Overview of the last few days. Tuesday I worked my
day job from 5 in the morning until 1:30pm... somewhere in the afternoon I took a quick
20 minutes or so of sleep, but most of this block of time was taken burning a new 'StayAwake 1.0'
mp3 disc for the night's short-notice-planned trip....had to go to my
night job at 5:45, and after that four and a half hour demonstration of
Murphy's Law, there was a quick stop back by the day job for
caffeine and a piece of
lasagna from the
sweet old lady who works there and likes to cook for everyone....
A gas stop was made and I was off to
Ithaca,
NY to chill for a few hours with one of my old friends from high school before having to each try and catch four hours or so of sleep before he went to a
final that basically amounted to a
pizza party with mandatory attendance, and I had to drive back to
New Jersey for work. Mind you, I live minutes away from
I-80, the first of several major
highways to be taken in accordance with the debatably silly route I was given by
MapQuest, but much closer to
NYC than to the
Pennsylvania border, the way I'd be going...so it's a good four hour drive. Alone, in the middle of the night,
without proper sleep...
Great fun, though. I haven't put in a decent amount of
highway miles in way-too-long, especially not in those wonderful, nearly traffic-free, hours.... partially out of lack of faith in my
car for a while, but since I'd gotten the
distributor cap replaced, it'd been behaving, so it was a good test for the thing...
It went well. I hit some
snow near
Scranton, and visibility wasn't the best between the darkness the snowfall, but I forged on anyway...it cleared up, and there was nothing worse than a non-accumulating flurry for most of the rest of the ride.
Until I got off the interstates...just some dark little 40-or-so mph road, 30 miles, and more snow for most of that. They're pretty diligent about
plowing up there, so it wasn't too bad. The only problem, again, was visibility...in the darkness there wasn't always a lot to see on the sides of the road, making it hard to be sure I wasnt drifting around without noticing, being tired and all....just made the assumption that the little ridges on either side were curbs and kept going...eventually making it into Ithaca, calling my friend back up and having him attempt to direct me. Not having a car, he didn't know the names of too many streets or landmarks, but 13 minutes or so later I was parked downstairs from his
dorm waiting to be met up with....
(hrm, have to attend that work thing....will try to get this finished later, and fill in some about the nature of highway driving and other crap i meant to write about)