Sheep Guarding Llama

Today I just worked from dad’s house on his computer in the office.  It was a very quiet day after so much excitement the last several days.

We did drive over to Geneseo for a late breakfast or early lunch at the Omega Grill.  Vicki, the owner, is in Greece for her wedding that is coming up in about a week so we did not get to see her.  There are two pictures of Liesl up on the milk cooler.  I got the Swiss patty melt with the veggie patty which I love there.  This is the only place that I can get anything like this.

After lunch we swung into Tim Hortons to grab some coffee, both ready made as well as grounds so that we can make coffee at the house.  We each got a donut as well.  I love Tim Horton’s donuts but after having lived in Texas for several months now they just don’t compare to what we can get down there.  I’ve become quite spoiled with Round Rock donuts and have little interest in eating any others.

Our big excitement this afternoon came in the middle of the afternoon when I was sitting at dad’s desk and he was working on the laptop desk and suddenly I could hear some serious creaking in the walls.  It sounded like a raccoon was trapped in the wall and wanted to get out.  Then the desktop started swaying and the monitors were moving back and forth.  It went on for so long that we were able to talk about it and look outside for large machinery to attempt to figure out what was happening.  It didn’t take long for us to guess that it was an earthquake.  We’ve had them before here but never this strong.  This was very, very noticeable and it probably lasted for about forty seconds.

The news, of course, cannot get earthquake data that quickly so I went straight to Twitter and, within seconds, had tons of information from people all over the northeast United States and Canada talking about the quake.  People were reporting having felt it from Michigan and Ohio up to Montreal.  Ever since that incident with the fake shooter and RIT and the complete lack of news coming from official channels I have learned that Twitter is the best resource for up-to-the-minute news reporting, especially on natural disasters like this.  Twitter worked awesomely today.

It was not long at all before the USGS had posted information on the quake.  It was epicentered just a little bit north northeast of Ottawa on the Quebec side of the line and had been a 5.5 on the Richter Scale.  Reports of people who had felt it were coming in from all over both countries including New Jersey, Thunder Bay and Long Island later on.  This is one of the biggest quakes to hit this part of the continent in a very long time.  One area registered aftershocks every few minutes for almost another hour.

I called Dominica and Francesca who were out shopping but they did not feel anything.  Dominica’s father’s office (or one of them) in Utica or Rome had some structural damage and had to evacuate the building until a structural engineer could verify the solidity of the structure.  So the quake was stronger than you might think.  Lots of office workers in Ottawa and Toronto evacuated their buildings and I saw a video of fish tank water splashing out from someone in Ottawa on YouTube.  They sure got it a lot more powerfully than we did.

My family in Ohio even called to see if we had felt it.  So the Canton Akron Metro area felt it enough to notice and feel that they needed to call to see where all it could be felt.  This was impressively big.  This is one of those events that people from here will mention over and over for years to come.  I’m very glad that I got to be here for it rather than just hearing about it on the news from Texas.

After work this evening, dad and I drove over to Livonia to Eric and Amanda’s house.  We dropped off four computers, a hard drive and a Windows XP installation CD.  That is a bit of stuff that needed to be moved and is now out of the way at dad’s house.  Less to worry about and their house was roughly on our way so that worked out pretty well.

From Livonia we drove straight out to Frankfort.  We did stop at McDonald’s in Canandaigua, up by the Thruway, to grab a quick dinner while we were on the road.  I have had more McDonald’s in the last several days than I have likely had it since moving to Texas!  I’m going to be all set with Mickey D’s fare for quite a while, I believe.

It was around ten when we got to the Tocco’s in Frankfort.  Liesl was so excited to see me when I came in the door that she tried to jump up and down and ended up just squatting on the floor and almost falling over!

Dominica loaded up dad’s car with he luggage and Liesl just clung to me while we sat on the couch in the living room.  She was not going to let go of me at all.  We were only at the Tocco’s for around fifteen minutes or maybe twenty.  Not much time at all.  We are all very tired and are looking forward to getting home and getting to bed.

