Flashback: A Long Drive

You can drive nearly from one coast to the other in five days (and fewer if you can power through more than eight or so hours a day behind the wheel), but I wouldn’t really recommend it.

To see everything of interest between southern California and southern Connecticut would take a very long time.  I daresay we’d still be driving if we’d been able to stop at every place we saw in a guidebook that caught our interest.  But, of course, even with time constraints, we did get to make a few stops, each of us getting to see something that particularly appealed to us, and we all survived and my new old car survived and those are the important things.

At the beginning of August Mom and Dad and I drove across the country to get me and said new old car, christened the Bluebird after Dad saw a bus from that company, to grad school (again, though a different school and a different degree than last time).  There are two basic ways you can get from our Point A to Point B: by taking I-40, which cuts through the Southwest before heading into Missouri and so on, or by taking I-80, which starts out going north through Utah and then heads east.  We chose the latter route, though with a bit of a detour.  While the most direct route involves taking I-70 through Colorado and picking up I-80 in Nebraska, we decided to stay on I-15 all the way through Utah and meet 80 in Wyoming, because we wanted to see Wyoming (and I, for one, wanted to avoid driving through big mountains as much as possible).  The biggest downside to our chosen route was that there was a lot of road work going on on 80; perhaps if we had known this beforehand we would've gone a different way, and it's a bit of a surprise that the AAA office didn't warn us about the issue.
 
Before we left we had a few places that we intended to stop, in Iowa and Indiana and Pennsylvania, but we didn’t make any hotel reservations ahead of time so that we could drive as far as we wanted to on any given day.  It was a logical notion that didn’t necessarily pan out in real life.

(Our ideal plan had been to leave 80 around Toledo, drive through Detroit and across the bridge into Canada, and then come down from the north somewhere.  This plan was foiled by the fact that somebody on our trip let her passport expire.  It’s less than three and a half hours from my current location to the border, though, and just under four to Montreal, so you know that that’s going to happen at some point.)

With Dad and I taking turns, I drove about half of the time.  My shifts ended up being from:
the Arby’s in Baker, CA, to Arshel’s restaurant in Beaver, UT (after leaving Beaver, above)
Evanston, WY, to Wamsutter, WY
Sidney, NE, to the western edge of Lincoln, NE
Adair, IA, to near Brooklyn, IA^*

Walcott, IA, to possibly Channahon, IL
Valparaiso, IN, to near Howe, IN
somewhere between Toledo and Akron, OH, to Shenango Valley, PA
State College, PA, to somewhere quite close to the New York-Connecticut border when my nerves finally gave up on me and I had to let Dad drive the 15 or so minutes left to our final destination

I don't have as many pictures as you might expect from the trip because of all the time I spent behind the wheel.

On our very first night we learned that you can’t just roll into Provo on a Wednesday night and expect to find vacant hotel rooms.  This did not, however, mean that we immediately got online and made reservations for the rest of our nights.  Except for the places we knew we were going to stop, we left our accommodations to chance.

I'd venture to say that the worst road we had to deal with was in Indiana.  Hoosiers, I am disappointed in you.  You dare to charge people to drive on that section of interstate?  Where is that toll money going?  It's certainly not going toward the upkeep of your roads.

I think my favorite scenery of the trip was from Utah into Wyoming.  I know my favorite driving was in Wyoming, and not just because you can go 80 miles per hour; southern Wyoming is very pretty, with lots of rolling hills and green grass and not a lot else.  On the western end of our route there’s a lot of open space between the cities.  That openness disappears the further east you go, with ranges giving way to farmland, denser populations, and more trees appearing.  It seemed as though the trees had swallowed all of Pennsylvania, and after the days of horizon it felt suffocating to have them looming overhead. 

One of our serendipitous finds was a Czech restaurant in Omaha called Bohemian Café.  Since it was a Czech place there was no halušky on the menu, nor did they have any Kofola or even Vinea, but the food was good nonetheless.  There was soup and pork and knedľa and poppyseed cake, and you don’t really need much else after you’ve been deprived of a good Central European meal for too long.

 

I feel confident in saying that the highlight for my dad was stopping in Iowa at Iowa 80, the world’s largest truck stop.  It’s huge.  One room has truck accessories for sale but it also has a full tractor-trailer and two rigs on display.  There’s a food court and like four different gift shops and showers and a chapel and a museum and a dentist's office, and parking for hundreds of trucks and even more cars.  It was pretty amazing.  

If I ever make this drive, or even part of it, again, I'm going to make sure there's plenty of time for stopping places.  Or I'll hire someone to drive for me, like that couple did with the cab driver.  That sounds more like it.

^{The uncertainty is due to the fact that many of our trade-offs took place at gas stations or rest stops, which all sort of start to look alike after a few hundred miles.↩}

Castle Run

A few weeks ago one of my former students shared a video on Facebook of a bunch of guys freerunning and parkouring around Spiš Castle.  This was done with the castle's permission, because it was a professional video with sponsors and everything.  The group, Born To Trick, has made a series of these videos called "Castle Run"; there are eight of them, each filmed in a different Slovak castle.  This morning the poor soul who has the dubious distinction of being my best Slovak friend sent me a link to this video, done at Orava Castle.  I can't imagine leaping about in that castle, where I felt so dizzy even when I looked at the pictures of it when I got home.  Though I've not seen all of the videos yet, this one might end up being my favorite; besides the parkour it also features folk dancers, and that's what Slovakia is.  It's people who are proud of their country, its culture and its natural beauty, and that celebrate that while embracing modern life.