Graduation at Simon's Rock was on Saturday, May 15, 1999 in the wonderful town of Great Barrington, MA. Derrek went home to Marlboro, NJ that afternoon, and I met him Monday evening. The adventure of packing the car began. It was all okay. After all, 'tsall good (as Larry Wall says) so it had to be all okay.But really, the monitor was having spacial issuage. Alas, Derrek and his monitor (the one that says "Fuck Work") were soon parted. Derrek recalls, "It was so sad. But it was either me or the monitor." Derrek's parents did an incredible packing job, and we tried our best to stay out of the way. Derrek's dad captured the finished product on his digital camera, but we have yet to receive a copy of the picture. We were quite impressed with the amount of crap errr stuff that fit in the car. Then we went swimming. As Derrek said, "It's amazing how much one ball can amuse people."
Our trip started Tuesday, May 18, 1999 from Marlboro, NJ, home of the Leute family. We entered the car reciting: "be very very careful." For those who need a time reference, this was the same day that FreeBSD 3.2 was released, Chain Letter on AOL fools TV station, and Star Wars Hack @ MIT. If you remember reading about all of that, you spend too much time reading Slashdot and should drive to Kansas where there's a penguin waiting to frustrate you. (Keep reading and you'll understand.) The first day of travel was a short one. We left at 9:30 A.M. The mileage on the car was 148,718 miles. As we pulled out of the driveway, the Beatles' "Drive My Car" (not Fix My Mac) was playing on the CD player which was wedged behind the driver's seat. 12 VDC to 115 VAC portable power inverters are neat. Our first stop was on Route 9 in Marlboro for gas. (Exciting, huh?) New Jersey is weird, and you have to get full-serve gas. New Jersey is really weird, and gas is actually cheap. But then New Jersey has tolls. If you ever drive on the Garden State Parkway, make sure to bring lots of change. Or tokens, but not token ring tokens. We spent $12.50 on gas, enough to fill up the tank with that good gas stuff, that for some reason I still buy even though it's more expensive. By 9:50 we had gone 13 miles, putting us on 195 West. We don't know when we left New Jersey, because there was no sign to tell us. Some states are really weird like that. (Okay, I'm done bashing New Jersey now.)
Driving cross-country means going through lots of states. Hence, we entered (take a guess) Pennsylvania. We took 195 to Route 1, a dinky little road with speed limits and lights. That annoyed Derrek since he was driving. But it was all good, because Route 1 was where we had our first iMac sighting, at mileage 148,795 just before we got on I-76W. It was a big posterboard with multicolor iMacs and a single word: "Yum." We were impressed. iMacs are cool. Nothing else too exciting happened in Pennsylvania. We discovered road work. Road work, in case you aren't familiar with it, is a common form of torture on interstates. It involves decreased laneage and reduced speedage. The road work we discovered in Pennsylvania was a precursor to what we would encounter later, creating a metaphorical and symbolic motif that unified our journey. Not really. It just gave us something to complain about. Another motif was attempting to listen to the radio. Radios are great if you want to hear about people commuting to work and if you like country music. We passed Philadelphia and Harrisburg. And a bunch of other *burgs. Pennsylvania is all about burgs. 76 becomes 70 sometime just south of Indiana. That's Indiana, Pennsylvania, in case you were confused. Apparently, there are only so many names, and those people who name roads are not creative. We passed California Road in Pennsylvania too, and a bunch of Californias later. There are also a lot of towns named Aurora and Washington. Lots of things are named after Washington, probably because he was the first president or something.
We stopped at a little after 1:00 PM for lunch at a Roy Rodgers in Newburg (yet another *burg), somewhere between exits 15 and 16. Lunch cost us $11.20. We also spent $.51 on a penny. You know, those smushed penny things where you can get a penny that says "Jesus Saves." We got a ying-yang instead. We also spent $10.29 on 7.686 gallons of gas at Blue Mountain Sunoco, and were back on the road at a little after 2:00 PM. Just after Newburg are three really cool tunnels. We were just innocently driving along, trying to ignore the blatant and imposing threat of rock directly in front of us, when a sign instructed us to take off our sunglasses. Thinking it was part of a stripping game, we did so. We were then asked if we had a light, I mean, told that we should turn on our lights. Kinky, huh? But instead of stripping down naked, we went through a tunnel. Not long after that, we had too pay a 9.80 toll. That was uncool. Then we hit more roadwork which was even more uncool. At the time we referred to it as "slow moving traffic funnage." Finally the end of Pennsylvania was in sight. Or rather, the exit numbers were really low. It was about 5:15 PM, and almost time for the end of our first day's drive because we were spending the night with Amber and Fluffy, friends from Simon's Rock, in Wheeling (Bethany), West Virginia. Our exit was in Pennsylvania, more precisely it was "the Claysville exit (really f-cking close to the WV border). You'll know it 'cause there's a giant hubcaps sign :)" Well, there is indeed a giant hubcaps sign. It had started raining and we exited and stopped at an Exxon where we called Amber to meet us. Our mileage was 149,111.
