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Contentment as a feeling is somewhat alien to me. The feeling of “this is nice” is usually tied to some other emotion like a need for me to do something to maintain that state like when I’m running a Scout event or hosting a get together. It’s something I experience rarely and only with a select group of people and the last four days have probably been the longest stretch of it that I can remember outside of the blissful simplicity of childhood. Our memory usually on remembers peaks and the end rather than averages and I suppose in this regard I am lucky. I crave that vast middle of experience and can remember it.

Over dinner on Saturday, the server asked how we were and I gave my standard response of a slightly loud, slightly excited “ok”. A dinner companion glared at me and said “after today you can only muster an ‘ok’?” She was right in her joking indignation. My emotional half-life from peaks seems to be faster than most but a slightly longer lingering period. In 2009, Pat, Joe, and I took a camping to Acadia National Park that I still ruminate on fondly. While considering it, I will have a notable improvement in my mood assuming I can prevent myself from falling into the trap of “so why haven’t you done it again?” and I remember both the interesting bits like meeting CJ and the more quotidian aspects of lounging in the campsite. This extended weekend provided me with about a dozen of those memory touchstones. I’m curious which I will often call upon and which will fall away.

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Observations on Me Driving

  • I spend an unusual amount of time staring out the window.  I usually count to three, recheck the road, and then go back to staring.
  • I look around the car a lot which sometimes looks suspicious to the person seated behind me.  I experience a unique joy if everyone but me in the car is asleep.  This seems somehow more efficient.
  • The volume required to listen to an audiobook over the car’s sound system in a car going 70 is quite high.  If anyone was trying to sleep, using a bluetooth earpiece to listen was easier.

Other Observations

  • The car (synecdoche) seemed to do fine on two meals a day and sometimes one.
  • Everyone was reasonably able to sync their bowel movements to gas stops.  Only four times and never more than once in a day did we have to stop because someone just plain had to go.
  • Gas never gets cheaper if you drive to try to find a cheaper gas station.
  • I thought my car had a 12 gallon tank until I filled it with 12.26 gallons of fuel.  Turns out my car has a 50-liter fuel tank or 12.85 gallons.

Stats

  • Total Distance: 4774.5 mi
  • Best Tank of Gas: 32.3 MPG
  • Worst Tank of Gas: 25.6 MPG
  • Average: 29.1 MPG (a little lower than my day-to-day average of 30.1 MPG)
  • Average cost per mile: $0.12
  • Total cost of trip minus food: $1080.  Excluding opportunity cost, this trip was cheaper than my weekend trip to Chicago.
  • Pool opportunities: 5
  • Pool visits: 0
  • Average steps per day: 7500 compared to the 13000 I otherwise average.
  • Weight gained during trip: 0 (I consider this a victory as when traveling in a group I tend to gain weight)

I found the trip to be enjoyable but not quite a vacation as it was rarely restive.  I underslept for the last four days of the trip and the lack of alone time or ability to just unwind wore on me emotionally, physically, and mentally.  I also value relatively close reflection, and didn’t get as much one-on-one time with the other trip-goers as I would have wanted to.  I’m not sure how I’d deal with this in the future as it seems odd to just “sit out” a visit or activity.  I feel in a lot of cases, the fact that there were four of us worked against us as our hosts were more receiving a party than receiving a unit with enough internal cohesion to be mentally classified as a single four-faceted friend.

Pictures

While John looks to be in slightly more pain each day, I was glad I kept up with uploading pictures as we went.  This challenged my normal slow workflow and for the first time I embedded names and captions into the meta-data which I think helped.

Flickr Collection from trip.

Ending Anecdote

On the day of driving from Cross Lanes to home, I had logged a total of 300 steps before we set to drive for that day.  I knew I’d walk very little more during that day but my pedometer registered as needing a charge so I plugged it into its charger then plugged that charger in to a USB-120vAC converter and then plugged that into my car’s built-in inverter.  The swinging of the pedometer on the cable registered as a step and by the end of the day I had “walked” nearly 8000 steps.

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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.