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
My car radio has been steadily declining over the past few weeks and started to exhibit odd behavior. Whenever I switched on my high beams or activated the turn signal, the radio would cut out and restart. Additionally, the iPhone dock on the radio stopped working with my phone and I initially assumed it was the age of my phone combined with a basic problem of the radio and my crappy wiring casing these problems. These concerns disappeared after the battery terminals on my car were cleaned. Battery terminals, really?
I left at around 9 AM with the intention of reaching Fayetteville by 11 PM and things were going fine until I approached Roanoke, VA. Traffic slowed to a crawl and I soon saw why: a truck that appeared to be made out papier mache was upturned and surrounded by something that looked like glitter. Either a million defective champagne party poppers went off or a bunch Liberace’s stunt doubles had undergone spontaneous human combustion.  I met Doug Bowser for a late lunch, had the world’s tiniest chicken sandwich and bought out the remaining InterroMugs and InterroGlasses. Doug refused a cookie as he was eschewing carbs and I continued to Fayetteville.
Carl and I have played TF2 together for about two years and he invited he into his home while he was under the influence of one of the biological weapons his kids brought home from school. We watched a slew of Science Channel shows and in thanks I offered him a cookie. He refused as nothing was staying down. When I showed my frustration at having been cookie-blocked twice he replied with, “earlier my asshole was in the toilet. I needed a fishing net to get it out.” Ok, then.
Sunday was a marathon of fun as there were two Magic tournaments followed by a barbecue. This was followed by frantic packing for my big loop. There were a few big chunks of stuff I brought:
My car looked like it was packed by a hybrid right-wing survivalist/wildlife photographer. I tried something new, packing each of the above things into separate Rubbermaid bins and bringing 3 clothing bags: 1 night bag, 1 for clean clothing, and 1 for dirty clothing. I did a final once-over of the car, trying to estimate how much more paint I’d lose from my front bumper and left for the glories of America.
Tracking: https://www.suburbanadventure.com/interroloop-location/ I’ll update the map when I hit a new location and a few other times. The application that provides information must run in the foreground which decimates the iPhone’s tiny battery.
Route:
Click for the full-sized version.
Most of the stops are one of three things:
The total length is a little under 12000 miles. I’ll probably need to have an oil change around stops 16 and 34. The route’ll change as I find things I can see and discover other things I can’t.
I don’t vacation well. I usually get more excited by sitting at home but rarely do I achieve the To Do List slaying I gun for and I’ve slowly learned that I suck at prioritization until the last minute or when someone else is counting on me. Joe and I talked of going to Nova Scotia over the summer which slowly turned into a few days at Acadia National Park. I had an secondary goal of visiting some people and somehow Pat Toye was magically available so he became our Day 1 waypoint.
Joe and I left a spot late around 3:30 PM and shot for the icy north. Entering NY was an absolute clusterfuck as we tooled along for 20 miles at 10 MPH. We saw the following:
And
Yep, her other car is a broom. After idling past Scarsdale I fumed at some 200 car pile-up causing the delay when we crested a hill and there the pile-up was. Not quite 200, but enough to generate a gaper delay that shaved two hours off my life.
We met A.C.E, aka Richard Mercier at Braza, a Brazilian steakhouse in Hartford with the standard gimmick of all food coming from servers with the appropriate meat cut skewered on giant 3-bladed rapiers/sais. I destroyed a hearty collection of sausages and various meats wrapped in other meats. I was disappointed to learn that desserts were not served in the same manner and was hoping to see a sword impaling a collection of cheesecakes.
A.C.E mentioned his love of hot wings and brought up some wing joint in Philly with egregiously hot wings. I began thinking if the hotness would be enhanced by simply using pepper spray on a wing before serving it and thought of starting a business as a pepper spray sommelier for those wanting a more refined tongue-incinerating experience. Before leaving the restaurant I asked if we’d missed any of the food items to which the host said matter of factly “no, sir. You ate everything.” I don’t know in what sense he meant “everything” but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were an airlift from Munich as an emergency restock after I leveled their sausage reserves.
