Saturday, December 26, 1998

Well, I haven't been such a hot diarist thus far; three days into my trip, and nary an entry. Nor have I been taking pictures; I had hoped to blow a roll or two on Grandfather's house in Des Moines. Whoops! Ahead of myself again.

On the 24th, I was to have flown in a simple, uncomplicated way from Houston to Des Moines. The proposed trip looked like this: show up at Hobby, fly to Dallas, and then to Des Moines. Simplicity itself.

And that's exactly how it went. Oh, except for the part where the first flight was late and then the captain didn't show up but I ran and caught another and got to Dallas just a little too late for my flight to Des Moines and then waited for SEVEN HOURS before getting on the only other flight that day going to Des Moines. Except for that part, everything was as smooth as silk.

It wasn't all that bad, really, except for all the junk food I ate. Yuck.

Christmas day was really nice: it was just me, my mother, my uncle Gerry, and my grandfather. Oh, and a visit from Kurt. A pleasant if uneventful Christmas.

So now it's the 26th, and I'm off to Connecticut to rendezvous with the beautiful but deadly Anika "Black Widow" Mutch, wanted in twenty states for ... well, best not get into that. Plans call for a three-day hide-out, followed by a swift dash to Maine, but we may be forced to flee to Algeria.

You never know.

Friday, January 8, 1999

Friday morning finds us near Wilmington, and all of those cracks I made about sled dogs this summer are starting to come back to haunt me; I opened the window shade this morning to discover snow, coming down pretty hard.

To rewind a bit; Anika and I left Connecticut yesterday at around 2:00 pm, after a frantic morning of packing and re-packing; we made it to New York in about two hours, but then rush-hour traffic made it another three to get to Princeton. We stopped to heist a pair of Lily's paintings, "H is for Heroin" (which really belongs to Ryan Kernan) and "Shooting Gallery," wandered around campus a bit, and then had dinner at Teresa's cafe, where some counter-intelligence agent managed to swipe Anika's wallet. After a frantic hour of credit-card cancelling, we got back on the road. I drove into Delaware, and decided to stop when I could no longer hear the sweet sounds of WPRB.

And now, here we are. In the snow.

5:03 pm, now, and we've made it a staggering 200 miles since daybreak; we've been driving through some of the most unpleasant slushy stuff it has ever been my privilege to witness. The DC beltway was magnificently horrible. Anyway, we did manage to get past that, and we just stopped for lunch at a diner in Grand Royal, Virginia.

And here is where we are right now.

Saturday, January 9, 1999

We didn't end up driving late last night; at about 9:00 pm, we turned in near Roanoke. Of course, we were nowhere near the city itself: we spent the night in that motel zone that grows like polyps along the interstates.

Take, for instance, Christiansburg, VA. This is not a random example; twice I've broken down in Christiansburg. Once with electrical problems, once with a separating tire. The first time I broke down was driving with Matthew from Princeton to Houston, and we ended up staying for a day and a half in this squalid interzone which contained two motels, a Shoney's and a Waffle House. We spent the evening wandering around what we thought was Christiansburg's scenic downtown area, and (with the exception of a rather charming and dilapidated drive-in) found nothing more exciting than a king-sized K-Mart.

The second time I broke down, I ended up cruising along the the secondary road which originally defined the interstate's path, a two-lane road connecting a string of really charming Virginia towns, and was surprised to discover that Christiansburg is in actuality a small and very pretty town.

And yet, at the end of the day, I still take the insterstates, and keep my head pointed firmly forward. Well, not right now. Right now Anika is driving.

Sunday, January 10, 1999

Sunday afternoon finds us on Interstate 12, zipping across Louisiana. We decided not to go into New Orleans --- actually, Anika was considering kidnapping me while I napped, but thought better of it. We've got a long way to go if we want to make it to Houston tonight.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Yesterday was the best long-distance day we've had thus far, though it included two preposterous detours. The first one was due to my (lack of) map skills, when what should have been a short jog onto a more scenic parallel highway (the Lee Highway in Virginia) turned into a nine-mile obstacle course, as we took route 80 winding up into the Appalachian mountains. We did find a gorgeous waterfall on the way back, though.

Our second silly detour was in Chattanooga. It was about 8:00 pm, and I thought it would be fun to go "see rock city," as the billboards throughout the south proclaim. Well, surprise surprise, it was closed. I couldn't even figure out just what it was. So we looped around on lookout mountain, and found our way to Ruby Falls, which was (snif) also closed. This was a little more disappointing, since photos inside the visitor center seemed to portray an underground waterfall about fifty feet high. I guess I'll never know.

We kept driving down across Alabama, and stopped on the outskirts of Birmingham; it was nearly midnight, and we were both exhausted. Birmingham sure is an exciting place; everyone seems to drive about 80, even at midnight, and we were passed by three police cars in quite a hurry. In fact, we were also passed by a swiftly-moving oldsmobile containing two men wearing ski masks and carrying rifles or shotguns. So presumably those were the bad guys. We resolved to come back to Birmingham the next time we need a thrill.

The motel we stayed in was seedy and had ashes in the ashtray; I suppose that's better than finding them in the bed.

We've made pretty good time today, though we continued our string of late departures, hitting the road around 10:30 am. The plan is to make it to Houston, and I think we will, though it's going to be late late late when we get there. It's 4:19 pm now, and we're a touch less than halfway there. I want to try and take a few more pictures, though the land between here and Houston is generally not the most scenic in America.

I'm now playing a conterminous version of the license plate game, where I'm only allowed to claim license plates whose homes border on states I've already got. So far, I've got Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. However, I've had to pass up some real corkers: Virginia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Ohio, Michigan, and Maine; they weren't touching other states that I had (at the time when I saw them). It's also a good way to learn your state geography. I figure that if I see Hawaii or Alaska, I'll take them anyway.

Monday, January 11, 1999

Well, here I am back at school. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful; we crossed the swamps of Louisiana in the dark, so I was unable to take pictures of the long long elevated roadway. We rolled into Houston at about 11:00 pm to discover that my house had not been burnt, robbed, or eaten by termites, and I was pretty happy about that. We unloaded my borrowed artwork and I went to bed. Ta!