After two long days of driving, we arrived at St. Louis on Friday night and spent the weekend at my friend Ashlie and her husband Travis’ new house. In two days, we watched some amazing fireworks, saw penguins, puffins and prairie dogs at the zoo, went up into the arch, ate toasted ravioli on a riverboat, and spent quality time with my three good friends.
Besides the obnoxious heat, I found St. Louis to be very pretty and charming. This opinion was, of course, strongly influenced by our amazing hosts. They went out of their way to make our experience really memorable. Especially, Travis (see, I told you I’d write about you.) He has also helped us fine tune our travel plans to make sure we don’t miss anything amazing and we skip the unneccessary. So now, we’re all set for the next month.
We’re currently driving through Oklahoma, on our way down to Dallas where Jake has a good friend. Today’s highlights included driving on the famous Route 66 and a sign for a porn store that was immediately followed by one that said “porn ruins lives”. We have been driving by lots of farms so we see many cows and lots of neat hay bales. We even saw mini oil wells in Illinois on the way to Missouri.
Our stop tonight is Tulsa or Oklahoma City depending our mood. I want to see the memorial in Oklahoma City which, I was told, is breathtaking.
After a week in the Caymans, two days in NYC, ten days in Turkey and four days in Boston, we’re back on the road. This time our final destination, and hopefully our new home, is San Diego.
We’ve learned some good lessons from the first leg back in May so our car is a lot less heavy now. We broke up the stuff across three smaller bags instead of one huge one. We didn’t bring the 47 pairs of shoes I own. We traded the box of books for a bag of books. Especially since all I read in the last month was Five Quarters of an Orange, the Shipping News, the Eight and Range of Motion.
The back seat holds only the food, the cooler and the AAA maps. We have two 12-packs of diet coke and quite a bit of snacks.
We put another 256megs of RAM into my laptop and got a car-charger so I can continue the Python coding I’ve been doing for my father-in-law. We brought along two more laptops, the little libretto and an old loaner. With one blackberry, two phones, three laptops, five cameras, two iPods, one Rio, one Palm and one Visor, we have quite a bit of charging to keep up with.
We planned out most of the route. The trip doesn’t really start until we leave St.Louis since we’ve seen most everything east of that, we decided to zoom to Missouri, see our friends and go from there. We have 21-driving days planned but I can’t so far tell if we’ve over or under estimated.
We didn’t get on the road till 1pm but we’re now making way through Pennsylvania, hoping to reach St.Louis tomorrow night. We’ve already begun reading a fascinating book, The Secret House by David Bodanis.
Right as we entered Connecticut, I looked over to my right and made an eye-connection with a driver to my right. I remarked to Jake about how much the driver looked like my friend Pat. A few minutes later, the same car put on its sirens and pulled us over. The cop came over to me and after giving us a bit of a hard time decided a ticket would be a terrible way to start our trip, so he let us go.
Lucky!
After a magnificent week in the Grand Cayman Island, we made it back to New York and are already on our way to Istanbul. I can’t wait to hug my nephews.
Save for the obnoxious allergies I had all week, the Caymans was truly enjoyable. We stayed with our friends Adam and Crystal and their friends John and Elsa. The view outside our balcony would have looked too perfect even for a postcard. We could see all the way to the bottom of the aquamarine water. We went diving (with an instructor since neither of us had a license) three times and hand-fed sting rays. We saw a plethora of colorful fish of all sizes and very colorful coral.
I will write more about our trip and post our pictures when I land in Turkey, hug my nephews, sleep and log in.
Crystal put up her Cayman pictures on Shutterfly so I stole some that I liked. Thank you, Crystal!
We’re now at the south of Turkey in a town called Fethiye at a resort. There will be pictures and posts coming since I was able to connect to the Ethernet connection of a broken computer using my laptop. Yey.
After leaving our hard-worked car in the garage, we came back to New York City on Friday night. We spent the night at Thirty on Thirty, right by our old neighborhood.
It feels eerie being in the city but not having a home to go to. I spent all of Saturday morning at the public library, surfing, while Jake took his exam. In the afternoon, I went to Jason’s, our kind host for the evening, and had a great time installing Linux on my laptop. (yes, I know how geeky that sounds, but it really made me happy since I am thinking of getting the SAIR certification)
Also, thanks to Jason’s kindness, I got to put up all of the pictures from the first six legs of our trip. I put up photos from audrey and tom’s wedding and archived all the logs from the last month. You can find the trip logs on the same page as the pictures.
Last night we went to see Finding Nemo which was really well-animated and rendered. The shots of Sydney were lifelike. Ellen DeGeneres did a great job. The script was cheesy but funny. All in all, definitely worthwhile.
Tonight and tomorrow, we’re staying with another gracious host in Jersey. On Tuesday, we fly to the Caymans. I don’t think I can log in from there so I assume there will be no updates for a week. We then come to NYC for two days and then fly to Turkey. June will hopefully be a hectic but fun and relaxing month.