I drove most of the way back from Frankfort.  Dad had driven to Canandaigua and I drove out the rest of the way east.  I drove back to Avon and had dad take over, after having gotten in a short nap, to drive the rest of the way home as I was completely exhausted and could not drive any further.

It was around one thirty when we managed to get home and get off to bed.  Very late but it is great to have my family back again.  Dominica and Liesl slept in the guest bedroom while Oreo came in to the television room with me and slept on the mattress on the floor.

Today is the big day, the Ralstons return home to America after fourteen months in the Congolese jungle!

Liesl is feeling some better today.  Not great but she appears to be improving.  She is still lethargic and not herself, though.

I got up at five thirty this morning, got packed, showered and downstairs for coffee by seven.  Not bad for getting just five hours of sleep.  I am not good at packing either – good thing that I had very little that I needed to pack.

I got the Mazda PR5 all loaded up and then stopped by in the kitchen for some coffee.  John and I hung out for a little bit – a little longer than I had anticipated so I was running later than I had planned when I went out and hit the road in the Mazda to go towards Virginia.

I was a bit later leaving Arnold, Maryland than I had planned to be.  I watched my Blackberry carefully in case the Ralstons were attempting to call me, but I did not hear from them during my entire drive.

The trip from Arnold to Dulles took quite a bit longer than I had thought that it was going to take and longer than any of my planning mapping software had predicted.  I had to drive right through the middle of Washington which is never fun and especially not during rush hour.  It went well, though, and I made it through with few delays.

Once I was out on the west side of the city and into Virginia things took much longer than I had anticipated.  The Maryland and Washington portions of the journey went surprisingly according to plan.  In Virginia I drive from Alexandria on I395 up VA110 to I66 in Arlington and took the expressway out to Dulles.  This bit of the trip took an amazingly long time.  I guess that I had no idea how far Dulles was from Arlington.

Fortunately the amount by which I mis-estimated the travel time out to Dulles was about exactly the same amount by which I mis-estimated the amount of time that it was going to take them to get through bagged claim and American customs.  When I was on the final approach to Dulles I called Mary, Art’s mom, to get the most up-to-date arrival and flight information, but she did not have that.  So I called dad who did some quick research and found that Dulles reported their flight as “still in customs.”  At this point it was right around nine forty in the morning.  The trip out from Arnold had taken more than two hours and they had been on the ground since five minutes till eight.

While I was still on the phone with dad Art called me to tell me that they were ready to be picked up.  Talk about perfect timing!  They were at the door that I was approaching.  I told Art to run outside so that I could see him.  I was able to pull up right to the very first door and there they were.  The timing was literally within seconds.  I was able to drive from Arnold to Dulles and they did not have to wait a single second for me.  Had I been any earlier or any later they would have to have waited some time for me to get to the arrival point to pick them up.

We quickly packed as much into the Mazda as we could.  Brenda was also picking them up as they had so much stuff that two vehicles were needed.  Brenda was in the parking garage so Danielle and Michael went with her to get her car with the last of the luggage.  We were going to a home nearby so that the Ralstons could get showered and cleaned up after their very, very long trek from the jungles of the Congo to Ethiopia to Rome to Virginia.  The last stretch was sixteen hours on a plane so you can imagine how badly they wanted to be able to shower.

So since Art and I did not have a GPS we just got basic directions (head to Sterling, Virginia on route 7) and we were to get detailed directions to the house once we were away from the airport and everyone else was out of the parking garage.

We got out and were several miles away from the airport before we managed to get a hold of Brenda and Danielle to find out where we were supposed to go.  The directions were simple so we headed out on our way.

It only took a little bit before we were pretty suspicious that we were lost.  The road that we needed to look for never came up and we just drove for miles and miles.  We knew that we had gone quite a bit farther than it was supposed to be to the house.

