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I’ve commented before on Canada’s signage, but by far my favorite are the penalty signs for going 50 KPH over the speed limit.  They include notes like “10 year loss of license”, “$15,000 fine”, “1 year in prison”, which all seem reasonable but I think one could capture a more visceral fear with ones that say “Go 50 KPH over the speed limit and your name is Peaches”, “Go 50 KPH over the speed limit and you’ll learn what a black bear in estrus can do”, and “Go 50 KPH over the speed limit and you will be hit by a cruise missile”.

Ambiguous signs combined with a few other strange map moments lead me to drive straight to work and where I arrived at 9 AM as I had told someone that I’d have something done by 10 AM and I had no intention of failing.  I hadn’t shaved, I was wearing day old clothing and my eyes were a spot red but I got the task done after which I triumphantly reported to my boss:

Me: I had a rough weekend and only came in to take care of a quick thing for a requester, do you mind if I leave now?
Him: Can you take care of just one thing before you go?
Me: Sure.
Him: Could you test fluid infiltration on these three different pouches, with two different challenge fluids at these 5 different conditions?
Me: That’s 90 pouches if you assume 3 per condition and that would take… many hours.
Him: I’d get started, then.

Lesson Learned: Old Boss – Analog, could match task to ability to do them.  New Boss – Digital, you are either present and working, or not.

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I left work at 11:30 and discovered something had happened to my vehicle:
1) If I broke suddenly, the radio would skip a track
2) If I made a turn, the radio would restart
3) If the air conditioner kicked on, my dash lights would dim
4) If I broke suddenly, my GPS would turn off

And then…. there was Canada.  So, I-95 has a clearly marked north and south, but some Canadian highways simply list next exit cities, requiring knowledge of things like “geography” and “how not to drive into the great white north”, like as if there were I-95 Boston and I-95 Miami.   Boo.

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Driving from Chicago to home with a stop in Fort Wayne was dull, except the stop in Fort Wayne.  It’s a route I’ve done before a few times and, since I had a ticket on record in Indiana and my car was out of inspection in PA I drove in that narrow band between “normal speedy” and “driving slow enough that no significant laws are being broken but fast enough that it doesn’t look like you’re trying to hide something”.  This was punctuated by driving across Ohio where the gas was cheap and the roads were barren.  The trade off was that all the rest stops were operated by attendants stunned by customers whose prose lacked elision.  Meh.

Through the drive I was listening to the 54 part series on the History of the United States.  I hit the war of 1812 as I stopped to pick up my rental car, I can’t wait to hear how it ends.  When I got home it looked like someone had broke in and cleaned the ground floor, baked an angel food cake, used the pool table, and somehow emptied the well.  Looks like someone had a party.  Based on the 3 full recyclables container and empty well, a very active party.

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After a lunch of tacos of questionable authenticity and diagnosing the world’s quietest desktop computer fan I was off to do the short 600 mile drive to Texas.  I was quite tired as despite being in bed for 8.75 hours, my host’s three-legged cat was being attacked by the cross-eyed ancient cat who periodically fought with the blinds.

Driving south, I crossed Oklahoma and thought they deserved a shout-out for traffic design.  Oklahoma’s roads aren’t amazing, nor wide, nor even well marked but one thing they get right is speed limit placement.  PA will have a 65 MPH road under construction with a 45 MPH sign that suddenly appears.  At the end of the construction zone, there’ll be no sign to resume the previous speed unless it coincides with an already posted one.  Oklahoma will gently reduce the speed limit from 75 to 55 or 45 at such a rate that a sedan can comfortably drift to the appropriate speed.  At the end of the slowdown from either a town or construction, the speed signs will quickly get back to 75 or 65.

Thank you, Oklahoma.

Otherwise, the drive to Dallas was dull and I arrived at the hotel without incident.  There were four people in one room:

Justin: Who wants the floor?
Me: No one.  These are queen-size beds, we could have two people play a game of Risk on the bed.  If you don’t want to sleep in the same bed as someone, you get to be on the floor.
Justin: Well, I’ll just take the chair then.
Cody: What, you don’t want to share a bed with someone who’s in-game name is “Spooner”?

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My goal for the day was to get to Columbia, MO which is a little over 1000 miles or about 16 hours away with stops.  I listened through an edition of the Economist, the entirety of Great Gatsby, and was starting to listen to Karen Armstrong’s history of the first axial age “The Great Transformation”.  I can only take so many hours of the history of Judaism between 13 and 7th century BCE and this eventually got to me.

I passed a fairground in Missouri with a partly assembled Ferris Wheel that consisted of one seat, a Star of David-shaped six-pointed star light system and what looked like a giant retention spring that prevented the whole thing from moving.  I immediately thought to myself “they’re building a Jew flinger, they must be stopped”.  I’m glad I was close to my destination.

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My car has a computer error and by some miracle of registration it’s under warranty and comes with a courtesy rental that would be awesome to have for my drive to Texas.  I drove to the dealership, dropped off my car, confirmed the rental was covered, and was brought to Enterprise to get a rental.

Attendant: What states will you be driving through?
Me: Ok.  Pa, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland *pause*
Attendant: Ok, PA, NJ, DE, and
Me: I’m not done.  Ohio, Illinois, maybe Michigan, Indiana, Oklahoma, Texas, I may do a jump into Iowa.
Attendant: Coverage stops at the Mississippi.  The other option is to take the 200 mile per day coverage option.  It’s $0.20 after that.
Me: Hm… That’d come out to $400 unless you have a hybrid.
Attendant: We don’t.  Let me do a call to the service manager *calls* I have a customer who’s going to be going over the Mississippi and I wanted to know if you’d cover *pause* no, ok.

