One final day of hauling across America

Day 3

I don’t want to call this the end…maybe the beginning. I shot out of Amarillo, Texas before the sun came up today, and was into New Mexico before it decided to make its appearance. The American Southwest is spectacular, and I’m excited to be living here. At least through June…

Observations from the road:

1.       Awesome spread of stars this morning, Texas!

2.       The sunrise in New Mexico was amazing. The sky stayed cream sicle orange around the sun for far longer than it had any right to. And the light on the red ground…great.

3.       New Mexico itself was spectacular. Buttes, canyons, washes, ravines, plateaus, mesas…startling to look at for a New Jersey boy.

4.       It’s clear why they call it Red Rock Park.

5.       Mystery road kill! Can’t figure out what might kind of look like a deer but be black.

6.       Elk signs everywhere…no elk…I’m afraid we may be looking at another moose situation.

7.       Five or six small deer…or antelope…or whatever they are here. Smaller than our white tailed deer though.

8.       After the fourth hour of it, I got tired of driving through mountains. I think my car did, too.

9.       The Rio Grande!

10.   The Continental Divide!

11.   A twelve mile, 6% downgrade that brought me down several thousand feet just before I reached Bullhead City…a place I’m aiming to set up shop.

12.   Needles, California, where I’m spending at least one night.

13.   Authentic Mexican food outside of Flagstaff.

Song of the day: How Far We’ve Come (Dawes)

Meal of the day: Since I only had one, I’ll go with the tacos…shredded beef wrapped in a fried tortilla. Delicious.

Tomorrow: Off to the school in which I will teach to meet my new boss, see my classroom, be productive. Off to hopefully see some apartments.

Tonight: Learning how to iron! Should be fun.

Day 2...belatedly

Day  2 began before dawn in Indiana. I woke up early, hoping to push past Tulsa and make some killer time, making the last two days of my trip easier.

It worked.  I stopped for ice, for my creative coolering, and at Waffle House for lunch before leaving Missouri. I have had a short but passionate affair with Waffle Houses. Colleen made noise about how great they were back in March before Sean and I visited Eric for the first time, and the Eric, Sean and I hit one in Mechanicsville before we headed back to New Jersey. I was hooked, forever and ever, and Colleen and I have made it our business to find them in our travels, as have I each time I’ve been to Virginia.

 I hit Tulsa around 1 pm, after the time change at St. Louis, and there was no way I was stopping then. I set my sights on Amarillo, Texas. Google told me it would take 5 hours. It took 3 hours and 45 minutes. No I didn’t speed THAT much. But I did manage over 900 miles today after managing over 800 yesterday.

One note on Day 1: I-70 in West Virginia is a lot like I-95 in Delaware. I liked it for that.

Things I saw today:

1.       A Midwest sunrise. Beautiful. It was neat to see the sky ringed all the way around with pink and orange and purple as the orange and pink in my rearview mirror intensified and the sun exploded over the plains. Well done, Midwest.

2.       The Muddy Mississippi

3.       The Gateway Arch and Busch Stadium.

4.       St. Louis kind of smells like ribs. Just saying.

5.       Watching the topography change in Missouri from plains to the Ozarks and back to plains as I entered Oklahoma.

6.       The plains of Oklahoma

7.       Road kill armadillos everywhere! And those things splatter!

8.       The vistas of the gullies and ravines and washes in the Texas Panhandle. Stunning

9.       A town with 2 water towers, one that said HOT and one that said COLD

10.   A flatbed with a new McDonald’s sign on it.

11.   More tow trucks towing tow trucks.

12.   A burned out husk of a car.

13.   Signs for the steakhouse I hit in Amarillo starting in Oklahoma.

Song of the day: Sweet Annie (The Zac Brown Band)

Meal of the Day: Toss up.  I had a killer prime rib with fried okra (for you, Colleen) and a baked potato at a steakhouse in Amarillo. Best part of the steakhouse? Also a brewery, so I tried their Rattlesnake IPA (really, really good. On par with the Ickys) and also a pale ale with my steak. Hard to beat. However, this morning I took a biscuit from the continental breakfast at the Days Inn I slept in last night. It was hard as a rock, so I Ben’s Ladder Listed* it in Indiana before the sun came up.

Tomorrow: Original plan was Albuquerque, New Mexico. Now hoping for Flagstaff, Arizona.

