Timelines

Sometimes when I come back from a trip, it takes a while to get back into the swing of things. And sometimes…

It hasn’t even been a full week since I got back from Wisconsin?!

I feel like I have been back for weeks!

Virginia Bound

Today wraps up my visit to Wisconsin. I didn’t quite get to see everyone I wanted to see, but I did get to interact with more people than usual, so I count it as a win. (And for everyone else, I will do my best to catch you on my next swing through!)

Thank you to everyone who opened up their homes and schedules to visit with me!

And if you think of it—say up a prayer for my flights tonight. I’m supposed to get in late as it is so if anything goes wrong with my connection, it will be a long night at the airport.

Two Types of People

At this point in my life I have stayed at a variety of hotels, some nice and some less nice.

But never before have I stayed at hotel with a giant jacuzzi tub three feet from the bed.

Baffled, I sent a picture of the hotel room to a few different people. Most responded with some version of:

“Well that is weird! Looks almost like a honeymoon suite.”

And then there was the other response:

“Why are you at a pay-by-the-hour motel.”

Flying Roulette

Despite clear skies, flying yesterday felt like playing Russian roulette. I was supposed to arrive in Wisconsin by 9:30 am. I didn’t actually arrive till 4 pm.

It started with the delay from DC to New York—resulting in my first missed flight.

Apparently that was the only flight to Wisconsin that day because initial flight suggestions all involved waiting till 8 am the next day.

After clicking around, I found a flight to Chicago which would get me to a flight to Wisconsin.

But the flight out of New York was delayed…so I missed the connecting flight from Chicago to Wisconsin.

Chicago thankfully flies to Wisconsin more regularly than New York does, but I still didn’t get another flight till 3 pm.

Then we sat on the tarmac for an hour with no explanation.

By the time we landed and I collected my bags (miraculously, they made all the jumps with me!) I had been in various airports for 11 hours.

Travel by plane isn’t all it is cracked up to be.

American Lit

“This book perfectly encompasses the American identity.”

The heavily accented comment caught my attention as I wandered around the university bookstore waiting for TG to finish up buying her Gilmore Girl swag.

“Americans love this book,” the voice continued. It belonged to an older man presumably speaking to his daughter.

Intrigued I scooted closer. Ivy League bookstores really are different! What book would this man highlight? To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee? Walden by Henry David Thoreau?

He paused before picking up his choice. “The most American of American books: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.”

…can’t say that one was on my short list.

Paper Maps

If you’ve followed this blog long, you might know that I have no sense of direction. I get lost walking around my neighborhood. I was the child in driver’s ed who got excited on the day we learned how to read a map because the map showed house and senate districting.

So, it probably comes as no surprise that I didn’t have a physical map handy when I decided to do this random road trip to the northeast. But I wanted one. First, I didn’t trust my phone’s GPS to survive the whole trip. (It did.) And second, I didn’t have a destination, and my phone’s GPS tends to want a destination.

But we couldn’t find paper maps anywhere.

We searched gas stations. We searched Barnes and Nobles. We found paper maps of Iceland. But there were no maps of the United States or the northeastern states.

Moral of the story: order your paper maps before going on an impromptu road trip.

Thoughts on the States

General consensus from the three of us on the road trip: we would absolutely go back to any of the 11 states we drove through, except maybe New Jersey.

TG said she would go back to New Jersey for Princeton. It was our favorite of the Ivy Leagues and she liked the town.

But New Jersey was also the only state where we felt unsafe. We swung by a gas station to do a quick bathroom break and felt very uncomfortable with how closely the three employees were staring at us. To be fair, in retrospect I realize they might have thought we were shoplifters. But at the time, we were just grossed out by their bathroom and really done with driving. And the one did not need to follow us to our car.

So, anyway, 0 points to New Jersey as a stand alone state but points for Princeton.

And 10-would-totally-go-back points for all the other states, especially Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. We didn’t get nearly enough time.

Impromptu Road Trip Recap

What do you do when you realize President’s Day means an unexpected 3 day weekend?

Road trip!

1200 some miles and 11 states later, I’ve officially hit every state in the Northeast. We also had a few side trips to Yale, Harvard, and Princeton so we could judge their law school buildings. (Joke was on us. All of them were gorgeous and we had nothing to make fun of except maybe how poorly marked Harvard and Princeton’s law schools were. Apparently you’re just supposed to recognize them.)

I brought two friends along on my trip. My housemate TG served as the trip photographer and brought all the energy (and DJing skills.) Then Elissa, my co-worker and a detail person, who kept us on track. She did remarkably well with the chaos but any time TG or I mentioned that it was time to find a gas station…or restaurant…or hotel room…she was 3 steps ahead of us and had already found the perfect place.

I couldn’t have done the trip without them.

Princeton > New Jersey

After spending the whole day battling traffic in New York, New Jersey, and the Princeton University campus, I’m tired.

But back in Virginia.

Other states checked off the list: Vermont, New Jersey, and Delaware.

(Plus all the states we had to drive back through to get to Virginia that we already hit this trip: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.)

Yale > Harvard

When TG realized we were close enough to Yale University to pick up a school hoodie (or as she calls it, “Gilmore Girls merch”) we knew we needed to stop.

And then what would be a visit to Yale on this aimless roadtrip without a trip to Harvard? (Guess which one we preferred.)

So far we have hit: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.