Bowling Green to Hartford - 12/18/09-12/19/09
We ended up leaving a day earlier than expected due to trying to get ahead of that winter storm that dumped 2'+ of snow all over the east coast. About 8:30PM CST, we got onto the road. I expected it to take a little longer than usual since the weather was kind of crappy and cause I knew Mom and Dad would need more stops than I would.
Yeah...7:30PM EST the next day...we arrived.
TWENTY TWO HOURS IN A CAR FOR A TRIP THAT NORMALLY TAKES ME SIXTEEN!!
/rage
Here's a list of why it took us so long:
- Late dinner (Mom and Dad have issues eating in a moving vehicle...)
- One hour snooze at a rest stop shortly after 2AM EST.
- Pennsylvania Department of Transportation apparently thinking "Eh...we'll plow it later". I kid you not...the second we crossed over from OH into PA, it literally looked like a salt truck or a plow hadn't bothered to touch the highways at all. This idiocy ended up costing us a lot of time. Namely at the start where it took us literally 2 hours to go 65 miles.
- New tires for my car. I still had about 10k miles worth of tread left on my tires, but I had been warned they weren't the best in the world for winter-weather travel. So...kill 2.5 hours in Wal-Mart waiting for a new set of Goodyears to get put on.
After the tires got replaced, there wasn't anything of note that really slowed us down other than a couple more meals/rest breaks/shopping. The weather was pretty crappy until we got closer to the PA/NY border and my plum-colored car ended up getting a white paint job somewhere along the way thanks to all the salt that the PA DoT finally decided to coat the roads with.
Hartford to Lincoln 12/22/09
We ended up leaving between 7-8AM.
This drive was relatively uneventful from a weather standpoint. Winter Storm "Alberta" (as it was called by a meteorologist in Hartford...the only weatherish person I heard actually refer to that winter storm by name) had dumped about 8" of snow Sunday evening. About a day and a half had gone by and most of the roads had been cleared out.
We met up with King Cranky Cat/Travis at a Cracker Barrel in Tewksberry/bury/howeverthehellitisspelled for breakfast.
Given the previous adventures of Travis at the summer BBQ in Maine, it was no surprise that:
A) He managed to sneak into Cracker Barrel with no one noticing him and got up behind me right as I was making an ass of myself by looking through a Transformers viewfinder.
B) He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts despite it being 20 degrees outside.
C) He ordered the blandest things he could find on the menu. A scrambled egg, a biscuit and some water.
It was a surprise though that he wasn't cranky. I told my folks he earned the King Cranky moniker for obvious reasons and after breakfast, they remarked "He was a nice young man and not cranky at all!"
I could only say "You caught him on a good day then. He probably found something he really liked on Netflix last night." :)
Pretty much drove the rest of the way up to Bangor without stopping. Once in Bangor, we stopped off at a number of places to do a little shopping and visit Kay's sister. Once done there, we drove to her parent's house and arrived about 4:30-5PM.
Lincoln to Hartford - 12/27/09
Christmas has come and gone and now it's time to head back to do some New Year's stuff.
We ended up dropping Mom and Dad off at a bus station in Bangor. The reasoning for this had to do with the following:
- Kay and I had never been to Boston-Logan airport before.
- The weather was rainy and shitty.
- There literally wasn't room in the car for all the presents the 4 of us got and 4 people + luggage.
Because of that last entry, we ended up loading up Kay's sister's car with our gifts. The plan was to drop the folks off at the bus station then go to her sister's house to pick up the gifts to transport back to Hartford.
The plan went flawlessly. We left between 6:30-7:00AM thinking we'd need the extra time to make sure they got on the 9AM bus. Getting on the road to Bangor, we noticed our early departure was useless since the roads were clear and it was just raining. We ended up wasting some time at Dunkin' Donuts before dropping my parents off and going to pick up the gifts.
At her sister's place, we hung out for a bit killing a little more time. The intention was to go hit up a couple stores to look for a couple odds and ends that would compliment our gift collection, but since it was Sunday...yeah they didn't open at their normal weekday hours.