I have read some books since the last excerpt: Catch Me If You Can, Alice in Wonderland, Nickel and Dimed. Look At Me and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Excerpts to come at a later time.
While I’m gone, you can entertain yourself with the aforementioned pictures or the book excerpts, or the numerous archives.
I met my husband in October of 1994. We quickly became close friends, mostly due to one fact: we had tons of fun together. We spent more time laughing than anything else. We talked for hours.
Almost nine years later, he still makes me laugh more than anyone else. I still prefer his company over any alternative. Many fights, many sad times and many tough times later, he is still my best friend.
A few months ago, I was looking for a book called “Important Questions” which contained a list of questions couples should ask each other before they decided to wed. I felt the idea was good but it would never work. People tend to lie in an effort to appear what they wish they were over what they really are. Thus, either party would answer untruthfully and the exercise would be pointless. Who would honestly say, a month before they marry their partner, that they might leave him or her if he or she gets fired. I think the answers can only come with first-hand experience. This is where dating for eight years comes in handy: chances are you’ve already lived through most of the questions. I know we have.
My love and I just celebrated our one-year anniversary which feels funny since we’ve been together about nine years. Do we start from scratch just because we now have a wedding date instead of a “dating date”?
We spent every minute of May together, most of those minutes in a car or in a tent. Amazingly, we still have much to talk about and he’s still my favorite person.
I love you, baby. Happy Annivesary.
After much debate, we decided to spend two days in Boston and do the trip to Pgh in one day. This means we won’t get there early enough to see our professors from college but we had a much-needed extra day to rest.
The drive from Philly to Boston was long and uneventful. We ended up getting on the road at 3pm because we had a long and very fun conversation with Jenn. Such, we didn’t arrive in Boston till nearly midnight.
The wedding in Pgh is of a good college friend and we’ll have other classmates there which makes this event tons of fun. We’re also staying with a friend’s friend whom we haven’t seen in a long time. Going to Pittsburgh is like going home for me since it’s the first American city I ever lived in.
After my mom’s birthday yesterday and my nephews’ today, our one-year annivesary is approaching fast. I can’t believe that, as of Sunday, we’ll have been married one whole year. And what a year it’s been! I’m glad I’ll finally have a chance to taste my wedding cake.
After a ten hour drive we made it to Shadyside in Pittsburgh and sat in my beloved Max&Erma’s. Now it’s time to rest.
We spent the night in a semi-fancy hotel due to yesterday’s bad mood and we took our time eating breakfast and checking mail.
We then drove towards the Great Smokey Mountains and Blue Ridge Parkway. The mountains are so tall that it’s completely thick with fog up at the peak. I drove most of the way but handed the seat to Jake at the peaks so he can drive us through the smoke.
The Blue Ridge Highway is very curvy and quite steep thus making it hard to go faster than 40. But the path is surrounded by mountains, tall trees and wildflowers. It’s certaily worth the trip.
After a long and slow journey through the winding roads of the Parkway we got to the campsite and decided it was too rainy and way too cold to camp. We took the next exit to a city (which turned out to be Marion, NC) and checked into the Days Inn. We’re now watching Liar, Liar on TV. The weather situation sort of sucks. We are planning to spend tomorrow night in Philly with my friend Jenn. The night after that should hopefully take us back to Boston.
Gas: $13.69@1.63
Miles on the car: 5246
Lodging: Knoxville, Clubhouse Hotel @ $80
States: TN, NC
Sites: Great National Smokey Mountains Park, Blue Ridge Parkway
We woke up to another rainy, crappy day and thus decided not to get back on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Instead, we are taking major highways to get to spend tonight with my friend Jenn in Philly.
The return trip has been less fun and less interesting mostly due to tornadoes, a ton of rain, having to stay in hotels, raised anxiety levels due to the accident, and long days of driving. Nickel and Dimed is proving to be an interesting read as well as sad and thought-provoking. We’re nearly done with it and I’m looking for other good read-aloud suggestions. It appears non-fiction works better than fiction. I’ve already read The Tipping Point and Fast Food Nation, both of which I think would have been good reads. If you have any suggestions, leave me a comment or email me.
I’ve only been to Philly twice before, once during college to visit my boyfriend-at-the-time and once two years or so ago to visit my brother in law, both in UPenn. My friend Jenn is also working at the school where she’s a PhD candidate in Art History. I wonder if everyone in Philly is somehow or another connected to UPenn?
We made it to my friend’s house on time and spent a beautiful night with her. To top it of she sent me on my way with three books. Anywhere I can stay for free and walk away with books is magic to me.
Gas: $10.99@1.39 and $7.27@1.41
Toll: $7.00
Miles on the car: 5802
Lodging: Marion, NC Days Inn @ $42.63
States: NC, VA, DC, MD, DE, PA
Sites: well we took 40 to 85 to 95 so we saw pretty much interstate highways all day long.
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projects for twenty twenty-six
projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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