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The drive back from Chicago across Indiana and Ohio is the cherry on top of a nice weekend of seeing Peter, Audrey, and Banks.  The flatness of these states allows for a golden hour where the world goes from being dipped in honey to on fire and back and I have no compunction about staring out the window at the setting sun.  John and Suzie are of a fundamentally different driving stock as myself and are blessedly capable of falling asleep in the back of the car, reminding me of my promise to Suzie to try and get a shot of them being a couple.  They fell asleep holding hands with their heads on each others’ shoulders and I pondered taking a flash shot after the sun went down.  I wasn’t sure if the pre-flash or the flash would cause the probably glare of terror but decided against a picture when I realized the internal reflectivity of the car would probably have me seeing orbs which can be somewhat dangerous at the speed I was traveling.

We dropped off Suzie and I took a nap after John began driving.  I woke up later after my car-dar went off, not because John was being either reckless or going too fast but the opposite.  Maybe my sympathetic nervous system could detect the vehicle velocity being below 70 MPH or the lack of sharp turns, but I asked to switch back so I could tear across the Allegheny Mountains.  I tend to speed a bit more on holy days of obligation.

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Leisure driving isn’t tied to a particular income bracket in the same way as falconry or scuba diving since it can be either cheaper or more expensive than the alternative of flight.  I drove to Dallas in September since gas was relatively cheap, as was my time due to still being on a furlough from work and the plane ticket on short notice would have been over $500.  That trip was 3200 miles of largely grade A American highway peppered with the bare concrete strips that are becoming the hallmark of US routes in the midwest with their manifold speed changes and stop lights.

Visiting the White Sands Missile Base and its semi-visible history lent itself to flying being both cheaper in terms of time and money than driving but at the cost of the road experience.  Beyond daydreaming, the pounding visual rhythms of street lights and road markings in urban areas and the directionless wrap of night or sky or field or forest in a rural area both blur to a smear of reality when one is going north of 70 mph which induces road reflection, the antipode of road rage.  The introvert is alone with his or her thoughts causing comfort while the extrovert is alone with being alone with his or her thoughts causing anxiety.  This latter option can best be compared to being in a room with a corpse; you’re the only person there, but I’d hesitate to say you were alone.

Some would consider it understatement to say that I don’t mind driving long distances.  As I think I’ve said before, once I realized I could get beyond the Mississippi or to the Florida pan handle in a day, America became a much more intimate country where there’s a 50% chance or so that I could visit anyone drawn at random from the decennial census in under 12 hours.  I also think that I probably won’t see gas cheaper than $3.50 a gallon for the rest of my life so driving is a “do it now while it’s cheap” proposition.

Me:  *Walking out the door* See you Monday, Dave.
Dave: Where are you going?
Me: The Trinity test site, where a bit more than 65 years ago a device simply referred to as “the gadget” launched radioactive fall out into the atmosphere and America into the nuclear age.
Dave: Well, drive safe.
Me: I’m not driving for once.  It’s like 2800 miles each way, that’s 600 dollars in gas.
Dave: I’ll let you off this time.
Me: I’m trying to convince someone to drive to San Francisco, does that make up for it?
Dave: Only just.

This wasn’t the only conversation of this type I had today.  My boss and my local superviser were both under the impression that I was driving to New Mexico and Southern California.

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My car radio doesn’t always connect properly and no way of holding my phone would lean the contacts correctly for the device to properly make contact, but this appeared to work:

By hanging the phone from a sunglasses hanger the connect seemed to stick except that Joe now had a iPendulum assailing his head and the phone sometimes disconnected forcefully.  Maybe it’s time to submit an RMA.

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The Chevy Conversion Van clocked a whopping 14mph for the trip meaning 2 30mpg  cars would have been more efficient gas-wise but would have probably lost in terms of total cost once one includes tolls, wear and tear, and the time of the drivers.  Bob was glad to get his car back filled with origami bits like a dog, butterfly, and something he simply described as a “squarey thing” and I was glad to get back Wanda.  He described my Matrix as “sporty” which is a descriptor that would fit more to a shopping cart than my car.

Otherwise, I wanted to run down some closing thoughts:

  • When settling large checks (like the $550 beergarten tab) I normally have to do two rounds to find unclaimed dishes as people forget appetizers or drinks.  On my first go, what people paid for was within 2 dollars of the total.
  • I stand by my default assumption that someone’s a reasonable adult even if they’ve displayed otherwise and only changing that assumption once one has done harm to oneself or has came incredibly close to causing irrevocable harm to others.
  • The Internet promotes togetherness not isolation.  When the web allows you to do something without interacting with a person like banking or shopping that’s liberation not solitude.  While the plural of anecdote is not data, I have driven 25000 Interromiles proving this point.
  • I think the InterroCoins made a good memento and inducement to pay quickly as that was the “unlockable” for settling one’s tab with me.
  • I still dislike the term “drama” in reference to interpersonal problems.  People have feelings, rather strong ones at times, and in blatant violation of my second bullet point we’re not always rational but we have reason to be unreasoned.  The response to this should neither be derision or sanctimony but compassion and patience.  Drama to me is when the strength of a response isn’t commensurate with the importance of the topic and getting riled up over gay rights is fine but not over tea cozy styles.  Considering the importance of connecting to another person, there are few cases where true “drama” emerges in light of what’s at stake.
  • Starting Team Interrobang has given me odd satisfactions.  Both the traditional kind of “I’m glad we accomplished this” as when we reach some participation milestone or a member has a personal celebration but also a second-order kind of satisfaction from seeing the auspicious and unexpected.  The delight of being proximally but not actively responsible for someone find happiness, either platonic or romantic,  in another person is magical.