We followed Amber back to her house. Roads in West Virginia are neat. Driving behind Amber is neat. Somehow we got there. Fluffy had a water snake which he let us play with. We didn't get to see his yo-yo. We went to a mall in Ohio, where we saw Amber's mom and called our parents. In the mall we heard the song "She Drives Me Crazy." After hearing that, we decided to start a collection of songs about driving. We went to see a 7:30 movie. For the record, Fluffy was the one who chose the movie. It's all his fault. But then, we didn't stop him, so it's our fault too. We saw "Idle Hands," or at least most of it. It was so bad we walked out. So that was a waste of $13.00. We probably could have complained and gotten our money back, but we didn't. What is sad is that it wasn't even the worst movie we had started to watch that week. "You've Got Mail" is even worse. I mean, it's about AOL. "Idle Hands" was really stupid, but at least we got to act stupid and say things like "I can't help it, it's like my hand, it's possessed." I'm surprised we didn't get kicked out of Eat'n'Park where we spent $15.00 on dinner. Our check said "be sure to take some bear claws to the office or 2 your home!" Eat'n'Park is kind of weird.
After dinner we went back to Amber's house and repacked the car. We managed to get a whole side of the back window clear. It was really neat to be able to see behind us again. Also, we taped up a sign that says "David Reed, Director of Computer Services." So we drove the rest of the way to California with a David Reed sign in the back window. If you don't know David Reed, you're just not cool. David Reed is so cool that he deserves his own fortune file. After that excitement, we watched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, looked at directions (Yahoo! maps suck, even if Yahoo! came from a cool place and uses python), and went to sleep. It's amazing how many people fit in Amber's room.
We woke up on the morning of Wednesday, May 19 (first day of the Star Wars movie) sometime before the alarm went off. I'm not sure why, but we keep doing that. It's mildly annoying. We left Amber's by 9:10 AM and spent $10.10 on gas. By 9:30 we were back on I-70 at a mileage of 149,134. Onward to Ohio since West Virginia doesn't really exist. Even when we were in West Virginia, we were in Ohio County. Go figure. Exit 198 goes nowhere. At least, we guess it does, the sign is just blank. Ohio, in case you didn't already know, was the seventeenth state admitted to the union. This is really cool if you are obsessed with the number seventeen. And there is a town in Ohio called Seventeen, Ohio (actually called Lock Seventeen). It's not too far from I-70, just on 36E off of 77N, so we went there. There's nothing in Seventeen, Ohio. We passed some road work and fields and finally a few (and I mean a few) buildings. And of course there were lots of signs that said Seventeen. The one building we stopped in was an insurance company. I think they thought we were really weird or something. What a surprise. At mileage 149,367 we stopped for lunch at KFC because we had cole slaw on the brain. And sporks. There is no spork. Anyway, there's a KFC at exit 54 and that's where we spent about $11 on food and sat around from 1:20 until 2:20. We also spent $11.01 on gas.
Pretty soon after that we crossed the border and were in Indiana. Our next destination was Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana to visit Curtis. We arrived at 5:20 PM EDT which is 4:20 in that weird Indiana time zone thing (EST). That was when I noticed that my Linux box was rapidly eating one of its hard drives. *grumble grumble* We walked around campus for awhile and then went to Lisa's apartment. Then we went to dinner at The Olive Garden (yes, we had actually made a decision about where to eat). Dinner was good. Lots of bread and salad and stuff. And Derrek got a Shirley Temple of course. We spent $30.00 on food, had lots of leftovers for lunch the next day, and left the restaurant quickly so Lisa could get back to her apartment. We went to Curtis's room and watched an Evangelion movie. Evangelion is really good anime. It has a penguin, so it has to be good. Well, that's not really why it's good, but it helps. Curtis has penguins, too. The movie was pretty depressing though, and also makes very little sense if you haven't seen the whole series. Which just means we have to watch the whole series. Then we went back to Lisa's and went to the Grounds for coffee and really good cheesecake. After that we went back to Lisa's where Derrek talked to Lisa and I talked to Curtis for awhile. Talking is good. People should talk more. We spent the night at Lisa's.