We ended up stopping at the brand new Wegmans in Leesburg to regroup, get new directions and use the restrooms.  The Wegmans was a new development and in a huge new “village” development, which was gorgeous, but not being done yet it was extremely confusing and we had entered through a one way so we were kind of trapped and unable to return the way that we had come.  So we spent a good fifteen minutes just trying to get back to route seven!

At this point we got new directions that were nothing at all like the original directions.  Instead of going towards Leesburg on route seven we were to go away (a pretty significant point) and the name of the road that we were looking for was the wrong name and that wasn’t the road that comes off of seven anyway.  So we were to head all the way back and start over with new directions.

We finally got out of the Wegmans parking lot and on to seven in the only direction that seemed to be available to us.  This took us back past the exit for Dulles (so we thought) but we were never able to find the new road that they had described “just past the Dulles exit.”  So we ended up driving for miles and miles getting not all that far from Winchester, Virginia far out to the west.

We decided that this just had to be wrong and we knew that we had never been out here before.  Everything just felt wrong but we could not figure out what could have happened since we had gone back past the Dulles exit even though we did not recognize anything along the way.

We decided that if we made it all of the way back to Wegmans and never found the road that we were looking for that we would just pull back into Wegmans and let everyone find us there.  The whole purpose of this leg of the journey was only to get showers in and Danielle and Michael had already had theirs and Art was getting less and less keen on taking one now as we had already lost an hour or more and could have been well on the way back home to New York at this point.  The total journey home is under five hours so losing even one hour here was pretty significant and very much taking away from time at home.

We never found the road and when we reached the Wegmans we came to the horrible realization that it was on the wrong side of the road from what we were expecting.  We surmised that somehow, although we could not figure out how given the existence of the Dulles exit, that we had gone the wrong way on seven.  So instead of stopping we continued on to the east to see what we could find.

There was quite a bit more driving to do since we were only now beginning our original “turn around” move having been completely in the wrong direction all of this time since leaving Wegmans.  Once we continued on we came upon the Dulles exit again (yes, there is one on either side of Wegmans roughly equidistant from one another!) and figured that we were on the right tract now.

We found the road that we needed, Algonkian, which through us off because we thought that everyone had been mispronouncing Algonquian.  We turned onto Algonkian and started looking for the road that we were told to turn onto from it.

Once again, we got lost.  We drove Algonkian way past Potomac Falls.  Luckily we did not go too far because it loops back around onto seven and that would have cause so much more confusion.  So Art called to get a new set of directions.  It turns out that we weren’t given the next road name yet so there wasn’t even a hope of us finding the road that we were looking for.  It also turned out that no one at the house, including the locals, even knew the name of the road that they were off of and could not figure out how to ascertain it.

So at this point, after about an hour and a half of driving around to find a place just five minutes from the airport, we found out that we had not yet, even now, been given the most basic instructions yet for getting to the house!  At least they could have looked up the road name when they drove down it an hour and a half ago.

So now, since no one knew where the house was, they had to send someone out to sit on the side of Algonkian and wait for us to come by since directions could not be given.  That sped things up and took only about ten minutes for us to find them and follow them back to the house.  At that point we read the road names for ourselves and while the final road name was close enough for us to have likely found it this time (had we been given the intermediate road name, “Winding”) it was still incorrect.

We pulled into a parking space and immediately Art and I both looked around and noticed that the landmark given to find the house (should we somehow get there without any road names) – an old Chevy truck – would have just confused us further as there was no Chevy truck anywhere to be seen but immediately we both saw a Ford way down the road that “couldn’t be it” since they had been so specific in that the pickup was a Chevy.  But no, that was the landmark.  Art also realized that we had the wrong town name.

So, after two hours of driving around looking for this house, Art was finally able to run in and take a shower.  In the end we had the wrong direction on the highway, wrong destination road name (twice), missing exit off of highway, missing exit off of Algonkian, wrong town name and incorrect landmark.  We literally would have had been luck with no information except the amount of time that it took them to arrive from the time that they left the airport.  We would have at lest had a rough region to look in with that information.

