Part One: Getting There


Thursday, July 18th:

If you want a small piece of advice, take this: Getting up at 5 a.m. to get into a car at 6 a.m. and drive ten hours in heavy truck traffic is not conducive to figuring out the extensive enigma that is a ticket one gets at a toll booth. Ugh. My mom and I grabbed breakfast at home and did just that; believe me, those toll tickets are an exercise in insanity. You get one figured out and then the next is completely and utterly different. Someone needs to tell the Ohio Turnpike that their tickets need to actually be readable so a person can find and pay the fare.

But I digress, this isn't a rant on toll roads or the tickets given there, it's a rant on a road trip. Well, not really. It was actually fun. I know many, many people who would run away screaming for the border if they had to take a road trip that long with their mothers but we managed to not only survive but get along. It must have had something to do with the Gilmore Girls jokes we kept coming up with. Especially since my mother kept drinking lots of coffee. (Need I mention that Starbucks was our hero when it came to breakfasts on the road?)

We had a brief drive through Michigan and Indiana, then the long haul through Ohio. All three hundred plus miles of it. I had to restrain myself from doing a little dance every time we saw a little elevation in the land. The Ohio Turnpike (I-80) wasn't all that bad, really, except for the excessive amount of trucks. There's a reason we call it "Inner Truck Eighty." Somewhere along the way at about 9 a.m. we stopped at a service plaza and got my mother's daily dose of caffeine, while I got a blueberry muffin to tide me over until lunch time. After that, we listened to lots of assorted CDs and music from my iPod while I read Les Miserables and suffered through fifty pages about Waterloo before I made it back to the main plot.

We passed into Pennsylvania not long before lunch and did the appropriate victory dance--no offense to anyone from Ohio reading this, but a person can only see so much flat before they start to go out of their minds--and started looking for a Subway to eat at.

Sometime around 1 p.m. we found a Subway near Clarion, PA and stopped for sandwiches. It was in a gas station/convenience store, and I think I sat in something sticky with my best pair of jeans. But the food was good, so I can't really complain.

After eating we grabbed the plastic bag the sandwiches came in and used it as a "trash receptacle" since our little Prius has, to our infinite misfortune, no trash can. Then we got back on the main highway and drove...and drove...and drove some more! I made it to the halfway point in Les Miserables and quit reading for a while to take a look at our maps we'd printed out from Map Blast.

Not long after that we escaped I-80 and laughed at all the people still sandwiched in between the double trailer trucks. And then we hit construction...and more construction....and yet more construction. None of it was very bad except for an area where two trucks got involved in an accident and slowed traffic down to a halt for a while, around 3 p.m.

At about 5:30 or so we finally pulled into our friends' driveway in Allentown, PA...after getting lost once or twice. Hey, was it my fault none of the maps had their street on it and I told my mother to go down the wrong street? Err. Don't answer that. Anyway...we fell out of the car and I just about kissed the ground. Had to teach my legs how to walk again, but they managed well enough after that. We had dinner with our friends and stayed up way later than we probably should have talking about life, the universe and everything. I passed out and mumbled something to the effect of "I ned slep" sometime around 11 p.m. It was at about that point we decided that, since it would only take us an hour to reach Philly, we'd leave around noon. More sleep, yay.


Friday, July 19th
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