Today's time: 10:27 hours
Total trip: 644.7 miles
Spend too much time driving in central Pennsylvania, and you start to believe that the entire world is populated solely by A) cars, and B) cows. I was a little ashamed of being excited to stop at a McDonald's, just for the sake of seeing actual human faces.
It does make for a very pretty drive, however, though you wouldn't be able to tell that from these photos, as I need to work on being able to take pictures from a moving car.
But some of them did come out decently.
Ignore the splats; this was before I cleaned my windshield.
Night draws down quickly in the mountains, and my body and brain let me know just as quickly that they had been hoping for a little more than the maybe two hours of sleep I had gotten the night before. Luckily, within the past 24 hours, I have discovered the sugar-and-cream alchemy that is capable of transforming coffee from a cup of mud into quite a palatable beverage. Fortuitous timing, I thought, since now I expect to be largely subsisting on the stuff, at least for the next three weeks.
Even so, as I traversed pretty much the entire breadth of the state along I-80, I started to suspect that I was not so much driving towards Pittsburgh as I was questing for the elusive city of Brigadoon, or maybe a landlocked Atlantis. Being from New England, I'm very unused to the concept of a highway that stretches so long without running into anything interesting. And I do mean "stretches"; I drove past a number of roadwork sites, and I am not convinced that there weren't crews busily inserting miles of new roadway to make the distance between me and my destination even longer than it had previously been.
I know, I'm going to love the Great Plains.
But Pittsburgh is not Brigadoon (more's the pity?), and I did finally reach it, or at least its outskirts. That's all I've seen of the city so far, and it was in the dark, but I can tell you this: they love Halloween. I've never seen such intensely Halloween-decorated houses. Jen says they're the same way about Christmas, but I'll tell you that I would much rather have seen Christmas decorations than houses with yards filled - filled - with plastic gravestones, ghosts, skeletons, Jack the Rippers, anything else you can think of. Especially when these houses are lining a narrow, windy, hilly, unfamiliar road, and especially when they give way suddenly to the largest cemetery you've ever seen, hundreds or thousands of gravestones strewn across a stretch of hills that loom over the roadway and look thoroughly creepy under a near-full moon.
Yeesh.
But I made it, and slept, and now am off to explore the city, provided that I can decrypt the (I think) exceptionally impenetrable bus routes/schedule.
The Trip So Far
View Larger Map
5 comments:
Bethany,
I think it's a bit odd that you would be standing in the passing lane just to get a good shot. But if that's what it takes.
You gotta live on the edge, man. Especially for photography.
I like how you put the state photos off to the side, that works a lot better.
do i detect the tones of mary russell's influence on these paragraphs?
... methinks i do.
Maybe subconsciously, but I don't think so. I haven't gotten farther into the book than I was at Starbucks the other night.
Post a Comment