June 2, 2006: Driving Day

My day started off a little later than I had planned and I had to rush around for about an hour getting everything packed and ready to go because I am not returning to the apartment after work today. I did a lot of packing last night and the majority of stuff was ready to go but nothing was in the car yet because we had heavy rains all evening and I didn’t want all of our stuff getting wet. I did remember to pack up my CPAP this morning. I am getting better about that after having had to spend a week without it.

I got to class late but didn’t miss a thing. They hadn’t even started yet. I had emailed one of my classmates to let him know that I was running late and that he should tell the instructor not to wait for me but then I ended up passing him on the way to class at the corner of New Jersey Route 22 and Warrenville Road. He is the first person that I have ever noticed from work out on the road.

Class only went from 10:00 until 3:00 today. That was awesome. We had done almost everything that we had needed to do the past three days and were just doing some light stuff today and a ton of people didn’t even bother coming today and one person didn’t come until 1:30.

On my lunch break today I drove down to Green Brook and found a Jiffy Lube. I have Min’s car and it is a little over due for an oil change so I wanted to make sure that it had it before I took it all over the place today. Her car has been sitting since we took it to Ohio two weeks ago. I was very happy to discover that that Jiffy Lube carries Mobil One. Not all of them do but we always try to use it. I grabbed a quick bite at the Taco Bell that is right there and then went back to class.

I was in the car and pulling out of the parking garage at 3:15. Boy did that make me happy. I made it west and didn’t hit any traffic really until I got to the Delaware Water Gap toll booths where I ended up having to sit for fifteen minutes. But that was my longest delay so I was pretty happy. I finally got a chance to try out Min’s EZPass and it worked great. I am really happy to have that now. It is so convenient and fast.

I took the normal route up to Binghamton but from there I decided to try the more direct and more backwoods route of going northeast on US 88 to Sydney where I caught NY 8 north and took it through the wilderness of eastern New York up into the outskirts of Utica. I think that it went really quickly and that it is the right way to go when you are going to Frankfort from New Jersey. I made really good time and cut a lot of miles.

I was just outside of Frankfort when I talked to Dominica on the mobile and found out that she and her family had passed me going west as they went to get food at Lot-A-Burger in North Utica. So I turned around and took the backroads west back to Utica and drove around Utica on my own. I managed to go straight to the restaurant without much of a problem.

We ate and it was nice because I got a chance to see Madeline and Emily. Min has been able to spend the last two weeks with them but I hardly get a chance to see them at all so at least I managed to a little. I will get to see them next weekend as Dominica’s entire family is coming down to New Jersey and staying with us so that we can all go to New York City and do tourist stuff for the weekend.

We had to run back to Frankfort to get Min’s luggage and to pick up Oreo. Boy was he glad to see me (and vice versa.) He was so glad, in fact, that he accidentally peed on Dominica’s foot when he saw me. We packed everything up and left Frankfort after just fifteen minutes or so.

The trip back to Geneseo was uneventful. We did manage to test the EZPass on the New York Thruway and that worked too so we are really happy about that now. We don’t use any particular toll road very much but we use a bunch of different ones a little all of the time. So having the EZPass work in a bunch of different states is really important to us.

It felt weird coming home to the house in Geneseo. It has been so long since I have been here. It is hard to believe that I have a house out here that I don’t live in. What a bizarre concept. Actually dad gave a tour of the house to my aunt and uncle in law (my dad’s sister’s husband’s sister and her husband) this week to see if they might be interested in renting it while Dominica and I are in New Jersey or wherever we end up. But for now the house remains our Geneseo hotel room.

Pretty much we went straight to bed after arriving. We did a little unpacking but we were both really tired and it was after midnight.

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