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Back in the Ne-Ne-New York!
Nov. 19th, 2007 06:21 pmWe finally got left Webster at about a quarter to 7 in the morning on Saturday. I had spent the night on the floor in the empty living room, between a pair of sleeping bags, while Galina slept on Natalie's bed. Frankly, we were tuckered out from packing an additional 1/3 of the truck once the guys we hired to help us had done all they could.
I got used to the way the loaded truck handled pretty quickly, and by the time we were headed east on I-10, I was doing the limit. We stopped at the thriving metropolis of Sulphur, Louisiana, for breakfast, and then continued on our way. Little did we suspect that the road between Lafayette and Baton Route was closed, forcing us to take I-49 north to Opelousas, and then a local highway east toward Baton Rouge. In all, the detour added about 40+ miles to the trip, and wasted a disproportionate amount of time, as the last part of the route was stop-and-go worthy of any metropolitan center.
The rest of Saturday was pretty nominal. I was putting the DeLorme Street Atlas program - which comes with a USB GPS unit - through its paces, and it works pretty well, all things considered. There's not really a lot you can do with any car-mounted GPS unit, since eyeballs ought to be principally directed out the windshield, and its strength really only comes to the fore at places where you have to turn.
I would have had my phone plugged into the computer, except that the stuff in my "must not lose" suitcase started to get out of hand, so I triaged the contents and somehow managed to stow all my USB cables... somewhere. In any event, using my BlackBerry in standalone mode, I was able to Google the location of a Sam's Club in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which we proceeded to find without much trouble. In fact, the only trouble we experienced (we wanted to buy the discounted gas) came when neither of us was able to put our mitts on our membership cards. Blyeah.
By about 9 pm we were in the vicinity of Birmingham, Alabama, with only 700 miles under our tires. We elected to push on.
Sleeping in the cab of a 16-foot Penske rental truck is not one of life's little pleasures. Between two tries, wedged in between Peterbilts and Kenworths at a couple of truck stops, I think I got about 4 hours of sleep during the night going into Sunday; Galina, maybe a tad more. By 6:30 am, we had covered only an additional 300 miles or so, but were less than 1000 miles from our goal.
Breakfast on Sunday morning was surreal. Our server at McDonald's was a Britney Spears knockoff, down to the studied thousand-yard stare. Before getting back on the road, I grabbed a sweater from the cargo compartment.
A few miles - or maybe tens of miles - down the road, a car pulls alongside and the folks in the vehicle are very clearly pantomiming that the door to the cargo compartment is open. I pull over to the side of the road and behold this is no joke: apparently, when I closed the door after getting my sweater, I was so intent on forcing the handle all the way down so that I could put on the lock that I missed the little detail about how the hook is supposed to engage the frame of the deck.
I like to think it is my skill at stowing boxes, but it is more likely a testament to extraordinary good luck that nothing had dropped out of the truck. I mean, my computer backpack was simply wedged in between a couple of other boxes.
Humbled, I properly closed the door, double checked my work, and then spent the next couple of hours behind the wheel wanting to stop and go check the door just one more time.
Stuff didn't start falling out of the sky until about the same place it did the first time I had driven the route, shortly after entering Pennsylvania. By the time we were approaching Allentown, the drizzle had turned to snow, and by the time we entered western New Jersey, it was snow that had begun to stick on the ground next to the highway.
I followed the same route as I did with Natalie during our first trip (I-78 to the NJ Turnpike, north to the GWB, across Manhattan and the Bronx to the Throgs Neck) and noted that with some few exceptions, the traffic delays we had encoutered the first time were par for the course. We finally pulled into the driveway here last night arount 10:30 pm. The odometer had recorded 1712.4 miles.
Today was an unpack-the-truck day, which is easier to do than packing (IMO). Tomorrow, I need to settle down and concentrate on my upcoming interpretation assignment (tomorrow night) and translations. Hopefully, I'll lose a minimum of time looking for stuff among the boxes.
Cheers...
I got used to the way the loaded truck handled pretty quickly, and by the time we were headed east on I-10, I was doing the limit. We stopped at the thriving metropolis of Sulphur, Louisiana, for breakfast, and then continued on our way. Little did we suspect that the road between Lafayette and Baton Route was closed, forcing us to take I-49 north to Opelousas, and then a local highway east toward Baton Rouge. In all, the detour added about 40+ miles to the trip, and wasted a disproportionate amount of time, as the last part of the route was stop-and-go worthy of any metropolitan center.
The rest of Saturday was pretty nominal. I was putting the DeLorme Street Atlas program - which comes with a USB GPS unit - through its paces, and it works pretty well, all things considered. There's not really a lot you can do with any car-mounted GPS unit, since eyeballs ought to be principally directed out the windshield, and its strength really only comes to the fore at places where you have to turn.
I would have had my phone plugged into the computer, except that the stuff in my "must not lose" suitcase started to get out of hand, so I triaged the contents and somehow managed to stow all my USB cables... somewhere. In any event, using my BlackBerry in standalone mode, I was able to Google the location of a Sam's Club in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which we proceeded to find without much trouble. In fact, the only trouble we experienced (we wanted to buy the discounted gas) came when neither of us was able to put our mitts on our membership cards. Blyeah.
By about 9 pm we were in the vicinity of Birmingham, Alabama, with only 700 miles under our tires. We elected to push on.
Sleeping in the cab of a 16-foot Penske rental truck is not one of life's little pleasures. Between two tries, wedged in between Peterbilts and Kenworths at a couple of truck stops, I think I got about 4 hours of sleep during the night going into Sunday; Galina, maybe a tad more. By 6:30 am, we had covered only an additional 300 miles or so, but were less than 1000 miles from our goal.
Breakfast on Sunday morning was surreal. Our server at McDonald's was a Britney Spears knockoff, down to the studied thousand-yard stare. Before getting back on the road, I grabbed a sweater from the cargo compartment.
A few miles - or maybe tens of miles - down the road, a car pulls alongside and the folks in the vehicle are very clearly pantomiming that the door to the cargo compartment is open. I pull over to the side of the road and behold this is no joke: apparently, when I closed the door after getting my sweater, I was so intent on forcing the handle all the way down so that I could put on the lock that I missed the little detail about how the hook is supposed to engage the frame of the deck.
I like to think it is my skill at stowing boxes, but it is more likely a testament to extraordinary good luck that nothing had dropped out of the truck. I mean, my computer backpack was simply wedged in between a couple of other boxes.
Humbled, I properly closed the door, double checked my work, and then spent the next couple of hours behind the wheel wanting to stop and go check the door just one more time.
Stuff didn't start falling out of the sky until about the same place it did the first time I had driven the route, shortly after entering Pennsylvania. By the time we were approaching Allentown, the drizzle had turned to snow, and by the time we entered western New Jersey, it was snow that had begun to stick on the ground next to the highway.
I followed the same route as I did with Natalie during our first trip (I-78 to the NJ Turnpike, north to the GWB, across Manhattan and the Bronx to the Throgs Neck) and noted that with some few exceptions, the traffic delays we had encoutered the first time were par for the course. We finally pulled into the driveway here last night arount 10:30 pm. The odometer had recorded 1712.4 miles.
Today was an unpack-the-truck day, which is easier to do than packing (IMO). Tomorrow, I need to settle down and concentrate on my upcoming interpretation assignment (tomorrow night) and translations. Hopefully, I'll lose a minimum of time looking for stuff among the boxes.
Cheers...
