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Done did it...
Aug. 26th, 2007 10:48 amBy the time we hit the road yesterday morning, it was 7 am eastern time, and we negotiated the rest of Alabama quickly, passing through the corner of Georgia and thrusting upward, into Tennessee. I seem to recall visiting the region back during the summer I spent as a field expediter for Gibbs & Hill, an engineering firm where my dad worked as a mechanical designer and also where the father of a college friend worked as the manager of the department that hired expediters.
Anyway, I recall my business in the area had wound up early, so I took advantage of my proximity to the Chicamauga battlefield to visit. I don't recall much from that day, only that Carl Sandburg's observation (And pile them high at Gettysburg... I am the grass. Let me work) was spot on.
Yesterday, I toyed with the idea of stopping somewhere along the way to play tourist, because one thing kept intruding into my consciousness. If the distance is really... call it 1700 miles from Houston to my dad's house, and I covered 660 miles Friday, and I were to do the same a second day in a row, that'd leave 400 miles to go, and I'd be tempted to go the rest of the way in one go just to save the price of a hotel room.
If I stopped somewhere, the option would be pushed out of reach.
But I didn't stop, and Tennessee gave way to Virginia, with an absolutely stunning concentration of patrol cars on I-81. You'd swear they'd invited the entire state patrol out for the weekend. Then again, they've enacted these really draconian fines for speeding (over $1200 for 20 mph over the limit, if memory serves, which might make sense, say, in a school zone, but applies equally to the interstate).
Anyway, by 4 pm yesterday, I'm within about an hour of having covered 600 miles. I'm feeling pretty good. No yawns, no itchy eyes. So I figure, why not just drive on to New York? At the rate I'm going, I'd be at my dad's place at 10:30 pm.
I'd run into some occasional sprinkles on the road, and as I left Virginia for 25 miles of West Virginia, which gave way to an even shorter stretch of Maryland, those sprinkles became more frequent, and punctuated with lightning. As I entered Pennsylvania, the rain started pouring in earnest, so much so, the wipers on the Ford could not keep up.
Through the wind and rain and thunder and lightning, Shiloh betrayed not a jot of awareness. When a bolt hit close by and almost shook some fillings out of my teeth, the dog didn't stir a hair. I thought this was curious for a dog that, at the hotel, had principally refused to climb or descend stairs to or from the room (it occurred to me that these were the very first stairs that Shiloh had encountered in her life).
Eventually, we outran the thunderstorms - sort of - by fleeing along I-78 into New Jersey, and all our troubles seemed to be past us when I took the ticket for the New Jersey Turnpike headed up toward the George Washington Bridge.
Wow, was that ever a mistake.
I have to assume the mother of all traffic jams I ran into had something to do with the lights that were on at Giants' Stadium, off to the left of me as I headed north, because from the time I was about 1/2 mile short of the exit toll booth on the Turnpike, until I reached the Queens side of the Throgs Neck Bridge, I logged about 2 minutes at speeds in excess of 10 miles per hour. (The Throgs Neck Bridge was particularly interesting. Traffic in general was held up for about 10 minutes, after which three official cars, moving abreast of each other, led the way across the bridge at 5 mph, I assume to give time for some trucks - which were already on the bridge, huge, and spaced at intervals of several hundred feet - to get across the bridge.
Evenually, I got to the old homestead, but it was after midnight. I did managed to catch a few zs, and have even gone to visit my dad in the hospital. He looks... smaller in the hospital bed. At any rate, some friends of the family are coming to visit him at around noon, and he tells me they'd like to talk with me, so I'll be going back then. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to go about cleaning this place up. It's been ages since my old man ran a vacuum in here.
Cheers...
Anyway, I recall my business in the area had wound up early, so I took advantage of my proximity to the Chicamauga battlefield to visit. I don't recall much from that day, only that Carl Sandburg's observation (And pile them high at Gettysburg... I am the grass. Let me work) was spot on.
Yesterday, I toyed with the idea of stopping somewhere along the way to play tourist, because one thing kept intruding into my consciousness. If the distance is really... call it 1700 miles from Houston to my dad's house, and I covered 660 miles Friday, and I were to do the same a second day in a row, that'd leave 400 miles to go, and I'd be tempted to go the rest of the way in one go just to save the price of a hotel room.
If I stopped somewhere, the option would be pushed out of reach.
But I didn't stop, and Tennessee gave way to Virginia, with an absolutely stunning concentration of patrol cars on I-81. You'd swear they'd invited the entire state patrol out for the weekend. Then again, they've enacted these really draconian fines for speeding (over $1200 for 20 mph over the limit, if memory serves, which might make sense, say, in a school zone, but applies equally to the interstate).
Anyway, by 4 pm yesterday, I'm within about an hour of having covered 600 miles. I'm feeling pretty good. No yawns, no itchy eyes. So I figure, why not just drive on to New York? At the rate I'm going, I'd be at my dad's place at 10:30 pm.
I'd run into some occasional sprinkles on the road, and as I left Virginia for 25 miles of West Virginia, which gave way to an even shorter stretch of Maryland, those sprinkles became more frequent, and punctuated with lightning. As I entered Pennsylvania, the rain started pouring in earnest, so much so, the wipers on the Ford could not keep up.
Through the wind and rain and thunder and lightning, Shiloh betrayed not a jot of awareness. When a bolt hit close by and almost shook some fillings out of my teeth, the dog didn't stir a hair. I thought this was curious for a dog that, at the hotel, had principally refused to climb or descend stairs to or from the room (it occurred to me that these were the very first stairs that Shiloh had encountered in her life).
Eventually, we outran the thunderstorms - sort of - by fleeing along I-78 into New Jersey, and all our troubles seemed to be past us when I took the ticket for the New Jersey Turnpike headed up toward the George Washington Bridge.
Wow, was that ever a mistake.
I have to assume the mother of all traffic jams I ran into had something to do with the lights that were on at Giants' Stadium, off to the left of me as I headed north, because from the time I was about 1/2 mile short of the exit toll booth on the Turnpike, until I reached the Queens side of the Throgs Neck Bridge, I logged about 2 minutes at speeds in excess of 10 miles per hour. (The Throgs Neck Bridge was particularly interesting. Traffic in general was held up for about 10 minutes, after which three official cars, moving abreast of each other, led the way across the bridge at 5 mph, I assume to give time for some trucks - which were already on the bridge, huge, and spaced at intervals of several hundred feet - to get across the bridge.
Evenually, I got to the old homestead, but it was after midnight. I did managed to catch a few zs, and have even gone to visit my dad in the hospital. He looks... smaller in the hospital bed. At any rate, some friends of the family are coming to visit him at around noon, and he tells me they'd like to talk with me, so I'll be going back then. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to go about cleaning this place up. It's been ages since my old man ran a vacuum in here.
Cheers...