Art showered and we were back on the road pretty quickly.  I had been hoping to have been able to have gotten online for a few minutes in order to communicate with work and let them know my status and to turn on my out of office notifications which I had expected to have been doing several hours ago so now I was getting a little bit desperate to get online.  No luck at the house, though, so I was planning to hit a McDonald’s or something quite soon to get some WiFi access.

From the house we needed to run a few miles up the road to go to the outlet mall so that Danielle could go shoe shopping as she did not have any shoes or footwear that fit at all and desperately needed some right away.  That actually worked out pretty well, timing wise, as there was a Panera Bread right next door.  So I ran in Panera to get online while they all shopped (Art, Danielle, Brenda and Michael.)

I managed to get a ton of work done with my time in the restaurant.  The WiFi worked great and I was really productive.

After the show shopping was done, Brenda took Danielle and Michael and got right on the road towards New York.  Art walked over to Panera and found me.  We packed up the laptop and headed out ourselves.  We figured out later that we probably were thirty minutes or so behind everyone else at this point.

We got on US15 headed north, which is a crazy beautiful drive through northern Virginia headed up towards the Maryland border and all through Maryland.  It only starts getting not so nice once you enter Pennsylvania.  We stopped for gas at some weird, out of the way backwoods gas station and were in pretty good shape for our journey at that point.  We had run through a lot of fuel in our search for the house earlier.

We got up to Harrisburg and Art could not resist the lure of American cuisine any longer so we stopped in to McDonald’s.  He has been looking forward to this moment for a very long time.

We ate while driving and right as we left McDonald’s I got called by SpiceWorks to find out that I am speaking at SpiceWorld 2010 in Austin this October.  There had been some confusion and they had thought that I knew that I was speaking and I thought that they had enough speakers and had decided not to have me speak this year since I had spoken last year.   So this is very good news.

At this point the rain started coming down pretty hard but did not last for long.  That was the only adverse weather conditions that we experienced on the entire journey.

The trip was uneventful up to Willamsport.  We were making decent time although everyone else was far ahead of us at this point.  In Williamsport, however, as we would discover later, somehow we missed a turn and ended up taking 220 West far out of our way.  Actually this happened because we had missed a turn in Shamokin Dam and in looking for that turn where it was not supposed to be we ended up missing another turn.

So we lost at least an hour driving way out of our way on 220.  That was not fun.  We discovered that we were on the wrong road right as 220 turned into a dead end.  This is getting to be the longest drive from Dulles to Mt. Morris ever.

We got back on the right road, eventually, after taking several really, really tiny backwoods trails to wind our way through the Pennsylvania hills.  It was some seriously gorgeous country but slow going.

We were still looking for US15 in Pennsylvania when everyone else arrived in Mt. Morris.  So there were several hours ahead of us at this point.  Depressing.

The rest of the drive went fine.  We stopped in Kanona for gas, as always; it is the best place to stop on this drive.

We got to Mt. Morris to Art’s parents’ house and had some pizza before Art and Danielle drove me up to my dad’s house and dropped me off.  They are taking the Mazda PR5 indefinitely so I am sans automobile while in New York.

It was late when I got in to dad’s.  I’m not sure of the time but I am guessing that it was around eight or nine.  It was definitely dark out.

The original plan was to have made an attempt to run out to Frankfort tonight to pick up Dominica, Liesl and Oreo and to bring them back to Peoria, but that was based on the original schedule that put us arriving at dad’s as early as four or five o’clock with six being a pretty realistic time.  We lost at least five hours today between customs, the Virginia getting lost and the Pennsylvania getting lost.  It has been one of those days.

Dad and I hung out for a little while.  I was off to bed on the early side.  It has been a long week for me.