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My target departure time of 10 AM was pushed to near 11 as I waited for everyone to wake up and say their good byes.  Some partings were stronger than others with this being my favorite:

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Memories

 

Chris Dodds volunteered to drive and I received some blessed sleep allowed by fatigue and a driver who didn’t consider the car a mechanical analog of the ball in a game of Pong.  Once we started leaving West Virginia after I had switched to driving again, the weather got much worse and I averaged 45 MPH or less over much of the Appalachian Mountains due to snow, heavy rain, freezing rain, and more snow.  My back hurt terribly and I was very happy to be home before 2 AM making the whole trip last just shy of 72 very eventful hours.

My first task after emptying the car was to start uploading pictures as I’d taken over 700, a new record for me for a weekend, and I was very excited to see how some had come out, especially those from the initial meetings on Friday evening.  I almost started to cry when the camera showed a “card not formatted” error and no device in my house could read the card.  I believe that card, and the images on it, to be dead.   Damn.  I then got a call that two of our group were stuck in Florida in a traffic jam caused by an exploded fuel truck.  Damn.  I found that our home dishwasher was broken.  Damn.

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Approximate timeline for trip to Cincinnati.

1:40 AM – Feasterville, PA

2:20 AM – Philadelphia, PA

3:40 AM – Bel Air, MD

4:50 AM – Timonium, MD

11:00 AM – Western Maryland

11:45 AM – Cross Lanes, WV

3:30 PM – Covinton, KY

5:00 PM – Hotel Bar

5:30 PM – Walking to Liquor Store in the Rain

8:00 PM – Mike Weber’s Room

10:30 PM – Pool of Covington Radisson

11:30 PM – Outside of Pool

2:30 AM – Room 1731

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We were supposed to meet Clay at a pizza place in Farnsworth, Il at 11:30 AM but were stymied by the restaurant opening at noon.  We pulled up early and I exchanged odd glances with some I thought was he which terminated in the “I’m looking at you” face.  He then cocked his head and got out of his car, leading me to believe I’d just gone crazy sniper stalker on someone I didn’t know.  I found out a few minutes later that he’d jumped in Peter’s car that was on the other side of his parked macro-van.

I ordered Ach-n-Lou’s supreme which was $22 but as each slice weighed 9 lbs I felt I got value.  The pizza was so massive I could polish off a mere 2 slices and that was all I ate for the next 18 hours or so.  There I also got a bad ass picture of Mike.

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Badass gonna badass.

FermiLab’s Wilson Hall towers over the surrounding plain as a citadel of science and everything there helped this idiom.  Even the handicapped sign guy was charging for science.

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TO THE FUTURE!

The opening presentation was neat as were the site tour stops but the Ask-a-Scientist program was the real reason I wanted to be there.  For the last two years, I’ve had a question that I never got answered of  “if photons can only exist at discrete energy levels due to quantization, does the redshift occur stepwise or continuously across expanding space”.  The answer is “Terry, you’re a moron.”  The slightly more detailed answer is “while emission photons have discrete energy levels they may occupy, a dozen other things like interactions with electrons, a bunch of scattering phenomena, and other interactions are continuous leading to photons existing at all possible energy levels”.  During the Ask-A-Scientist program cookies and punch were served, which I wasn’t expecting and we got hear yet another round of otherwise avuncular particle physicists get angry at having lost the chance to finish the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas.

One scientist took us under his wing and allowed us to pepper him with questions at one point uttering the phrase “spectrometers are fucking complicated”.  This was very humanizing and coupled with the washed and dirty view of the accelerator cooling ponds made particle physics much grittier than it is in my head.

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Concrete + Steel + Vacuum + Brains = Discovery

Throughout the weekend I had a persistent photographic challenge of getting a reasonable headshot of Suzie.  She has somewhat cherubic features which requires a larger depth of field than I normally use for portraits, slowing the shutter time, making a lot of scenarios low light.  As Peter peppered Dr. Dave Christian, I got one.

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GOTCHA

I chose to drive the first leg back but after about 45 minutes I felt a sleepy.  I looked around the car and everyone else was asleep so I slowly raised the radio volume until some woke up and I asked to switch with them.  The rest is snow, roads, a very aggressive vagrant in a Cincinnati gas station, and sleep.

