3,000 miles in 3 days - Day 1

I've been back in Connecticut since 9 p.m. Monday night, and a week later, I'm still having difficulty knowing where to start this blog. Information overload, I guess. When in doubt, I guess it's best to start at the beginning.

The story really starts Tuesday, February 19, when I picked up SN Suraci at JFK airport. For a few months now, Tim's been in the United States Coast Guard, and stationed in Oxnard, CA. In an attempt to acquire housing off the station, it became obvious he needed his car. So really, this is the story of shipping a car.

Flying home and driving back, even when you account for the cost of food, gas, and lodging along the way, turns out to be cheaper, and of course much faster, than having his car shipped. So, with leave granted by his commanding officer, thus begins this epic adventure.

3:00 p.m., EST, I pick him up at JFK -- he needed a ride, and I generally don't pass up an opportunity to see Timmy since he moved to the West Coast. That's supposed to be the end of the plan. I drove out to JFK, drove him home, he came over for good New Haven style Pizza for dinner, and that should of been the end of the visit. So I thought.

Over dinner we were discussing his trip back. Still no word from the friend of his who was supposed to drive to California with him. He finally did get him on the phone, only to find out -- as we'd expected by this point -- that he wouldn't be able to make the trip.

"Too bad I didn't know sooner; I could have gone with you."

That's what I thought, at least. But, after a bit of encouragement from my beautiful and loving fiancée, I walked into work on Wednesday, asked for the rest of the week off, came home, packed a small bag, found a flight home for Monday morning, and that was that.

So it was 8:15 a.m., Thursday. Quick stop for gas, smokes, water, and a road atlas, and we were on our way. By 9:00, we were in New York. 9:30... New Jersey. 10:50 a.m. and we were in Pennsylvania. That was the end of the short states, and the last time I crossed a state I'd been to before. The road ahead was new, the country was spread out before us, and the adventure was beginning.

By about 1:30 we were in Harrisburg, PA, our first stop -- gas and food. A couple steak sandwiches at the Flying J truckstop -- a landmark that would define civilization over the rest of our journey -- and we were off into uncharted territory. This would be the farthest west I'd ever driven, the last stop in a semi-familiar place, and the beginning of a foreign part of the country, a land dotted with crumbling barns and rebel flags. I wonder how they forgot about Gettysburg. Wasn't this still Union Army lands?

Pennsylvania bled off into Ohio, passing briefly through West Virginia in between. Strip mines contrasted oddly against signs advertising coal as "Clean, Green Energy". Pastoral farms still dotted the hilly landscape every mile or so, many of them still bearing the Harley Warrick painted ads for Mail Pouch Tobacco. By now it had been 10 hours on the road, and a gas and coffee stop in Ohio signaled driver swap, and brought up the question that would nag us for at least the next few hours... What is a Buckeye?

So it's 6 p.m., we're about an hour into Ohio (that's about a 1/4 on your maps, for those of you following along), fresh gas, fresh coffee, fresh driver, and a fresh blizzard heading right for us. Our network of progress-tracking well-wishers had made contact to inform us of an impending Midwest snow storm.

"OK, so where is it?"

"Wait, it can't be the whole Midwest."

"OK, we'll be in Columbus at about 7:00."

"So the snow starts in Columbus... at 7... and moves East."

"Nope, we have to go through it."

OK, so it turned out not to be a blizzard... at least not for us. That system did continue East and dump 10" on Connecticut, snowing in my fiancée, closing my office at noon. But, remarkably, as I drove through it -- and I did drive straight through it, from mid-Ohio through Indiana and Illinois, for no less than six straight hours -- there was never more than 1" of snow; slushy in parts of Indiana, dry powder for the rest, but never more than an inch.

Missouri brought me two new challenges I'd never faced driving: freezing fog, and an angry TomTom. The former was an interesting anomaly. Now pretty much past the storm system, residual moisture has made it a foggy night. Not the worst of conditions after 6 hours of snow, and not so dense as to slow driving conditions, but the unexpected part was the freezing aspect. The well-below-freezing temperatures caused this fog to freeze directly on the windshield, making it near impossible to keep the view clear as the wipers tried in vain to act as ice scrapers. Defroster on full and wipers double-time, we pushed forward, nearly at St. Louis. When we did finally stop, we removed a 1/2" thick cast ice mold of the front grill and licence plate, perfectly molded.

But if the freezing fog wasn't discomforting enough, it was the angry TomTom that really made that last leg of the trip difficult. We based the trip on directions from Mapquest. Two options were provided, but given that it was February, we opted for the route that didn't go through the Colorado Rockies. We have the driving directions, we have a road atlas of the 50 states, and we have a borrowed TomTom GPS. When all is going well, the three tend to be in agreement. When Mapquest takes us on an Alt route around a major city, TomTom spends 30 seconds recalculating the route, and is soon synced up with the printed directions. But, when Mapquest starts us down a route into Kansas, because it knows that I-64 is closed for the entirety of the state of Missouri... TomTom freaked out.

For 300 miles I drove through Missouri, across the old US-66 bridge over the Mississippi, just north of St. Louis, and every time I passed a highway exit, TomTom barked at me to get off and turn around; go back the way I came, because it will still be shorter to double back and take I-64... which was closed. 300 miles of this. I wasn't worried that I couldn't follow the Mapquest directions without the aid of TomTom, but I had to wonder, how far out of the way are we going if TomTom still thinks turning around and driving 300 miles in the opposite direction is still faster.

Against TomTom's better judgement, I got us to Kingdom City, Missouri, by the end of my 10 hours. Pulled off at a Phillips 66 truckstop just of the highway, right about where Route 66 would have crossed Highway 54. A newly-awoken Tim gets out of the car in a vain attempt to gas up, while I proceed to walk laps around the store in hopes of fending of leg cramps. It's almost 4 a.m., and I see through the massive display of Confederate flags that the cantankerous old clerk is growing increasingly agitated with Tim's inability to pump gas from what we would discover to be a broken pump, and I -- now awake for 21 hours straight -- was becoming increasingly agitated with his comments. I wonder what the penalty is in Missouri for hitting an 80 year-old man. Not wanting to find out, I left it at "Lay off; he just woke up." His tone changed, Tim gassed up at an adjacent pump, I got back in the car, and slept until Kansas.

So it's 6 a.m. when I wake up up from my brief nap; Garner, Kansas. 22 hours in and the first day is over. Good to his word, perhaps steeled by his determination, Tim has gotten us to Kansas -- about 30 miles passed Kansas City -- before the road was too much. And so we walked up to the night clerk at the Super 8 Motel, there in Gardner, Kansas, and asked for a room for the night.

"Just tonight? Check-out's at 11."

"What's time zone are we in? It's 6? What's that, 5 hours? That'll be fine."

And so we slept.