Tales From the Road

Well, the contents of my vacation were sufficient to fill several days' worth of blogging, so I'm going to break things up by category. As preamble for all of this, here are the particulars of the trip.

We started from Denver Thursday evening (after all involved parties got off work). There was me and two friends, B and E. Both female, but both very much "one of the boys" in our circle of friends. We drove straight through to Grand Rapids, making occasional stops to gas, stretch, eat, and trade driving responsibilities. It took 18 hours, not counting time changes.

After a couple days in Grand Rapids for the wedding, we drove 2 hours to a small town south of Lansing to visit an aunt and uncle of E's, who showed us a good afternoon, took us in for the night, and gave us a great breakfast to start off Monday morning.

That morning, we drove about 3 hours to Cedar Point, where we spent a great day at the amusement park. As the park was closing, we set off on the road, driving straight back in about 19 hours.

Overall, a pretty great trip.

In this post, I'm going to focus on random tales and observations about the drive itself.

• Colorado really ought to give everything west of Denver away to Kansas or Nebraska. It's as boring and obnoxious as anything those states have to offer. Although there is a pretty fun Sinclair gas station near the border with a big dinosaur out front.





• At night, western Nebraska smells like cigarette smoke. We didn't have that on the return trip during daylight. But man, on the way out, it smelled like one of those lounges in an airport that fog pours out of when you open the door.



• We all really like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and sang along loudly to the soundtrack from the musical episode, "Once More With Feeling," to pick us up when we all got weary of the journey.



• The World's Largest Truckstop is off I-80 in Iowa. Pretty much the best (only?) tourist attraction in the state.





• Across the Great Plains, there's a rather humorously named chain of gas stations, with an equally humorous slogan. And strangely, some of them sell their Super Unleaded for as much as a dime less than Regular Unleaded.





• Driving anywhere near Chicago absolutely sucks. We hit the tri-state highway intersection too close to rush hour and were stuck there for an eternity, surrounded by semis. Apparently, the state is taking 80 cents from every car that passes through, and using it to ensure the highway stays in a state of perpetual disrepair and traffic snarl.



• Sadly, some young man from a city just inside Indiana was killed in action in Iraq just a week before we passed through. The whole community had its flags lowered to half mast, and were a clear testament to the price of the war on terror global struggle against extremism.



• Michigan has a total fetish for left exits off the freeway. Finding a right exit off the freeway in Michigan is about as uncommon as finding a left exit anywhere else in the country.



• There's a chain of banks in Michigan and Ohio called Fifth Third Bank. Huh? Fifth Third? What bizarre mergers or brain farts conjoined to name this place? I don't think I would trust my money to an ordinal fraction.



• We passed more semis that I could possibly count along the journey, but two in particular merited a photo op.






• The west side of Toledo, Ohio smells very strongly of peanut butter. Then you pass a Wonder Bread factory, and it smells like bread. We figured the east side would smell like jelly, but no, instead it smelled like burning gasoline. What a nasty sandwich that would make.



• I actually lived in Toledo for a year when I was about 7-8 years old. I have very few memories of the city, and nearly all of them are bad. (Subjects for a future, slow blog day, perhaps.) This was the first time I'd passed through the city in over 20 years. And I happened to be looking off the highway as we drove by one exit, and saw this old two-screen movie theater. It was totally rundown, and I couldn't believe the thing was still open in any capacity after all this time. But I had an instant, total recognition of the marquis sign out front, and remembered that it was was the place where I was taken to see both E.T. and Return of the Jedi. It was a neat insta-recall of some fun childhood memories.

Join me in the days ahead for details of the wedding, the visit with E's family in Michigan, and crown jewel of the trip, Cedar Point.