The Day Of

Saturday

Dad, Colleen, and I arose around seven a.m. in order to shower, figure out an apt travel route, and down many cups of dark roast coffee.
Dad cleverly decided to change routes in order to take the “quicker” 600 mile trip that boasted a 12 hour travel time.

This glorious route, in fact, took approximately 16 hours, frosted with icing that looked like a 1 ½ traffic jam over the Brooklyn Bridge. Also sprinkled with dad’s ‘creative’ route out of Wake Forest…

It may very well have been the most entertaining car-ride of my life, proven
by the fact that I didn’t fall asleep until nearly 11:30 p.m. after getting only six hours of sleep. The route, albeit unnecessarily long, was gorgeous, taking us along the Eastern Seaboard through North Carolina, Virginia, Washington D.C., Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Colleen and I listened to the most eclectic mix of music I have ever heard, which included John Cage’s postmodern “Aria,” Radiohead, music from Star Wars and Gladiator, Chumbawumba, Chicago, the Gremlin’s theme song, the Popcorn Song, original harp songs composed by Colleen’s friend WES based off of the “Limberlost” folk-tales, John Rutter choral arrangements, and the Beatles. Can you guess which song we played when we approached D.C. (think UFO’s)? What about New York City (think green monsters)?

Another highlight from the road trip was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury book on tape. We listened to one and a half CD’s of the eight hour CD set. The punch line from that book should be “Caddy smelled like trees.”

Another highlight was the Jersey Turnpike, which isn’t as glorious as its cracked up to be, in terms of tolls and a lack of bathrooms, but it is a wonderful road for speeding and racing. We were the proud participants of a nail-biting car chase that lasted twenty miles in hot pursuit of the notorious Silky Basmati Rice van. Below you can view a very professional, factual synopsis and captivating photographs:

And at the end of the day, we crashed in our Super 8 motel room in Milford, CT.