Once we were finally back on the road, we stopped off in Augusta to look around since our searches were fruitless in Bangor. Fruitless searches happened in Augusta and we stopped off in Portland to look around and have lunch at Pizza Hut. By the time we were done eating, it was about 3PM and I was fkn tired. I managed to make it back to the aforementioned Cracker Barrel before having to pull off and doze for a bit. Not even a 5 Hour Energy could keep me awake for a couple more hours until we made it back to Kay's place.
Finally arrived back around 6PM. Long ass day.
Hartford to Cincinnati - 01/03/10
Holy balls I fkn HATE winter now thanks to this drive.
I left Hartford about 7:00AM.
Snowing the entire way up to Columbus, OH with winds constantly blowing my car (and the snow for that matter) all over the damn highway. I only pulled off at a couple places for gas, food and walmarts/shitstops/legstretchings/transformerhunting.
The only major event that happened aside from being constantly stressed the entire drive due to the weather was when I was on I-80.
I came down this hill doing about 85MPH (speed limit of 65MPH). I had passed up this gold Pontiac S.U.V. and right as I came around the corner, there was an emergency vehicle/state trooper parking space complete with 3 state trooper cars waiting to catch speeders coming down that hill. One of said troopers pulled out and started coming up behind me, but then pulled in behind the Pontiac and ended up giving them a ticket.
Could have easily been me and I have no clue how it wasn't...
The total distance between Kaelis' place and Kaylea's place is about 770 miles. Somehow, going from Hartford to Cincinnati...that distance drops by 20 miles according to my odometer. Either way, I made the drive in my customary time of a little over 12 hours (arrived about 7:15PM), but when you consider I spent a little over an hour on the side of the road, it should give you a pretty solid idea of how fast I was driving. :)
But yeah...hate snow. hate arctic wind. hate snow + arctic wind.
<\3<\3<\3<\3<\3<\3 road salt.
(I have a white car again...)
I had to pull off about 100 miles north of Columbus, OH because I could no longer see out of my driver and passenger front windows due to them salting up. Aside from the areas my windshield wiper touched, everywhere on the outside of my car was basically one big salt brick.
At the gas station I pulled off at, I ended up breaking the squeegie handle because I had to press so damn hard to get the salt off my windows.
(Hope they don't mind...)
Kaelis and Mrs. Kaelis received a spoon gift set from me for Christmas due to the sheer stupidity of this video that Kaelis managed to waste 10 minutes of my life with:
Cincinnati to Bowling Green - 01/04/10
I left Kaelis' place after a night eating sushi and roaming a Wal-Mart. I pulled out of his driveway about 5:45AM. I was happy thinking all the snow was finally behind me.
Yeah I was wrong.
All along I-71 was snow and more blowing snow. It wasn't until I got past Louisville that the snow let up.
I finally got back into Bowling Green around 9:15 AM (eastern time) where I promptly pulled into the parking lot of "work" and put in my normal hours.
Conclusion
Fuck I'm tired.
Tally up the time spent driving/on the road and you end up with my spending approx. 57-58 hours travelling. Only about 1/4-1/3 of that was driving in decent conditions. The rest was crappy winter weather. I totaled up nearly 3300 miles in 2.5 weeks just on highways alone. This doesn't include excursions to places like Kay's friend that lives in Avon, CT (bout 20 mins or so away over a freakin' mountain. Avon owns the most pansy Five Guys staff in existence since they closed early for "severe weather" on New Years Eve...wasn't even 3" of snow on the ground and every other business around them was open).
Doesn't include excursions to nearby Manchester, CT because Kay just had to have Outback Steakhouse...
(FYI: Blooming Onion for dinner + THINKING ABOUT 5 Hour Energy for the drive home the next day is far worse than actually eating any form of wasabi and drinking a 5 Hour Energy the next day...)
Whoops, I digressed.
In total conclusion:
Tons o time in the car + nearly 3500 miles total on the ol' engine (that's now over 151K miles) + wintery weather =
(Thanks failblog...really couldn't have said it better myself.)
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