*One of the redshirt summer staff on the Walpole Island Workcamp was our Tool Guy, Ben. When youth groups check in, often times they will give ladders to the Tool Guy for crews to use during the week. The week before Walpole Island, Ben had eighty-some-odd ladders to account for…and his list got sucked out the window one day while he was driving. So that’s now a verb meaning accidently (on purpose) losing things out of windows.

Writing my Future

Wow. Where to start?

I thought July was a whirlwind when I returned from the Outer Banks. Turns out it wasn’t done yet!

Early Wednesday, I interviewed for a 7^th Grade Language Arts position in Mohave Valley, Arizona. After an angst filled day, I received positive news, and some interesting news.

I got the job. The first day of school is August first.

Excitement!

Serious, major, super downside: I don’t get to see Colleen before she returns from Canada. Crushed. Glad we had those three weeks out of four on various trips.

ROADTRIP!

I left New Jersey this morning around 6 AM, driving out Route 70 (it was nice to say goodbye, temporarily, to the pitch pines), up the Turnpike and then into Pennsylvania. I took Rt. 76 (yes, I listened to the G Love and the Special Sauce song) to Rt. 70, and was on 70 the rest of the way. I’m now in Terre Haute, Indiana (about an hour southwest of Indianapolis) for the night. It was a long day, but an exciting day, and I have 3 more ahead of me.

Some observations from the road:

1.       Eating alone in restaurants is weird.

2.       Goodbye Pitch Pines and Wawas (and that surprising field of lilies hiding in a gully by the side of the road) for now.

3.       Pennsylvania is what it is. Everytime I’ve driven across it, it has been the same. Although, I do like driving THROUGH the mountains. Couldn’t decide which was scarier: a mountain tunnel collapsing on me or an underwater tunnel collapsing on me. Probably about the same.

4.       Ohio did not put its best foot forward. I went to Ohio, once, with the Scherm clan and the state itself bored me. Then I went there again in high school, with the same result. Driving through it with Colleen and Katie was ok, because I was with Colleen and Katie. But this time Ohio dropped the ball. Rain. Traffic. ALL THE TRAFFIC. “It’s just like New Jersey without the beach.” Thanks, Uncle Bill. I thought I’d managed to avoid the BENNY traffic this year. I guess it was relocated to ALL OF OHIO.

5.       Indiana…maybe it’s just the Midwest. It was so sunny I couldn’t see without my sun glasses on, and it was also pouring. Really?

6.       Things I saw, in no particular order:

a.       Huge storms

b.      A tow truck towing three other tow trucks. I saw this more than once

c.       A van driving down the interstate with its side door open. And its occupants not caring about it.

d.      Two small deer. ONE, TWO. I guess I’m beating myself at that game.

e.      Lucas Oil Stadium

f.        A lot of farms.

Song of the day: 3 way tie between 1-76 (G Love and the Special Sauce, for obvious reasons) Bonita and Bill Butler (Alison Kraus and Union Station, because I drove through Wheeling, West Virginia) and Fly Over States (Jason Aldean, because I have driven through Indiana…expect a repeat performance of that one)

Meal of the Day: Chicken and Dumplings with hashbrown casserole and mac and cheese from Cracker Barrel

Tomorrow: Tulsa, Oklahoma, and my first time zone change

July (Part 2 of 2)

Following the week in Irwin, Colleen, Katie and I surprised our high school youth by showing up as camp staff for their mission trip to the Walpole Island First Nation Reservation in Ontario, Canada. Along the way, we hit a Waffle House in Ohio, the Toledo Botanical Gardens, a new state for me (Michigan), and a ferry across the St. Clair River onto Walpole Island. Upon arrival, we checked in with the summer staff for the camp and then soon after set out to retrieve the fourth member of our Red Shirt team from PCTR, John Forsythe. Aside from the fact that a two hour drive back to the island took more like four because “just go straight” isn’t a very good direction when a road ends and you HAVE to go left or right, it was a pretty incredible experience to serve with John, who had been one of our leaders ten years prior when we were high school youth. I feel very blessed to have had the chance to serve alongside him and have gotten to know him more.