Afterword we hit A.C.E’s house where none of my pictures of his mint-green pool were properly illuminated. His wife “the Warden” is a wonderful gal and loves to have her picture taken and does an awesome impression of Samara from the Ring.
A.C.E has a minute computer monitor and I’m not terribly sure how he plays TF2.  I think I’ll start a collection for a real one leading up to his wedding.
I suppose to a certain extent that was made up for by his much larger DVD collection.
A collection he rarely gets to peruse for the following reason:
All my photos of Richard sucked so….
We departed Richard’s home around midnight and arrived at Pat’s Vermont home at 2:00 AM. Joe and I were immediately struck by the quantity of celestial pinpoints apparently called “stars”. There are few in Philadelphia and I think we should look into importing them. We went to bed around 4 AM, about 2 hours after Pat first saying “maybe we should go to sleep soon” and three hours after Joe shared a moment with Pat’s cat.
I took up residence on an inflatable floor mat and day 1 was done.
The plan was to take NJ Transit into Penn Station, walk a block, take the E-line to Lexington and walk to the W. .. and that’s exactly what happened. I was stunned at the functionality of NJTransit compared to SEPTA as I walked through four cars to find a seat and didn’t stick to anything. The station was a spot confusion as the tracks weren’t labelled directly only indicating what the other side was much like travelling on the PA Turnpike and having the directions labelled “not New Jersey” and “not towards Pittsburg” or I-95 “not North” and “not South”. The tracks were also straight, which was weird as there were ligitimate moments where I didn’t know if the car was moving or not. To top it all off, the route had better graffiti. I thought this was the one place where SEPTA could triumph but the spray of colors, historical and social references, clarity of the tags and smoothness of the dodges was simply better than I’ve ever seen traveling in and about Philadelphia.
I did get more looks than normal as I took pictures of trains and stations, but such is the way of things in a post 9/11 world. I met Chayoss, Impulse (Steve McMackin) and his spouse Ratchet (Rachel Garman) at the W. Steve regaled me his efforts to do a time-lapse of the plane flight and I felt like I was punched in the face by hipster. This contrasted sharply with Chayoss’s urbane air that made one think that he’d never done anything for the first time.
In the rain, the pavement shines like silver
Dinner was at some trattoria hosting the reasonable New York prices of $18 for a 10″ personal pizza. Luckily, New York City has what’s rumored to be the best tap water of any major US city which keeps getting better as the Catskill snowpack melts. I had a delightful paillard and learned about Rachel’s work receiving a barbed wire giraffe.
Le Webmaster
We took the subway to the stunningly boring Time Square but on the way I got to get a picture of Steve such that he looks like an absolute tool.
Le Tool
I hate newsie hats or whatever they’re called. There are four people that don’t look like tools when they’re reversed and while I’ve never met any of them, although statistically they exist. People who wear their hats as such should be sealed in lucite and serve as a standard tool size for things like jackhammers and boom cranes. There were an infinitude of tourists split between slack-jawed jokels and pseudo-knowledged residents. I stuck by being a stranger in a strange land and we made our way to Central Park. Steve stopped several times to use buildings, lightposts, and postboxes as stabilizers but I decided for a stiff arm using the excuse of “the blur makes it look mysterious”.
I made my way back to Penn Station in time to miss my train so I had some waiting to do. Then, New York unfolded.
The ride back went swimmingly until we stopped at my station… and none of the doors opened. Apparently some sort of ghost-conductor came around to tell as 8 people in my car missed the note that they’d only be unloading from one car of the 12 on the train. So, I had to go from Princeton into Trenton, wait for the 4:00 AM return train, get on that, argue with the conductor on why I and my non-English speaking hanger-on who also missed her stop and only English words appeared to be “NO PAY FOR FUCKING TICKET” should not be charged and then drive home without falling asleep and dying.  It was 5 AM by the time I got back to the station three hours after my initial target time and I did the only reasonable thing one can do when in New Jersey, hungry and tired. I purchased 3 Wawa hot dogs, drove to work and fell asleep at my desk. Good day in all.