The original plan for today was to be up and in to Dulles, Virginia first thing this morning to pick up the Ralstons from the airport.  That did not happen as their flight from Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo to Addis Ababa in Ethiopa was two hours late yesterday causing them to miss their flight to Rome and on to Dulles.  So instead of today being a travel day, it is, instead, a day to hang out in Maryland and relax.  A nice change a pace indeed.

Since I was originally set to travel today and not tomorrow I am instead working today rather than tomorrow.  So I got up and got signed right in to work.

Brian drove down from Philadelphia today so that he could spend some time with John and I since we are all so close, which is a rarity.  It took him all morning to drive down, it is almost a three hour drive down depending on the route and traffic.  He arrived just before noon.

Today was not quite as hot as yesterday, but it is still rather warm for Maryland in June.  Definitely not hot like Irving but the humidity is really high and we are really feeling it.

The morning, up until noon-ish, was really nothing but me working for the office.  Then, round about twelve thirty, John, Brian and I went out and took John’s 1,800 hp Pratt and Whitney jet turbine powered racing boat out for a trip over to Deep Creek for lunch.

First we took several laps around the Magothy River hitting around one hundred and ten miles per hour which is, by far, the fastest that I have ever been in a boat, let alone a tiny, little balsa wood boat on a river!  Likely the fastest that I have ever been is around fifty-five miles per hour in a small speed boat out on one of New York’s Finger Lakes.

After speeding around for a little bit we went over to Deep Creek for lunch.  I have not had a chance to eat at Deep Creek in many years.  Definitely not for three and quite possibly not for four or five years!  Back when John lived at “973”, just up the street from Deep Creek, we would eat there all of the time.  It was our usual haunt and we even walked there at least once.

When we tried to dock at Deep Creek we realized that John had accidentally left the electric, slow-speed propellers in the water and the high speed racing across the Magothy had ripped the port propeller off.  That made maneuvering in Deep Creek rather difficult and we had no real way of getting close to the dock.  The only chance that we had was making several runs at it with Brian attempting to grab the dock as we passed.  That did not work so well.

We ended up using the tide to push us slowly in so that we would not cause a bigger disaster by crashing in at high speed.  Then we had lunch.  It took us so long to get out to Deep Creek, though, that John had a post-lunch conference call that he needed to be on and he was on that all while Brian and I were eating.

I have discovered that the velvet cream crab soup at Deep Creek is my favourite.  I don’t think that I have ever had it before, but I am certain that I will be having it again.  Wow that was some amazing soup.

Getting out of Deep Creek was a little bit of a challenge as we didn’t have our steering propeller.  We had to maneuver the boat against the dock by hand and literally “shove off” to get far enough from the dock to fire up the turbine “safely.”  Then we took a run with the boat going over one hundred and twenty miles per hour during which Brian used his iPhone to grab a video of me riding in the back of the boat.  It starts off slowly and you can see the plume of water form behind me and get bigger and bigger as we go.  It was very cool.  John kicked on the afterburners too which were insanely hot.  Even at those high speeds the back of the boat is crazy hot from the turbine.

We got back to the house and I got right back to work.  Brian hung around for another hour or so before getting on the road back north.  We had some good opportunity to get some work done.  It was a good use of the time today.  The Ralstons being stuck an extra day ended up working out very well for me both that I got to hang out here and that I got some much needed rest before another long day of driving.

Today, the Tocco clan, including Dominica and Liesl, went to Enchanted Forest Water Safari in Old Forge, New York for the day.  The Water Safari was not there when I was a child, but I do have fond memorize of going to Enchanted Forest with my parents when I was very, very little.  I remember walking through the woods, taking the little train that ran around the perimeter and going on the very small ferris wheel out in the woods.  It was not a fancy amusement park but it was well suited to little kids.

While out at Enchanted Forest today, Liesl developed a fever and was not feeling well at all.  Once they realized how hot she had become they left the park right away and headed back to Frankfort.