We left Terre-Haute by 9:00 AM on Thursday, May 20. We bought gas again, probably another $11 or so cause gas is actually cheap in Indiana. Terre-Haute is in Western Indiana, so we were out of Indiana pretty quickly. Illinois went by pretty quickly. I think that had something to with the Texas driver. He passed us, we passed him, he passed us, we passed him, he passed us.... you get the idea. We waved at each other a lot. He was pretty cool. We would have taken him out to lunch or something, but after following each other for about an hour, he got off the highway. But not before we got a picture of him as we passed. It's not as cool as the picture of the Montana driver giving us the finger though. And that was the end of Illinois and the beginning of Missouri. We spent more time in Missouri. We passed St. Louis and saw the arch before we stopped for lunch. We stopped at 12:45, mileage 149.822, somewhere around exit 200 and spent an hour and $12.50 at a Subway and $10.94 on gas. Gas prices in Missouri are about $1.00/gallon, which is just incredibly low. California gas prices are damn close to twice that, which just sucks.
Around 3:45 PM and at mileage 149,915, we stopped again, this time side-tracked by signs in Booneville, Missouri about a Russell-Stover Candies factory outlet (1795 W. Ashley Rd, in case you ever want to go there). So we spent $12.00 on chocolates for people and then went into downtown Booneville to find the post office where we spent $16.00 on postage. Except none of this was actually us; Pen-Pen was the one who sent the chocolate. By the time we got everything mailed, it was about 4:45. We continued driving, passing Kansas City, and then were in, not too surprisingly, Kansas. At 6:30 PM and 150,062 miles, we stopped for dinner and spent $11.55 on food at a Hardees and about the same on gas. I picked up a map that told us where we would expect to find roadwork. Roadwork is everywhere in Kansas, and the roads were rather nice where there wasn't roadwork. I guess yellow-brick works well. We also heard a weather advisory with flash flood warnings. And then we saw this dumb machine, one of those ones with stuffed animals cruelly locked inside yearning to breathe free and an idle claw with which poor suckers attempt to rescue the animals. Guess what was in that machine? An adorably Tux-like penguin. And all I wanted was a bagel, errr... penguin. But the penguin I wanted was impossible to get. But we still threw away about 10.00 and whined a lot. I even got the phone number (1-800-471-3587) for the company that services that machine so I can call and complain. Maybe if I'm lucky they'll sell me the penguin and throw in a free car for all of my troubles. I doubt it though.
We were in a sad state when we pulled ourselves away at almost 8.00. The weather was miserably dreary as well, much like Melville's "dark and dreary November of the soul" or Poe's "midnight dreary". We knew for sure that we were in Kansas. By a little after 8:30, I pulled off I-70 because it was raining too hard to see. We stopped at a tourism rest area and considered staying there for the night, as it was warm, dry, and free. But after sitting around and playing Canasta for an hour and a half (Derrek's score leaving mine in the dust), we got back on the road to find a motel. We ended up driving until we reached an Econo Lodge at 211 W. Flinthills Blvd, Junction City, KS at 11:00 PM and mileage 150,167. We spent $39.28 on a room (room 116).
On Friday, May 21, 1999, we once again woke up before our alarm clock and were on the road by 8:30. At 9:00 and mileage 150,205 we were pulled over for speeding. The speed limit was 70 and we were probably going about 78 (the cop said 86, except the car's speedometer doesn't go above 85!). Oh well. So that was a $67 expense. Not too long after that we passed the Garden of Eden. Yup, the Garden of Eden is in Kansas, around exit 200 off I-70. It's also within a half hour of Bob Dole's hometown. I'd say this explains some fundamental truth about the universe, but it really doesn't. There's not much to see in Kansas unless you are impressed by lots of grass and large prarie dogs. At 11:00 we spent $12.59 on gas in Wakeeney, Kansas where prices had gone up to 1.169/gallon. Sometime after noon at mileage 150,338, we spent $13.00 on mid-western Chinese food at a place called Jade Garden. It was pretty good. We stopped again at 2:20 PM (CDT) and mileage 150,484 where we spent $6.02 on gas. At 1:50 (RDT) and mileage 150,664 we changed time zones. We changed time zones back to CDT and then to RDT again because we went north on 27. We were in Nebraska for a few minutes, and then we were in Colorado. At 4:30 PM and mileage 150,664 we stopped at a Target somewhere in Colorado. We hung out for an hour and a half looking for penguin and bought sandals. And then we just kept driving on I-80W to Wyoming. We stopped at the Lincoln Memorial at 8:00 PM in Wyoming, and then again at 8:30 and mileage 150,779 where we spent $10.00 on dinner at Wendy's. We kept driving and stopped at 11:00 and spent about $12.00 on gas. Then we drove again until 2:00 and mileage 151,902, when we stopped for the night at Best Western Dunmar Inn at 1601 Harrison Drive, Evanston, WY. (Note: this mileage can't be right; perhaps it was 150,902.)