This weekend was dedicated to the craziest thing doable these days short of drinking from a microwaved Nalgene bottle: Meeting people in a strange town that you met on the Internet. Team Interrobang is a little shy of 16 months old and we decided to have a meetup at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo with the plan that Friday evening would be spent staying over at Banks’ (Chad Bedwell). I picked up Tardbagel (Jeremy Churchill) on or about 2:30 at the 5 1/2 hour to Ft Wayne began.
Tard, stunned with joy.
I’ve never considered PA particularly exciting driving-wise except for some stretches over the Appalachians and around Pittsburg. I learned a new type of boring driving through Ohio. If you want to recreate the experience we had, I strongly recommend you stare at the following images in fullscreen while making snarky comments about people and feeding dollars into a papershredder to simulate the burning of gas.
Boring #1
Boring #2
Boring #3
I wanted to get a quality shot in Ohio of us at an intersection showing both roads going into infinity but I didn’t want to agitate the case of deep vein thrombosis that was building up after sitting on my duff for roughly 10 hours.
The roads weren’t just boring, but an epic, periodic kind of boredom. Even in the spartan areas of PA houses exist in clusters of 3-7 even in the boonies but Ohio went house with small backyard surrounded by hundreds of hectares of nothing followed by another house surrounded by hundreds of hectares of nothing.
There was a brief moment of farce when we asked the GPS for the nearest fuel and we were directed to a “Sunoco” that was actually an abandoned rail station surrounded by sorghum fields. On the way we passed a sign for “Jim’s Custom Meats” which depicted a pig giving the “a-okay” sign. This was preceded by a 30 mile stretch where the GPS was convinced Rt 30 was 50 yards to our right. The half hour of “off route! Take next right to route 30. Make left on route 30. Off route!” is slightly above “da da da” as things I hate to hear when driving.
The highlight of the drive in was by far Tard’s slurpee in Ft. Wayne.  This is quickly followed by a close second by the collection of anti-abortion billboards of which my favorite is always “abortion stops a beating heart”. One had a blank billboard below it on which I wanted to write “except in cases where the fetus has yet to develope to the point where it has cardiac cells or has some congenital developmental defect, but I doubt it would have lasted long.
We met Banks in Ft. Wayne after almost having to pull a General Lee to hit the McDonalds’ parking lot and he took us to “Flanagans” the stereotypical Scotch-Irish cultural island that every city of at least 100K people must have where I ordered the “Flan-jitas” which I pronounced as such with a hard j. The server attempted to correct me that it was “fÉ™-hÄ“’tÉ™”. I think a bit of her died inside when I showed her the butchering on the menu. The Flan-jitas were expensive and I should have gone with the Flan-burger with some Flan-diments.
Back at Banks’ I wind-mill slammed my 70-200 lens into the pavement but that was balanced out by the splendor of seeing the Jimmy Johnson room which contained a lifesized cutout wearing a straw hat and the bumper of his car after a victorious race of some sort. This abutted his fallout shelter/exercise room which contained enough soup for him and his family to walk to southern Ohio in case of zombie invasion.
Banks gazing lustfully at Jimmy Stewart
Just in case
Banks also has a dog, Tootsie Roll, which he rescued. At some point after doing so, she ate a bag of Tootsie rolls without dying although after 5 years she acted like she was still on a sugar rush from that incident. In addition to the “Oh, shit” stock Banks basement had a carpetted bathroom. The room in which I stayed had a shelf of books which I was told were signed, which is interesting as the shelf has a paperback copy of the Iliad. Even if Homer has been dead for two millenia and may not have existed, I have no doubt Banks could get his signature.
This was the end of day 1. All photos available below:[flickr album=72157619668029842 num=5 size=Thumbnail]