Mostly we just relaxed this evening at the Nicklin house.  It could not be too wild of an evening since I have to get up quite early tomorrow and get on the road.  The Ralstons are still on target to get in to Dulles tomorrow morning so the original plans for today are just pushed off until tomorrow.

We stayed up probably a bit too late this evening talking.  It was not all that late, though, I probably headed off to bed around about midnight or maybe even a little earlier.  I have to get up at roughly five thirty tomorrow which is not terrible but I have been working pretty hard on making up for lost sleep so even though it is not that early I still need to be careful not to push it too much.

I have been reading, and quite enjoying, the business classic “The Peter Principle” from the late 1960s which lead to another classic that I really like, “The Dilbert Principle.”  It is a pretty short book which I plan to finish reading this week.  I’ve wanted to read it for a decade and just never got around to doing so.  So I am happy to finally be getting it out of the way.

Quite late, probably around eleven, Dominica called to tell me that Liesl’s fever had gotten quite bad and that she thought that she needed to go to the hospital.  Dominica gave her a cold bath to bring her temperature down but she was way too warm and we did not feel that it was worth the risk of having them go to sleep in case she got warmer during the night.

So not long before midnight Dominica took Liesl to the emergency room in Utica.  They had made it into urgent care but urgent care would not see a child under two years old so that time was all lost and they had to go to the emergency room anyway.

It was a busy night at the hospital and it took a very long time before they were able to see Liesl for more than a few minutes.  They took her temperature right away and it was one hundred and four point six!  No wonder she has been unhappy all day.  They gave her some Motrin and then she was stuck waiting for hours before she really got to see a doctor.

Once she finally did get to see a doctor, they determined that she had a double ear infection.  Poor little girl.  No wonder she is not happy.  She got some medicine and her fever was down a bit – to one hundred and two point five – before they came home early in the morning.

There is also a virus going around that causes a high fever and may be the cause of the fever rather than the ear infections.  That is expected to pass in another twenty four hours or so and is nothing to be concerned about.  If it is the virus that caused her fever then she is lucky that that caused her to get checked out for the ear infection when it might have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Top legal minds at the National Pork Board are confused about the existence of unicorn meat.  I’m guessing that a diet of nothing but bacon has done wonders to the brains of these distinguished lobbyists.  Perhaps the pork board hires small children to be their legal council?  How does the reality of unicorns sneak by these people?  What can we, the adults, learn from this debacle?  We learn that the pork people are both evil and mentally challenged.  While we can provide any actual proof one would assume that the correlation among the things we know (evil, dumb, eat lots of pork) is likely.

Today is my second father’s day and I am very sad to not be able to spend it with Liesl.  Liesl (I suspect Dominica’s involvement here) did leave me a Father’s Day card on my desk back in Las Colinas before she left for New York, at least.  Today would also have been my mother’s birthday.  She was born on a father’s day as well.  It just occurred to me, as I write this, that my mother and my daughter were both born on floating holidays and that they were both born on the least likely window where the holiday was on their birthday on the year that they were born.

I managed to sleep in quite a bit this morning.  Oh boy did I ever need that.  I probably slept for ten hours or more last night and woke up on my own this morning.  I feel so much better.  I am quite surprised that that is all the more sleep that my body felt that it needed given that taking tonight’s rest in combination with Thursday night’s rest I have still not quite gotten two nights’ worth of sleep and that doesn’t even take into account the fact that I did not sleep Friday night whatsoever!

Once I was up and showered and went down stairs to join the land of the living, John, Frankie (who is now six and a half) and I went out to Annapolis to do some quick shopping and to grab some lunch.  We tried going to our old stand-by, the Double T Diner, in Annapolis but as it is father’s day the place was completely packed even though it was just eleven thirty.  So instead we went up route two to a pizza place up there and got lunch.

After lunch we went back to the house and I worked for a while, sitting at the desktop that they keep hooked up in the kitchen.  I am working today so I need to be connected.

