first. Phoenix from the air looks like an absolutely flat tabletop cut with a careful grid of roads, onto which some giant has dropped big stiff dark peaks of mountains. Otherwise straight roads are interrupted by enormous stiff-edged chunks of brown dirt. Oh yeah, and it’s hot as hell.
Apologies for the post outage. We flew with the dogs to Lisa’s folks in New Jersey yesterday, which is always a long day without blogging. Lisa’s folks picked us up from the airport and fed us some fantastic pulled pork barbecue, which more than made up for the trip (four and a half hours in coach with two dogs that don’t want to go to sleep is always a joy).
Today I hooked up our wireless base station to her mom’s computer and am happily blogging away from the kitchen counter. WiFi is one of those inexhaustable reservoirs of delight. Every time I set up a wireless network in a new place I get that giddy feeling of freedom all over again.
Well, we’re on our way to Charlottesville for the reunion. If anyone wants to hang out, we’re staying at the Inn at Court Square—catty-corner from the Court Square Tavern, of course. Blogging will be light, I think.
…is Atlanta-Hartfield International Airport on Memorial Day Weekend without air conditioning. And with no WiFi.
Oh well. I can’t complain. At least I found an electrical outlet and finished watching Faraway, So Close. I don’t really understand it, can’t even guess at how Wenders intended the floating boat of East German rockets manned by acrobats to be interpreted. Perhaps “I must be an acrobat to talk like this and act like that”?
(Written at 12:27 PM Pacific time on Sunday.)