Day One -- Off to Pennsylvania

Well, we got off to a rocky start. I don’t mean the start of the day. I mean the whole day and its position as the start of the trip. The day began in traffic, four miles from home. We had an interminable wait to get onto Grove Street. Then driving along Grove Street was infuriatingly slow. When we finally got on the highway, the luggage bubble on top of the van was making so much noise when I got up to 60, I had Parker poke his head out the window (yes, while I was going 60 – what good would it have done otherwise?) to check on it. He said that the bubble was rising up a little. That heightened the paranoia I already had that the bubble was either going to fly off, explode, or cause the van to tip over. So, we stopped off at Jeff’s work, which is right on the way. He drove his car with Parker in the passenger seat looking back at us to see whether the bubble really was lifting up. He said it was only a slight lift, but it was a lift. So we drove to the Home Depot at the exit for the train station (Southeast?), and bought bungees and straps and fastened that bubble so tightly to the van that the only way it could fall off was to pull the van’s side rails with it (the beginning of a new paranoia).

With that settled, Jeff went back to work, and we were on our way. After talking with Jeff via cell phone, and telling him how he had saved the day once again, we heard a strange noise coming from the roof. We pulled into the next rest stop, and I secured the end of the securing strap so that it would no longer flap in the breeze.

We were on our way again. We’d left at 10 a.m., and it was now 1 p.m., and we were all hungry, so we pulled in another rest stop to eat. Only, I couldn’t find the bread. It had fallen to the back, and I didn’t dare open the hatch for fear of never getting it closed again. Also, I had put the mayo in the big cooler, which we couldn’t get to, and the knives for the peanut butter and jelly and the spoons for the yogurt were buried even deeper than the cooler. We ate turkey pastrami and a piece of fruit.

Our first traffic jam occurred shortly after lunch. It was nothing special, just slow traffic, very slow. We inched along, but we moved. Then traffic was moving again, with our never having seen a reason for its slowing. But we let that go, because we were moving. We made it through the 125 miles of I-84 and made our way to I-81.

Three point three miles from our exit off I-81, traffic stopped. No inching forward; just stopped. After 10 minutes or so it moved a little, and then every once in a while it inched forward, but mostly it stopped. It took half an hour to drive 2 miles. Then we realized (with the help of the New Yorkers in front of us) that traffic was backed up for those staying on 81, where the construction was. We followed the New Yorkers down the edge of the road to our exit that led us to I-80. Free at last. By now I was so disgusted with traffic that I no longer thought much about the bubble.

When we ran into traffic again, I wasn’t as bothered. Parker had put “The Crazies” on the DVD player, so I just watched it with the kids while I drove at .2 mph. Once traffic started going again, the storm started. Wind, rain, lightning – oh, we had it all. By this time, our 6.5 hour drive was looking to be an eight hour drive. The rain got so bad and the whiteouts from passing semis so unbearable, I pulled off the next exit and continued watching “The Crazies” with the boys.

When we finally started going again, our day was looking to be a 10-hour one. According to the GPS, we weren’t going to get to our campground until 8 p.m., and then we’d have to set the tent up in the rain. Our first day out, and we were already going to get soaked.

In order to make our day not wind up being a complete bust, we called Jeff and had him find us a hotel. We picked up sandwiches at Subway and are currently cozied up in a Quality Inn, with the promise of a hot breakfast in the morning.

This was not exactly the day I had planned, but I’d decided early on that I was going to go with the flow, and the flow ended here today.


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