On Saturday, May 22 we spent $9.35 on gas (at $1.492/gallon) at 9:00 AM at an Amoco service center and then left Wyoming. Wyoming is actually really pretty during the day. Utah is really neat too. The Salt Lake is very pretty. We stopped at about 11:00 and spent half an hour playing in the salt. That was fun. Then we drove across the border into Nevada. Nevada is a bunch of hot nothingness and casinos. At 12:30 PDT and mileage 151,352, we took exit 152A to Four Way Casino and Cafe. The casino was just about the only thing at the exit. This makes sense since there really is nothing but casinos in Nevada. We spent $12.00 on food, $1.00 on slot machines (cause all there is to do in Nevada is gamble), and $11.69 on gas. We were back on the road at 1:15. The desert in the afternoon is hot and tiring, so we stopped again at 3:00 PM and spent $23.00 on gas, drinks, and sunscreen. Photons just aren't a good thing when you are getting sunburnt from them. It's also not good to be falling asleep while you are driving. Passing Montana drivers, on the other hand, can be a good thing, though I think the guy was slightly surprised when we took his picture. We stopped for dinner sometime much later and had fries and tuna in Reno. Reno is a pretty happening place. And then we hit California. California is much grenner than Nevada. It's also all downhill for quite awhile which is fun. At 10:15 PM and mileage 151,815 we took a break from driving (even though I still think I was awake enough to be driving) and stopped at Raley's, 6119 Horseshoe Bar Road, Loomis, CA. And there we finally found a stuffed penguin for $6.42. He is now hanging happily on our door at work. (The Tux penguin that we found much later is in the apartment.)
After picking up the penguin at Raley's we started the last and most frustrating part of our trip. At around midnight we decided to look for a place to stay for the night. We stopped at two places which had no vacancies. At this point we were getting a little cranky and annoyed and started taking random exits to find a place to stay. At mileage 151,900 somewhere just before Hercules, CA, we found a Motel 6 which officially had no rooms available. Fortunately for us, there was a nice druggy standing there who told the Motel 6 manager to give us a room. He said we looked tired and he wouldn't do this for just anyone. We decided to hang out while the room was being prepared. After about 10 minutes of standing there, the manager finally came back and gave us a card key to go look at the room. It was around the opposite side of the building on the second floor. The room was quite small and lacking a phone. The smell of pot will be left unmentioned. After staring at each other for a while we decided not to take the room. So we got back in the car and I complained loudly and deliriously about wanting to get out of the car and go to sleep.
We went through Sacramento, stopping around 11:00 to spend $11.72 on gas ($1.669/gallon) at a Shell station. At this point we decided continuing to Palo Alto would be the best course of action. We figured there would be more places with vacancies at a small city. At this point we weren't that far from the San Mateo bridge. The Bay Area is all about bridges which makes a lot of sense given the water. It's also about switches and routers, but that's another issue entirely. We kept looking for places to stay, but somehow the road we were on was completely lacking in the hotel department. Finally, we found University Avenue, right by Stanford University. We decided to stop by Stanford, see the campus, and then find a place to stay around there. Now, University Avenue sounds like it should lead to a University right? Wrong. Actually it does, but we still haven't figured it out despite the fact that we can get from campus to 101. I was getting, as Derrek recalls, a little snippy by this point. I think I was quite a bit snippy, but whatever. I think we drove around in circles on El Camino Real (82) and 101 for awhile in Palo Alto. I'm not sure how because there are tons of hotels everywhere, but I swear none of them existed that night. And in one of our trips down University Ave we somehow ended up not at Stanford, but at Sun Microsystems. We spent about 10 minutes in the parking lot gawking at the building. Buildings are pretty interesting to gawk at when it's 2:00 AM. And then we got back to El Camino and looked for places to stay. We found a hotel, the Stanford Hotel actually, but they don't give rooms to people under 21. That really annoyed me, and they are lucky I was too tired to tell them exactly what I thought of their policy. But the guy there directed us to a nice "Mom and Pop" hotel several miles down the road. It was also full. As we were leaving we noticed a Best Western in Menlo Park which was open, expensive, and would give us a room. It was almost 3:00 and we had put almost 152,000 miles on the car, so we took the room and went to sleep.
