Channels of Interstate Commerce

Traveling over 700 miles in a day can get boring. I can usually entertain myself for 2 hours with music from the radio, another 2 hours with talk radio, 2 hours of my own music, and sometimes another hour of podcasts. But when the itinerary calls for 12 hours of driving, that still leaves some gaps. So this time I tried to fill one of them by marveling at that part of western Ohio where the terrain starts to look like a completely different country from where I live:

But then something else caught my eye. On my left, I appeared to be racing someone:

As I was saying before I was interrupted…

The time has come once again to hit the road. But before I get to the details of this new adventure, let me set the stage (there are pictures after the jump, I promise):

Another semester of law school is over and, once again, I find myself in a different place than when it began. While the life of a law student is often compared unfavorably to a war, a marathon, or any number of seemingly impossible unpleasant tasks, I see it differently. Call me naive or oversentimental, but it often feels to me like a love story. So if last fall was “boy meets girl,” this spring had its roots firmly planted in “boy loses girl.”

Dawlurs and Dollars

     

If you look closely, you can see UN territory between the flags.

It's Always Mothra, Mothra, Mothra!

Horseshoe Falls

Bridalveil Falls

American Falls

American Falls

From the Observation Tower

One of many hobbit holes

The smurfs come marching in

From Maid of the Mist

Maid of the Mist

Maid of the Mist

Maid of the Mist

Maid of the Mist

Maid of the Mist

American Falls from Skylon Tower (in Cananda!)

Horseshoe Falls from Skylon Tower (in a whole nother country!)

 

His brother Mothra always gets all the attention!

Torontonto

Torontonoto

General Malaise

A better place to be

I Saw Below Me That Golden Valley

Finally.

After a week of delays, my Great Dixie Adventure culminated with a visit to Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, which was once again open for business. Well, at least the road was open for business. From what I could tell, I seemed to be the only person who knew about that, because I only saw 7 other people during my day in the park. This helped to provide an added measure of privacy and seclusion, because those are two things that Shenandoah, through an unfortunate accident of geography – doesn’t really have going for itself, most of the time.

On the Road Again

I have bad news and good news. The bad news: I appear to have grabbed the wrong AC adapter for my computer and for the moment I have no way to charge it once I use up the remaining 72% of the battery. It looks like I took the adapter from my old computer (you remember the old computer – that’s the one that died in the middle of Utah last summer. It’s the gift that just keeps on giving). Fortunately there also appears to be good news about the bad news: There’s a Best Buy about 20 miles down the road from the middle of Shenandoah National Park and that store purports to carry all manner of AC-adaptive thingers. So my new plan for tomorrow includes getting up a little earlier, doing the first half of the park as scheduled, then taking a 20-mile detour to Harrisonburg, VA before getting back on Skyline Drive and finishing the park in time to get to Blackrock Mountain by sunset. The most disappointing thing about this mistake is that it will certainly introduce more stress into tomorrow morning, much like my quest last summer to “do” Crater Lake one morning and get to a camera store before it closed that evening.

The real good news is that I successfully spent the afternoon in Gettysburg and then made it to world-famous (or not) Front Royal, Virginia without getting a speeding ticket (more on why that’s significant another time).

For I Must Be Traveling On Now

In the immortal words of The Lion King’s Rafiki, “It is time.”

Six months to the day since crossing the Delaware Water Gap and retuning To New Jersey after my 11,000-mile journey west, I again stand upon the precipice of another grand Elantra adventure. Granted, this precipice is not quite as steep, nor is the adventure quite as grand, but it is perhaps more necessary.

For schools in New England, the week of President’s Day is known as February Vacation – a 10-day school recess coming after the post-New Year depression and before the furious 6 weeks of instruction leading to April Vacation and which includes the first rounds of MCAS testing. As Gandalf would say, it is the deep breath before the plunge. Knowing that this would be coming, and suffering from premature cabin fever after last summer’s travels, I began contemplating plans for February Vacation in October. It was never a question of if I would be going somewhere; it was a question of where I’d be going.

The Threads of An Old Life

What a long strange trip it’s been. Over the past 36 hours things have changed drastically as I’ve been plunged headfirst back into the real world. In some ways it feels like I’ve been on the road for years and today marks the beginning of a new life. In other ways it feels like I climbed through the wardrobe into Narnia and while I’ve lived a lifetime in another world, only minutes have passed back here in reality. But to top it off, today I experienced a new phenomenon that really signals the end of the summer – stress.