Day 1: Vestal, NY to Davenport, IA

Totals Today:

Mileage: 860. 5 miles

Miles to go: 1317.5 miles

Average Speed: 68. 0 mph

Max Speed: 86.5 mph (Dad, not me).

Moving Time: 12 hours 38 minutes

Stopped Time: 36 minutes 44 seconds

It was in the middle of Indiana that I realized how awesome Upstate New York actually is. So often is it the little things that make you realize what you take for granted. On top of that list, are the rolling green hills that seem to endlessly tower over the winding creeks and tributaries for the Finger Lakes, the Susquehanna, the Allegheny and of course, her winding majesty the Mississippi. As we broached Olean, NY, I was amazed by how little of civilization was actually visible from the highway. When you drive through the Greater Binghamton Area, you can see the Oakdale Mall, the power station, and even the Johnson City Sewage Treatment Plant. Between Olean, NY and Erie, PA there were...trees. That's it, save for the occasional power line that crossed the Southern Tier Expressway. We got to the New York/Pennsylvania Border, and it all changed.

There was traffic. There were bad drivers (like Boston, but less visual-spatial sense). There were ugly exhaust-fuming trucks. And, it was FLAT. I don't mean like foothills flat. I felt like I could spit from Erie, Pennsylvania to Davenport, Iowa. Fortunately, I was driving and didn't get to try. I got hollered at on several occasions for reading a text message. I cannot imagine that spitting with my head completely out the window would have merited me a more positive response.

By the way, texting and driving is bad. It is really bad; punishable by the "stupid zapper" that I have yet to invent. Regardless, I am an idiot. I couldn't resist. There was a BBM from someone (take a wild guess) that I wanted to read, and Dad was asleep. SCORE! I thought I could totally get away with it. Apparently, I swerved a little, he woke up, and I get yelled at. Okay, no more texting and driving.

We spent a good part of the day listening to Bill Bryson's book Neither Here Nor There. It was good. It was stupid irreverent travel humor that poked fun at the French for driving around the Arc De Triomphe and, at will, cutting across eight lanes of speeding traffic to exit on one of the 13 possible options. As he said this, I looked around and said to a snoring father and myself, "if the eye could see further than the horizons of corn, maybe rural Indiana and Illinois actually have endearing qualities." Since all I could see was mile upon endless mile of cornfields, Toto and I resigned ourselves to being far too close to Kansas.

So here I am at 11:30 PM in Davenport, Iowa, looking towards 12 hours of Westbound travel in the fishbowl that used to be my car. More tomorrow. Goodnight.

PS- I still get funny looks when I wheel my bicycle sans front wheel into a hotel lobby.