Alongside a Gibbous Orange Moon

Sunday, April 18, 2004

The Last Hail, Wind, and Rain Show

Central Parkway, Schenectady, New York

We had the luxury today of awaking at 7 am. That probably didn’t allow us enough time for sleep, but it was a good start. We did have a chance today to chat with Betsy, Steve and Shannon, and to tour their beautiful house, so this morning was a little relaxing.

But that beginning to the day belied the reality of our day.

The last day of a road trip is the worst because there’s no point to it except to get home. The struggle back towards home seems all the longer because that is our only goal for the day.

Our day’s trip started well. Traffic was smooth, and the weather was clear. We passed into Maryland, into Pennsylvania, past Gettysburg. But we’d forgotten we’d be driving on I-81, that most unforgiving of highways, because it is always under construction. We decided to take I-81 to I-88 today because I didn’t want to stop multiple times to pay tolls on I-95 and I-90. We would have had to have stopped since EZ-Pass doesn’t work with our van for reasons EZ-Pass cannot explain or solve. So we took I-81, and it all went well for the first 90 seconds or so.

Then, just outside of Harrisburg, we came to a stop and wasted at least a half an hour to go a few miles. The cause of our delay was merely that we were in a work zone. No-one was working there, but still I-81 had the power bring us to an almost complete stop. Eventually, we all escaped from that bottleneck, but everyone was anxious to move by this time, so driving became a bit more treacherous for us.

The rest of Pennsylvania was unremarkable, but as soon as we crossed the border into New York the grainy sky grew darker, and the winds pummeled our van. Nancy guided the van through rough waves of wind, but once the rain began to pour down in 50-mph winds and the hail started we did something we never do. We exited the highway (at Bainbridge) and waited a few minutes for the storm to subside.

Once back home, we unpacked, listened to our messages (most were from a kid dialing a wrong number over and over again), thumbed thru our mail, and began to put our things away. Our Manx was a little shy with us at first, so we didn’t see him for a few minutes. Tim and I left to retrieve from the kennel our three dachshunds, who were excited to see us.

Erin, the one of us not on this trip, had the big news of the day. She had to follow a friend to director Peter Bogdanovich’s house to feed his cat last night. Erin didn’t meet Bogdanovich, of course, but she met his cat, who was very nice but kept head-butting her in the stomach.

Remember: there will be one last blog entry for this trip tomorrow: the traditional list of trip statistics!

||+ permalink Comments Geofhuth 11:09 PM