going to the store, anyone want anything?

[ducky]

It's not 2008 again if someone isn't writing a-- (the rest of this message is corrupted)

Day One

Hey. A lot has changed since the last time we were here. Not least of which is that I've learned to be really precious with my time off. That's why, when I finally find a good holiday week to go on a trip - and save some PTO while I'm at it - it's not enough to get a good night's sleep and leave Saturday morning. Instead, I've got to put in long days so I can leave work early on Friday, make a last minute stop near home in Albany NY to get my tires balanced because that wobble just isn't right, and then drive to Ohio.

These Fridays are always the shortest travel days, but they're also the longest. The first and last hours of a road trip are slower by far than any other leg, and I-90 through central New York is - well - I wouldn't call it boring; it's actually beautiful in a lot of places - but it's very, very familiar and always goes on longer than you think. I never feel like the party has really started until I pass Buffalo.

Today I drove with an uncomfortably shaky ride that came and went, even after taking it in. That could just be a sign of aging tires. I watched someone else lose a tire in Buffalo tonight, but I'm sure that didn't mean anything. I also drove into a persistent headwind, which drove down my fuel efficiency, a thing that you become irrationally obsessed with if you own a Prius. In Buffalo, there's a fairly significant southward bend in I-90, and today you could feel that wind off Lake Erie really strongly there. I also saw a black cybertruck and had a good laugh.

Tomorrow, I'm entering the Midwest in earnest. It's hard to document things as I go, since it would be unsafe to take pictures while driving, but hopefully this thread will push me to be a little better about it.

This is where I realize how accustomed I've gotten to the internet of today. I'll grapple with the few photos I have taken later.

[DrunkCat]

It's a shame that cybertruck didn't explode or otherwise catastrophically impact a tree.

[ducky]

Don't worry. I saw another one in Iowa today. Like in the middle of nowhere. On US-20 in Iowa. The middlest of nowhere I've ever

Day Two

Hey. A lot has changed since the last time we were here. For example: I now piss more. On a dose of 200 mg of spironolactone and four cups of coffee a day, my body is a horrible, warm fountain. You'd think I might be used to this by now. I'm not.

The worst part is that lying down reliably squeezes out whatever I'm holding on to. Especially if my posture is at all abnormal. Like, say, I'm sleeping in the driver's seat of a 2018 Prius Prime. To make matters worse, doing anything about it means sliding on my crocs and trudging through the rain to the public bathroom at this rest stop.

What has not changed is my experience with random bursts of sadness. This week, maybe due to anxiety, due to a change in my routine, or maybe for no reason at all, I've been feeling swells of really deep sorrow over the most random things. Didn't go to dinner with my sister on Thursday the night before I left. Taking out the trash. Today I almost didn't treat myself to a Popular Midwestern Fast Food Chain that Rhymes with Bulver's, because the thought of treating myself to a nice meal seemed so heart wrenchingly sad that I was genuinely afraid to risk it.

It is harder to feel sad about lunch when it's in front of you, though.

I also had a stupid navigational mishap. My plan had been to go to the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska, which would see me rest somewhere in Iowa overnight and head over in the morning. Two - no, three - problems. The first is that I finally broke while typing a sentence that started with "two pr" and went to piss again and forgot what I was saying. The second is that the Excel sheet i made a month ago projected me going to bed at 7:30 in Iowa and waking up at 4:30. This is insane and I don't know what I was thinking. The third problem is that there is no universe where I use all the travel time available to me and also get to Ashfall after they open for visitors. In other words, that's out.

But the really unfortunate thing is that I learned this after spending some two or so hours crawling up US-20, a highway which appears to have no function except to deliver wayward twinks to the Ashfall Fossil Beds. It doesn't even have the basic "pull into a parking spot and use a bathroom" type rest stops. So the cherry on top is I had to spend the last hour of the day finding my way to a rest stop on a different highway.

I got to see a wind farm, though. America has a lot of areas that that feel so lonely and dreamlike at dusk. A couple of scattered houses dot the bare, shallow hills. You can see the lights from the one ethanol plant this town is built around. Tonight, on top of all of this, wind turbines towered over everything out the the horizon. Each turbine, for miles and miles, had a blinking red aviation light, and each blinks in perfect sync with all the others, despite the distance.

Tomorrow I will commit either to taking I-80 to salt lake city before turning north to Tacoma, or cutting north now and taking I-90 through the remaining northern states. Until then. I piss and then I sleep and then I piss again.

[SeaWeasel]

Lord have mercy - a road trip while having to piss every hour sounds like a nightmare.