My choices were to take my car with a faulty computer on a 3400 mile trip, get a rental and hope it takes 3 weeks to repair my computer to cover the mileage, or come up with something else.  Wanda and I were off to Texas.

[Editor’s Note] Normally, I don’t add parenthetical notes for something that made something funny in retrospect but when I came back to drop off my car for service, I was informed that a Prius was returned about 15 minutes after I left.

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Normally I replace my computer every 18 months but I’ve pretty much decided to skip this cycle.  I added RAM a month or so ago and just wanted a spot more desktop space so I bought a new video card and searched Craigslist for a monitor.  For rarer items I’ll search in nearby areas like Allentown and even New York City and this was one of those cases and my extended search was rewarded with a hit in New York.  I made contact with the seller and after a bit of haggling got the price to $600.  He gave me an address which was a lacrosse store (I didn’t know there were lacrosse stores) and saw that it was in Long Island 140 miles away.  Thinking over the selection process I realized I had picked a location near a location near a location near me, which apparently adds up to 140 miles.

I left at 12:30 PM on a Saturday and arrived at 5:30 PM, averaging slightly under 30 miles per hour.  When I got there all the cables were tied up with lacrosse laces.  I asked the seller why he was parting with it:

Him: It wasn’t good for games.
Me: What was powering it?
Him: A 13″ MacBook.

The ride home was only 3 hours.  Now I just need a video card that can power it…

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The current judge shirts aren’t available in my size and when I asked why the response was “they were made in Europe”.  So, on the way to Columbus I stopped by my mother’s house who’d volunteered to sew the appropriate patches in place.  I received my patched shirt and drove to Delaware to pick up my co-pilot.  The ride started out dull enough until we got to Lancaster whereby the driving became “old timey” and we were passed by horse-drawn wagons.  I’m still not sure why, but there was a section where everyone seemed to be driving on the shoulder with the center two lanes being entirely clear of traffic.  We again hit traffic in New Stanton and made it to Columbus two hours after my target time.

I went to the event venue to meet my room mate, gave him a key, and went to bed happy in the fact that my last-minute arrangement would cut the price of my stay in half.  These feeling ended when I discovered my room mate snored liked a buzz saw.  Normally this is just hyperbole but I’ve never encountered someone who was able to have a single snore extend for such time.  As an experiment, I synced my breathing with my room mate and his snore nearly outdid my breath.  The sound had that timbre that pops up when something is slowed down; maybe this was the snoring equivalent of whalesong.  I only got about 4 hours of sleep but added a new To Do item: get earplugs.

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I wanted to meet Peter Jerde in Chicago for lunch, which turned into a late lunch, which turned into dinner.  Upon entering the greater Chicago area I encountered something I’d largely missed so far on my trek across vast open landscapes and barely tamed wilds: traffic.  It was novel at first, the idea of having a car immediately in front of me that was moving at a speed of less than 10 miles per hour seemed neat.  Maybe I could get out of my car and greet them, see how their driving was going, but as the slowness entered the second hour of moving 7 MPH or less I became…unaffected.  While being passed by a windblown Arby’s bag was disheartening, having driven about 10,000 miles, the context of traffic was a temporary inconvenience that moved my average speed for the entire trip down on the order of a tenth of a mile per hour, I’ll live.

Pants and I met at a Wendy’s where we were both hoodwinked by a savvy salesperson.  We were both asked “medium or large” a false choice as small was also an option but a question to which everyone I heard picked one of these two.  Tricky.  We ate, he showed me his Prius modifications and I shortly thereafter left for Fort Wayne, a 2.5 hour drive.  I was cruising along thinking I’d get to Banks’ house shortly before midnight, the time I’d told him I’d arrive when he shot me a text asking me where I was.  Oh.  Crap.  Prior to 2006, Indiana didn’t observe DST, making it effectively in the Central Time Zone when the rest of the country was under DST.  In 2006, Indiana started observing DST again, a fact I forgot, making me an hour late.  I floored it.  I screamed across towns and Rt. 30 shaving minutes off of my route… until I hit a speed  trap about 3 minutes from Banks’ house, erasing any semblance of a benefit from my speeding.  The ticket was for $181, but again context, a mere 1.5 cents a mile.

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Hag in Golf Cart: You need to pay for today.
Me Suddenly Awoken: I already paid for today.
Hag in Golf Cart: Nope, you paid for yesterday.
Me Suddenly Awoken: I got here at 6 AM.
Hag in Golf Cart: That was part of yesterday.  Today starts at 11 and you need to pay.
Me Suddenly Awoken: Ok.

These are the moments where I’m simultaneously happy and sad that I don’t have laser vision.  The shrew in a house dress may have inadvertently helped me as her call to reveille provided enough rage that I didn’t feel terribly tired during the next eight hours of driving when coupled with the focusing power of a Carl’s Jr. hamburger.

North Dakota and Minnesota were more of the same after driving through Canada except that the North Dakota license plate is just close enough to the PA one for it to trigger flashbacks when viewed in my peripheral vision.

Close

to this.

Another difference is that as a side effect of the manifold legislation to jump start the American economy, most of the arterial roads in both states were under some sort of construction.  One of these construction areas was large enough that the best detour consisted of driving 20 miles on dirt roads next to exact rows of spring peas.  These roads had the curious distinction of having a speed limit of 65 but being speckled with stop signs.  Some drivers tackled this by blowing stop signs, others tackled it by humming along at 40 and slowly rolling to a stop.  I tackled it by driving the speed limit and then stopping at the stop sign while watching the former and passing the latter.  Driving is fun.  During the drive I think I crossed over the Mississippi four times each from what seemed like a different direction until I arrived in Minneapolis, made niceties and then rocked some sleep.

All in all I drove 1600 miles in the past 34 hours or about 12% of my entire trip.

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