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I told Mike that I wanted to leave at six AM.  We packed our bags, got into the car, looked at the clock and the clock showed six.  Yeah, bitches.  Driving to Cross Lanes, WV was slower and faster than I thought as Eastern PA received quite a bit of snow but central PA had enough time to clear it allowing us to do 9 MPH above the speed limit as I tend to like.  My biggest fear were deer, not because of limited visibility or difficulty breaking but because by the time we approached West Virginia I went from driving a car covered in salt to driving a salt lick with a gas motor.

Test Dirt: Please do not wash

Mike and I stopped for lunch at a very depressing Hardee’s with some of the fattest pigeons I’ve seen and service staff dropping awesome lines like “He can see the kids again once he shows he can stop drinking for two days”.  Pigeon obesity seems to be defined by simply walking away when someone attempts to kick you rather than flying.

Once we picked up Chris, I had a novel experience: I sat in the back seat and didn’t drive.  I tried such things as lying down, browsing the web on my laptop in a moving vehicle, and my personal favorite, riding with my leg out the window which was invigorating but very chilling:

Look at them gams.

I also got to take pictures of traffic control devices and other novel road phenomenon like “MacCorkle Drive”, and what looked like very angry red light:

ANGRY TRAFFIC LIGHT

We originally sighted these in WV, but they continued in other places.

I had built quite a nice fort out of people’s bags when we approached Cincinnati which was a traffic clusterf#ck that I later learned was unrelated to the snow.  The roads were icy and hills required a bit of weaving to get up and I think stopping distances were measured in light-years.  At one point, Mike approached an intersection slowly but going from 5 MPH to 0 proved difficult as the ABS went nuts.  The car began to fishtail and Mike applied the e-brake, which was exactly the right thing to do but, as we were going 3 MPH, a more effective breaking method would have been to get out of the car, walk in front of it, and push in the other direction.  Me screaming “NOOOOOOOOO” the whole time probably didn’t help and I’ve come to the conclusion that just as we have drivers’ ed, I need to take passengers’ ed.   This course would probably ask you not to do other awesome things I do as a passenger like suddenly touch the driver’s neck and rest my hand on the shifter when I fall asleep.

The rest of the drive to Chicago was uneventful but we noticed that you could make out where you were in Chicago by determining what store was excessively prevalent whether it be barbershops, hair salons, butcher shops, laundromats, or Starbucks.

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I left Miami a bit before 2 PM on Sunday after taking the guise of InterroClaus and leaving Alex and Ashley with stickers, shot glasses, mugs, and cookies and began taking the ride home which consisted of a single direction: north.  The barrage of 50 cent and 1 dollar tolls on the Florida turnpike grew annoying quickly and I gunned for I-95 at the earliest possible point, delighted to see that I’d not have to change roads for another 700 miles until I was around DC.

I have driven from PA to FL just enough that areas seemed familiar like the “Welcome to Pecan Country” rest stop in Florida where I spent an agonizing 15 seconds trying to open a stall door that was actually just a wall panel for a handicapped stall.  After that bit of idiocy I felt justified in using that toilet.

The trip was incredibly dull and I was able to average near 80 on several long stretches which destroyed my fuel economy which dipped from 31 mpg at 60 mph to 26 mpg at 80 mph.   Stupid non-linear power range of cars.  I stopped for gas in North Carolina where it was about 28 degrees, or about 60 degrees cooler than when I experienced in Miami Beach’s afternoon heat.  For much of the trip I was close to a very aggressive Jeep Compass driver who, when behind me, would blink his high beams while I was in the process of passing a vehicle to get me to move over.  I lost sight of him near South of the Border but I passed his Jersey plates near Alexandria, VA and I smiled a prickish smile.

I narrowly escaped Philadelphia’s rush hour and arrived home shortly after 8 AM to a light dusting of hoarfrost on the driveway(which technically may be rime frost, I don’t recall).  I moved my things inside, took a nap and went into work.  1224 miles in 17 hours.

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Carl and I rose at the crack of 10 and he refused my invite to breakfast.  I went to shower and learned that I left my towel at home so I used a hand cloth to dry myself.  Traffic out of Fayetteville was fine and I got to take in the sights of the south:

  • A realtor offering “free Christian flags”
  • A Walgreen’s selling a “9′ apple pie” at less than 7 cents a square foot
  • A gas station offering a free “bootle of water”, I assume a bootle is a small boot
  • A White’s Motel and Restaurant, thought that was illegal

I-75 into Tampa turned into a parking lot and I lost about an hour seemingly due to the world’s tiniest car accident.  As traffic was at a stand still I started looking into whether Biscayne National Park required any sort of reservations and discovered my second omission of trip, my national park pass.  Traffic flow resumed and I made it to Tampa with great haste meeting Bob Tyler and quickly going to Steak n’ Shake.  His Steak n’ Shake exists at some sort of strangeness nexus (Fark.com refers to it as “Florida”) and I lost an hour to stories of a boy that barked like a dog, Bob’s friends’ inability to properly roll up and snap a straw, the subterfuge required to a member of a restaurant wait staff, and finally a Gabe Newell impersonator who manipulated his newspaper quite angrily.  We slammed some cookie-topped brownies and I left for Miami Beach.

Alex and Ashley met me in front of the Bass Museum of Art at around 2:30 AM and I made way to their tiny apartment.