Later in the evening, Tommy, Cookie and George came over to the house and the guys headed out on John’s fishing boat to putz around the Magothy.  John just got a new satellite positioning system for the boat and infrared camera so we were out playing with that.  That is some serious cool stuff.

We hung out on the river for a few hours then came back and enjoyed an evening on the back deck.  It was good to get to see everyone.  I haven’t been down to Annapolis since some time before Liesl was born.  Maybe almost a year before Liesl was born for the Christmas party!

We hung out until pretty late.  Then off to bed.  I’m beat and still have a bit of sleep on which to catch up.

I ended yesterday’s post with me heading out from the office to get the car packed and to get myself out onto the road.  Jen got to the office about forty-five minutes before I was able to escape so she sat in the parking lot waiting for me to get out. Then she followed me over to the apartment and helped me to switch everything over between cars that I needed and to pack and load the Mazda for its long trip north.  Altogether that took around two hours.

It was seven forty-five when Jen hit the road with the X3 heading down to Houston and I hit the road with the Mazda on my way towards Arkansas.  That was about two hours later than I had hoped.  I had meant to have been home and really, really ready to jump into the car even before Jen had arrived but instead I was way too long at the office.  This is going to be that much longer of a night.

So my drive began having gotten only five hours of sleep, working a ten hour or more day, packing the car in the crazy heat (of the parking garage with no air flow) for two hours and then hitting the road at a quarter until eight.

The beginning of the drive went great.  I made very good time across Texas to Texarkana where I crossed into Arkansas and fueled up for the first time.  It was around midnight when I entered Arkansas.  I had been hoping to have been at least to Little Rock by this point if not already nearing the Mississippi flood plain.

Driving across northeast Texas and then diagonally across Arkansas is one long, boring drive – especially at night.  There is just nothing to look at at all.  By the time that I crossed the Mississippi River into Memphis, Tennessee I was getting pretty tired.  It was a long day and knowing how much drive was in front of me did not help.

In Jackson, Tennessee I decided that I was just too tired and that I should take advantage of it being a small town and just find a hotel and call it a night there.  My original plan did not have me leaving until tomorrow so was still well ahead of the game.

I stopped and talked to the Comfort Suites in Jackson and discovered that there were no hotel rooms in town as there was a basketball tournament going on.  Well, that wasn’t good.  I was really looking forward to a bed at this point.  I was pretty drowsy.  So I went to the gas station right next door to the Comfort Suites, fueled up, grabbed some drinks and talked to the girl working at the desk for half an hour to give myself a break from the car.  I figured that that might help with waking me up if I stood up and talked for a while.

It did help and I was back on the road shortly.  If I remember correctly it was probably about four to four thirty in the morning when I was in Jackson.  Back on the highway again for me.

I continued on to Dickson, Tennessee – having stayed there on my last trip through the area – and figured that I would stop there to get some sleep even though it was not light out and getting pretty late for getting in to a hotel.  The Comfort Suites there was really nice last time and quite affordable so I was hoping that it would work out favourably again on this trip.

While in Dickson I managed to get off at the wrong exit for the hotel and, by the time that I had trekked around looking for it and stopped to get fuel, I was wide awake again and decided that getting a hotel room now would not be prudent so I just decided to press on again.

The rest of Tennessee went quite well heading east along route forty.  At this point, the Sue Grafton novel “U is for Undertow” which I had been saving until I was quite tired, went into the CD player and I entertained myself with that for about three additional hours.  That helped a lot.

Dominica and I had last listened to the first nine or more hours of “U is for Undertow” back in December when we drove down to Houston together.  We always do this – listen to books on CD while doing really long overland drives together.  The problem is that we seldom do long drives together and Dominica does not like to listen to nearly as much as I do during a single trip or she is getting sleepy and cannot pay attention to the book and so I can’t listen as she will miss large portions of it.  This seems like it couldn’t possibly be a real problem for an eleven hour book on a twenty three hour drive but I think that that highlights just how much of the time I am stuck driving while she is dozing off!

