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).

And 10,000 More To Go

Greetings, faithful readers! Yes, I’m talking to all 3 of you. I come to you tonight from the parking lot of the Flying J service station in Spiceland, Indiana. For those of you who, for some reason, may be unfamiliar with the greater Spiceland area, that’s about 40 miles east of Indianapolis. My plan for today was just to get over the Indiana border, but then I decided I’d keep driving until the end of the Rachel Maddow Show (thank God for the MSNBC simulcast on XM!). As it turned out, just as she was getting to the Best New Thing in the World Today, this Flying J popped up right in front of me.

Today’s adventure seemed to have a natural division right around the Pennsylvania / West Virginia / Ohio border (Yes, I did say West Virginia. Who knew that WV was between PA and OH? So that brings the estimated total for the trip up to 21 states.).