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So with New York, Canada, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky behind us I'm looking forward to a day full of the rest of Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas. Never thought I'd be saying that. Hopefully we can get a little earlier start this morning. Yesterday's 14:30 start made it a little difficult to visit with family and friends in Nashville. Jose spent last night with the Dolak's, a couple of good friends from MIT, and I crashed with my younger brother Jared, his groovy girlfriend Rachel and Sam the dog. Even got a chance to hang out with my Dad and his groovy girlfriend Nita who were down here in Nashville visiting Jared. Good times although too short and I'm not expecting Jared's breakfast to be as tasty as that made my Mom, who must be the second best mother in the world since Jose already christened his mother with the top honors. I'm going to miss those blueberry muffins.
In spite of our late start yesterday, Jose has been doing an exceptional job putting the miles behind us. In fact I have to admit that I am slightly less of a man, although man enough too admit it, and cannot drive a manual transmission. Therefore Jose has done all the driving. I've mostly sat in the passenger seat making obscene gestures at minivan MILFs we have passed. As you can tell, with my absence of abilities in driving and Spanish speaking I am going to be quite the asset on this trip. Luckily I have a good sense of direction and am great with maps (thank you Margie Fetty and Cub Scout Pack 85 in Armada, MI). In fact we have been able to put down the first 1200 miles without owning or even really looking at a map. Although my brother has a map of the world on his shower curtain so I kind of cheated and glanced at that. It is really wacky though. In some sense it is extremely accurate in that it is the first map I have ever seen that has North Cyprus separated out as a unique country. In other ways it makes no sense at all in that it shows numerous cities around the world with no real ryhme or reason which ones are picked. For example it has Dawson Creek, British Canada (yup its a real place), but does not have Toronto, Ontario. In fact the only American cities it shows are all in Alaska including Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands. So it hasn't been so helpful in finding the best route from Nashville to Dallas. You know what else isn't isn't very helpful for directions, Yahoo Maps. Yahoo Maps sucks, true that, double true. For some reason the programmers feel that people are interested in the shortest distance between two points and not the shortest duration. Yesterday this involved driving through the boonies of southern Kentucky. Not roads I'd necessarily want to take in the afternoon let alone at 22:00. Needless to say we got fairly lost in the dark and at one point ended driving up someones super long driveway thinking it was the road we were looking for. People who build long driveways normally don't like to be disturbed and so we were a little worried about a crazed hillbilly running out with a loaded shotgun giving us a less than friendly welcome. Luckily my back country roots kicked in and we were able to find the correct road and make it to the Dolak's safely.
The other major adventure we had involved a little run in with the Ohio police who were out in full force to ensure that as few people have a happy holiday weekend as possible. I won't steal Jose's thunder and will save the majority of the story for him to tell, but I will make one comment. I've always found it interesting when a cop pulls you over and tries to make you feel like you're a danger to humanity because you are going 85 miles per hour. Yet often times the police are parked on the side of the road sometimes even pointed in the opposite direction. This means that they need to drive over 100 miles per hour to catch up to you after pulling onto the expressway. Personally this seems like a larger threat to the safety of others, but hey I didn't go to the police academy. I could barely even tolerate the movies.
Dallas he we come, Andon signing off.
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