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| The Rockies up ahead | Our feckless driver; this picture doesn't appear to show any feck |
After I visited Washington, D.C., I drove up to New York City to see Justin. Didn't take any pictures. The most memorable thing was going to see The Blair Witch Project with Justin and Carla.
So after a couple of days in New York, I took off on Saturday, August 7. I left around 2 pm and immediately, I was confronted by a major hurdle: the Holland Tunnel. A large assortment of cars was stuffed into one end of it and it had clogged up. This, apparently, is proof that cars are not the favored means of transport in New York: I could have walked to the tunnel faster than I drove there. Anyway, after 30-45 minutes, I was speeding to my next line, which was the one to get on the Jersey Turnpike. Within a couple of hours, the traffic had lightened sufficiently, and I got to the Pennsylvania Turnpike headed for Pittsburgh.
You see, Mark McGwire had just hit his 500th home run a couple of days earlier and the Cardinals (the St. Louis Cardinals) were in Pittsburgh to play the Pirates. I asked myself: why not take in a ball game on my leisurely way home? Getting no response, I went anyway. (I bought a ticket from Ticketmaster online while I was in New York.)
Off the Penn Turnpike, I took another road into the Pittsburgh area...and through. I crossed the Monogahelia River, passed through downtown, and saw Three Rivers Stadium. And then I started looking for a place to stay. On a Saturday night. In the middle of summer.
According to the closest authority -- someone at one of the hotels that I couldn't find a vacancy -- there were no vacancies within a two-hour drive of Pittsburgh. Why Pittsburgh? He didn't know. The theory was what I previously mentioned -- people were out driving around that weekend and a lot of them were staying in hotels in and around Pittsburgh.
OK, it's 11 pm, and I'm two hours from a shower and a real bed. I could camp out in my car until a police officer or sheriff told me to move along. Or, I could do something else. My initial instinct was to camp out, but then I decided to forget the game and to forget the leisurely drive home -- because now I was driving overnight and at least for two hours. So why not just push on until I get really tired and make progress home? Getting no response, I bought a couple of bottles of caffeinated syrup beverage (Mountain Dew, Pepsi), refilled the gas tank, and took off for Portland.
From Pittsburgh, I drove on I-70 through the panhandle of West Virginia and then through Columbus, Ohio. By about 5 am, I was coming up to Indianapolis. I was pretty tired, so I started looking for a place to sleep (aside from the driver's seat); I got through Indianapolis and stopped at a Holiday Inn Express. My sense of timing wasn't especially good, since there was a big NASCAR race -- the Brickyard 400 -- that weekend. But someone had just cancelled, so I lucked out.
After a brisk sleep, I was out of Indianapolis by noon on Sunday, August 8. Now that I was fixated on getting home, I was back to driving and driving. Outside of Indiana, I crossed into the Central time zone in Illinois on my way to St. Louis. The ultimate destination for the day was I-80; at the beginning of this trip, I'd crossed from I-80 to I-70 by way of Denver. In looking at the map, though, I saw that I could avoid driving through Denver by crossing east of there. Kansas City looked like the best place to do that, so that's where I was headed. I didn't quite make I-80, but I did get through St. Louis and Kansas City and to St. Joseph, Missouri, where I stopped for the evening. Coincidentally, I was driving through St. Louis during the time when I should have been watching the Cardinals game in Pittsburgh, so I listened to the game on the radio. The game turned out to be pitching duel and I felt better that I'd skipped it. (Nothing against pitching duels, but the Pirates and Cardinals aren't the first teams I think of for pitching. They're not the second or third teams, either.)
The highlight of the drive out from Portland was road construction. On the way to Portland, the highlight turned out to be road accidents and the associated "rubbernecking." The first one was on the loop around St. Louis Sunday afternoon. A truck jackknifed on the other side of the freeway, scattering its load. This was much less of an obstacle on the side of the freeway I was on than the many drivers who were compelled to view this apparently entertaining sight. Personally, I didn't take any pictures. (More on truck accidents and photography shortly.)
The next day, Monday, August 9th, I employed my long distance driving technique of sleep deprivation and overnight travel. At around 2 am, I left St. Joseph, Missouri. By 5 am, I was through Omaha, Nebraska on Interstate 80, headed towards Salt Lake City and my last major freeway change. The day's drive took me through Nebraska and Wyoming. I entered the Mountain Time Zone and got to Cheyenne by noon. A couple of pictures:
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| The Rockies up ahead | Our feckless driver; this picture doesn't appear to show any feck |
By 4 pm, I was just outside of Evanston, Wyoming, just short of the Utah-Wyoming border and where I wanted to stop for some sleep. The weather was a little stormy, but also photogenic:
Shortly after I took this picture, Interstate 80 became a large parking lot, though. This was a major accident, a turn the engine off, read for a while, ask truckers what's going on accident. The story was that another truck had jackknifed. At least one RV and a couple of other trucks had then crashed into the debris. One of the trucks had thrown an axle. A big mess. By the time I stopped, the backup was seven miles long. We waited for about 90 minutes, by which time the backup was probably twice as long. Amazingly, when traffic started to move again, it picked right up to freeway speed and we were on our way...to the accident scene itself, where many drivers exercised their rubbernecking skills. By the time I drifted slowly and impatiently by the accident, I was ahead of a car with a couple in it. As I floored the accelerator in my car, the male, spouse-like person in the car behind me slowed down. The female, spouse-like person produced a camera and took photographs. The picture I would have wanted was of that -- the couple-like people in the car photographing the accident scene.
Thankfully, I was in Evanston by 6 pm, having lost only two hours. The stop itself for the accident was actually good for stretching and walking around -- something I didn't get to do very often while driving.
By 2 am on Tuesday, August 10, I was back on Interstate 80. This was actually important: the most direct way to Interstate 84 and Portland was through the Salt Lake City area -- really Ogden, Utah. I got on I-84 just east of Ogden. Salt Lake City is hosting the 2002 Winter Olympics (which you may know about for other, scandal-related reasons). The road system in the area is being overhauled for the Olympics and I was warned away from driving through there by the automobile club (AAA) on the advice of other drivers. I figured, though, that I could probably get through in the early morning hours without finding much traffic. By 5 am, I was through Utah and into Idaho without having to stop. The sky was clear, and away from major cities I saw stars and the Milky Way again. I also saw a lot of shooting stars before I remembered that early August is the time of the Perseid meteor shower. It was pretty neat; the most memorable one looked like it was tumbling and skipped across the atmosphere. It seemed to change direction instead the normal straight streak of light.
I got through Boise, Idaho just before the morning rush got heavy and then it was through eastern Oregon and into the Columbia River area. I got back to my apartment around noon Pacific time.
The final statistics: New York City to Portland, approximately 3184 miles. Total time: 73 hours.
Round-trip (Portland to Florida, up the East Coast, back to Portland): 8635 miles.
Well, the penultimate statistics: I knew I'd gone a long way, because the front of my car was coated with a chunky film of organic matter.
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Last Revised: 11 August 1999
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