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I always wanted to drive across country. But not like this... Click here for a map of our trip. Unfortunately, I do not have pictures... The camera was in my bag in the Marriott, and probably doesn't do so well anymore...
Friday – After they picked up those three terrorists again on the NY->LAX flight, we decided to pack it in and drive. We picked up a Taurus SES in Westchester County Airport (just to the east of White Plains, NY) and started driving around 10:30am. I was really weird seeing an airport in total lockdown, but I thing we're going to have to get used to it...
We drove around to the north on Highway 287 which turned and went south until we picked up Hiway 80 to the east. Boy, directions on this trip were going to be very easy. Take Highway 80 for 2000 miles, and then turn south on Highway 25. That would be about it... It was raining as we left, but cleared up near the Deleware Water Gap, and would actually be a pretty nice trip for the remaining three days.
Overall, Pennsylvania was a nice drive, and some beautiful country. Highway 80 doesn't really go near any of the big cities, and is actually pretty "rural" most of the way. We had stopped for lunch somewhere in the middle of the state, and started talking to a guy in the parking lot. He was going to pick up their daughter, who lived very close to where the fourth plane came down. We asked him where he got his flag on the antenna of this truck, and he pulled out a spare, and helped us get a flag flying from our antenna for the drive west. It was amazing how people open up in times like these... There were flags everywhere. Cranes, highway machinery, cars, bridges, etc. What a wonderful sight. As a side note, there were cornfields everywhere on this trip.
[2] Friday night – We checked into a Marriott Courtyard in Maumee, OH (just to the southwest of Toledo). We agreed to meet in the lobby by 7am the next morning.
Saturday Morning – I woke up, showered, and looked out my door for the morning paper, a business traveller's ritual "USA Today". I was kind of bummed that it wasn't there. When I got to the lobby to check out, I asked if the papers had been delivered yet. "Sir, its Saturday, we don’t get a paper on Saturdays." Weird. Not that they don't get papers, but that I'm not used to staying in hotels on Friday/Saturday nights...
We left Maumee at 7am and started heading west. More flags, but now the programmable road construction signs (that usually say "Caution, exit closed", or things like that) now say – “United we stand – USA” and "God Bless the USA". One of them was just an image of a waving flag. What an outpouring of patriotism. We even saw one guy in the middle of nowhere, standing on a bridge across the highway, with a big flag, just waving it back and forth. Amazing. Still get goose-bumps thinking about that one.
This part of the route also had a cornfields and soybeans almost the whole way. That's a LOT of corn...
[3] I started playing around with some new mapping software that I had bought because I travel so much. I programmed in Tom's Cousins address in Iowa City, IA and we headed that way. The route planner told us that we'd get there at about 1:58pm. We actually arrived at about 1:45pm. Pretty dang close... We spent a couple hours there, for lunch and just to talk. We pulled out at about 3:45, and headed on towards Nebraska.
This trip too was filled with cornfields. Both sides, as far as you could see.
[4] We figured out that we'd be in Lincoln at about 8:30pm, and we hit it just about perfectly. We had dinner downtown at the Fox and Hound Pub, just to the south of the football stadium. This would normally have been a game night, but given the recent events, the game had been cancelled. It was still pretty busy. Must be insane when a game is in town...
We checked into a Motel 6 near the airport (boy it was quiet up there), and got probably the best night sleep either of had in the last week... One thing, though. Some maintenance guy started rinsing out paint buckets with a high pressure hose at about 6am. Sounded exactly like the jet that flew over our heads on the 11th. I came out of bed pretty quickly on that one...
Sunday – We agreed to meet in the lobby at 7am again, but I screwed up. I forgot that we had crossed a time-zone on the way in. So my watch went off at 5:30am local time. I got up, showered, and propped my door open, knowing that Tom had to pass my room on the way to the lobby. At about 6:15am, I decided that Tom had slept in or forgot to set his alarm, so I called him. He wasn't sure why I called him at 6:15am, but figured it out pretty quickly. Needless to say, we got an early start on the day.
We stopped at a Truck Stop Diner somewhere outside Lincoln where our waitress and the cook were having "a spat". Our food took almost 45 minutes to come out. Our waitress was so ticked off that she gave us our entire meal for free. Oh well...
As we were driving through even more corn fields, doing just under 80 on 80, we saw a BIG roadsign on the right side of the highway that said "No stopping or slowing down". Literally in the middle of nowhere (well, OK, in the middle of Nebraska) What the heck does that mean? We rounded a big right-hand corner and found out. There in the middle of nowhere, was a HUGE wooden bridge, over the entire highway. Must have been 100 feet high. With big silver eagles on each end (probably 30 feet high each). Nothing else. No buildings, no roads, just corn. Of course the average Joe would want to stop there. It was so out of place. We were so surprised by this that I don't even remember what the name of it was.
Continuing on towards Cheyenne, Tom mentioned that he'd always wanted to go storm chasing, and to see a Supercell thunderstorm "up close". Given there were supposed to be some good ones cooking down on I-70, we had the computer figure out how to get us down to Goodland Kansas, and then we'd take I-70 the rest of the way to my house. It was back roads for about 150 miles, but fairly quick. Every 20 or 30 miles, we'd go through a small town (and I do mean small). The core of the town was probably about 10 to 20 businesses. Most of them boarded up. But all had flags flying from every utility pole in town. Another goose-bump image in my mind.
[6] We finally got down to Goodland, Kansas, and headed towards Denver. Tom got his wish. We had a couple good cells boil up on us, but they fell apart pretty quickly. Still, I think he was impressed...
[7] We made it to my house at about 5pm that night. It was nice to be home, even though it would only be for about 12 hours. We met friends of mine from Colorado (Gregg, Kathy, Chip, and Gregg's parents) at Three Margaritas for dinner and stories, and headed back home for a brief overnight before jumping on flights to Santa Barbara the next morning. I did a little bit of laundry, dug out an old suitcase, packed what I could, and got ready to leave again.
Monday AM - Got up and headed to the airport for the great unknown. Luckly, my 1K status allowed us to use a very short line to check in (only about 20 minutes). We talked to some folks that took four hours (!) to check in their luggage. I'm really gonna miss that 1K status next year...
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