I had to go back and cover about one hour of the book that I had already heard back in December just to re-acclimate myself with the material.  I finished the book somewhere around of the end of the road in Tennessee.  I definitely think that this book is better than the last one, “T is for Trespass”, and I am happy to get a little more of the character development that was lacking in the last one.

I got on to interstate eighty one heading northeast from Knoxville and off towards Virginia.  Before reaching the Virginia line, however, I got stuck in some serious traffic and basically came to a complete stop.  I lost possibly as much as an hour waiting for traffic to clear up.  When it finally started moving slowly my fuel was pretty low so I decided to just get off at the very first exit that I could so that I could get some fuel.

I happened to pick just the perfect exit, maybe thirty minutes before the Virginia border, to discover what had happened.  The exist was packed full of people standing all over, as if the carnival had come to town, with police and utility crews everywhere.

It turns out that there was a major piece of over-sized equipment being moved up the highway.  Moving from Tennessee to Virginia.  The move was publicized in the newspaper so everyone was out for this big, local event.  Normally the thing moved during the night but, just my luck, today was the one time that they needed to move it during the day.  The thing took up the entire highway and was the length of many tractor trailers.

I stopped at the gas station across the street from where the thing was parked.  The gas station (and everywhere else) was packed with onlookers checking out the spectacle.  I talked to some of the locals and they filled me in.  This is a massive component of a nuclear power plant, they believed, being hauled up to Virginia.  They had to pour new concrete on some parts of the highway just to get it to be able to handle the weight – presumably on the bridges.  The utility crews had to travel along with it raising the power lines as they go.  The thing can’t go faster than ten miles per hour.

So that was at least interesting even if it was pretty annoying that I got stuck in that traffic on my long drive.  The last thing that I needed was to lose an hour sitting pretty much still in the blazing sun.  The air conditioning is just barely working on the Mazda at this point.  Jen thinks that we have a leak in the air conditioning system which seems pretty likely.

I was doing okay for the first thirty or forty minutes into Virginia but by the time that I hit Marion I was getting very drowsy.  I had to start working very hard to stay awake.  I stopped for food and fuel and made many rest stops where I got out and walked around for a few minutes to get myself pumped back up to drive.

The constant stops definitely slowed my progress but it did its job of keeping me awake enough to keep driving.  I can’t give up in Virginia, so close to my final destination.  The exhaustion lasted until I passed through the north of the mountains and switched from route eighty one onto sixty six heading east into Washington.  I kept fighting to stay awake until I passed Manasses when I magically got another wind and was in great shape as I drove through northern Virginia and into the nation’s capital.

The drive through DC went very smoothly – it has been quite some time since I needed to navigate the streets going across town.  Getting from Virginia and out to Maryland efficiently is a bit of an art in Washington.  I was quite pleased with myself for getting through town so well.

I got out to Annapolis as John had just gone out to the Chinese Buffet up on route two with Tristan and the kids so I drove up there and joined them for a quick dinner.  So it was probably around seven when I actually got to Annapolis – twenty three hours after having left Irving, Texas and thirty eight hours after I had gotten up with just five hours of sleep.

After dinner it was back to the Arnold house on the Magothy River.  I was pretty wired after having been in the car for so long so Michelle and I stayed up for a few hours and had a bottle of wine in the Florida room before everyone turned in for the night around eleven or so.  What a long day.  But I made it, all the way to Arnold, Maryland in a single go.  Now the big driving is out of the way and I don’t need to do it again for several weeks and I will have Francesca to split the driving with next time.

It is really good that I did not have to stop on this trip up because instead of arriving at some crazy hour and being worthless all day Sunday I will now have all day tomorrow to visit with the Nicklins as well as time to really recover from the drive before having to do a lot more driving on Monday.