While Colleen was being utterly spectacular as Worship Leader, playing her guitar and leading the camp in music for the week, Katie and I were teamed up as site coaches, going around to different work sites and making sure things were progressing the way they should. It was, to say the least, frustrating. It felt more like a week of reprimanding adults who didn’t want to listen to advice and sound technical judgment than actually helping crews complete tasks like building porches. Some highlights: One crew whose adult insisted they had enough lumber to complete not the 6x8 porch they were assigned but a 10x10 and then didn’t finish building anything, really; The crew that framed a porch with 2x4’s and then panicked when they were told that was wrong; and, from one of John’s sites, the crew that hung 2x4’s in joist hangars meant for 2x8 and then swore that she needed longer nails to nail the decking onto the porch. It boggles the mind.

The positive upshot of the frustration? Hanging out with Katie, which was awesome, and getting to watch Colleen with the music every morning and night. Truly the best part of the week and many times all that made the week tolerable.

Coming home from Walpole found us in Niagara Falls, Canada. Not my first time at the Falls, but very cool, and very enjoyable to spend time there with Colleen and Katie, and run into our high school youth on their time at the Falls. After crossing back into the USA to head for a hotel near Rochester, NY, we got onto an interstate that led us right back to Canada. This bummed me out. Quite a bit. I do love me some America and I just didn’t want to end up back in Canada, but we spent the night in Niagara Falls, Canada and headed for Utica, New York the next morning. The next two days we spent driving around Adirondack Park looking for moose (which don’t exist) and jumping into Seventh Lake in the Finger Lakes. We ate at a place called The Moose Tooth Grill, where Katie had eaten before (which she didn’t tell us, no matter how vociferously she claims she did) in the town of Lake George, and headed home on Tuesday, July 10^th.

The fifteenth found us heading south down Rt 13, over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, across the Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge and to the Outer Banks for the family vacation. It was great to be able to spend a week with Eric, both of my nephews, and Colleen, as well as my parents and grandmother. Swimming with the little guy was great, as was the Colleen induced nerd fest on Thursday: a tour of the Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility, a trip to the Wright Brothers’ Memorial, lunch at Pigman’s BBQ, a short hike in Nags Head Woods, a stop at Kitty Hawk Kites for Fudge, and then, for me, a nap.

My adventure culminated with a truly fantastic dinner at Paul and Laura’s with Colleen and Morgen, and then a solid night’s sleep in my house and a nap the next day.  A change of scenery truly does help sometimes.

July (Part 1 of 2)

So this is really my first opportunity to sit down after a whirlwind of a month that saw me in 9 states, one Canadian Provence (more times than I’d initially hoped for, but more on that later), and one First Nation Reservation.  Until Saturday, I had spent exactly 5 nights of July in New Jersey, and including last night seven nights in an actual bed. Pull out couches do not count.

The last week of June found me in Irwin, Pennsylvania, a little town outside of Pittsburgh on a home repair Mission Trip with our middle school youth. To characterize that as an awesome experience would be a little overdone, since I say that every year. There were a lot of elements to this year’s trip that made it more rewarding than some in the past (last year’s stress-fest comes to mind). For one, I was lucky enough to be teamed up with nine great youth from all around the country, and two other great adults. It wasn’t long until we realized we were “that crew”…the loud ones, the ones who had a ton of fun and gelled very quickly into a cohesive unit. We finished our project, painting the exterior of a home, with a little time to spare, which made things even better. On top of that, the resident of the home was one of the most incredible people I have ever met. At 102 years young, she showed so much verve and life; she had more life in her than some of the 20-somethings I know.

 Upon meeting her, she’s been blind since the mid-nineteen eighties, she asked us all to shake her hand, and then corrected those who did not give her a good handshake. I was relieved to have passed the test (credit to my Dad). Someone then asked her what the secret to living to reach 100 years of age was, and her response was so simple it’s forever locked in my memory. She told us, “Smile when you wake up, smile again when you go to bed, and if you can’t laugh you might as well push up the daisies.” She truly embodied that mantra, as she was often laughing and sarcastic and really just a joy to be around for our short time with her.

Most incredible thing about her? Her best friend is also 102 years old. Seriously.

California/Nevada: An Addendum

Writing the first few posts that centered around an interview in Reno, Nevada was bizarre for me.  It was strange being so open about things, it was strange trying to describe the immensity of the redwoods, the angst before the interview, how much I hate taking off and landing. Strange putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be) and seeing “I” over and over again when describing the events of the journey.

I was lucky enough to share that experience with Colleen,  who has been a very, very good friend of mine for a very, very long time, and I kind of generally think that she’s the greatest. I’m a lucky guy to have her in my life.

Also, her reaction to the redwoods was epic. : )