Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Jake: Hit it.
How do you make a twelve-ish hour bus ride seem to be entertaining?
Hummmmm
let me think about that for a moment
Well
short of adding in a cross-country chase and wrecking about seventy-five police cruisers
I dont know either, but thats the task I set for myself.
If I were yall, Id be skipping this update (and probably the entire TR for that matter), but me, Ive got no choice in the matter. Like any good curse, Im both eternal and reoccurring. So
out of a need to meet that standard, I have to put up an update for the next part of this journey.
The first phase of the mission can actually be summed up pretty easily: It was dark.
OK, just to add a bit more detail... We pulled onto north bound I-77 just three miles shy of the NC boarder at about 6am in the midst of rain, fog and oppressive blackness. Most of us were still three-quarters asleep, and the rest were tired form stuffing all the gear into the cargo bays, so the two hours it took to cross North Carolina were little more than a caffeine deprived blur. When the sun did finally make an appearance, it had little effect on our surroundings as the Southern Piedmont was still immersed in fog and mist.
We made the Virginia boarder by about 8am and stopped at the welcome center for our first stretch of the legs.
And an opportunity to solve any other problems that may have arisen now that everyone was more or less awake
Once wed collectively gotten a little bit of relief and clambered back onto the buses, we found that we had new drivers. The first group had made the drive from the garage in Spartanburg SC (nearly three hours to the west of our starting point) before picking us up and then made the drive up to Virginia. Legally, they werent exactly at the ragged edge of their daily driving limits, but there was no way they could make the entire drive up to Hackensack and this was the easiest spot on the map for the bus company to orchestrate the switch. With the administrative tasks cleared up, we headed back onto the interstate and started climbing.
Its right about here on the map that the foothills come to an abrupt end. The next fifteen to twenty miles of highway travels more up then along and the road hugs the edge of the mountain sides. On a good day, there are some spectacular views of the farms and small towns in the valleys below (Ive seen it many times while traveling up the WV to visit relatives), but the fog was still smothering the countryside and there was little to see this morning except the tops of the mountains rising up out of the mist.
Thats not a lake in that last picture. Its the top of a fog bank that was probably a half-mile or more deep and engulfing the valley below it. Shortly after I snapped this picture, we reached the plateau around Wytheville and turned onto North I-81. Wed spend about half of the day on this stretch of asphalt basically traveling up the Shenandoah Valley.
Lacking any better entertainment, it was at this point where something Disney would make its first appearance in this non-Disney TR. This would be in the form of a movie. Now, we happened to br riding on the first of the two parent buses, but in truth they were family buses. A decent percentage of the passengers were younger siblings along for the adventure, so with age appropriateness in mind, the first film of the day was the Pixar adventure:
The Incredibles
Yah
thats a bit blurry, but buses bounce around a good bit and thats pretty much how it looked as I half watched, half listened and half stared out the window (thats the new math at work there). Regardless of the calculations involved
this film did a fine job of making the ride up to Stanton Va. fairly painless. This spot on the map also provided us with another rest stop and our second chance to hop off the buses for a spell.
Unlike the first stop along the way
this one was just a might less - shall we say - hospitable
Im sure that once they're done remodeling the facilities here, it'll be a very nice place to take a break, but for now at least, we had to make do with what was available.
Well
it certainly beat the trees and bushes, but still
Anyway you could also tell that as a group we were starting to get a might punchy
What do yall think
would Dennis make a good hood-ornament or not?
I like it myself.
While were stopped, let me introduce you to Dave
the fellow in charge of Bus-4 and a fine driver.
Believe me, anyone who can maneuver a tour bus through downtown Manhattan during the Thanksgiving holidays and not lose their sanity (or our lives) wins the right to the title.
Dave earned the right.
Well, as the old punch-line goes: Alright, everyone back on your heads!
It was time to get back on the highway. Low and behold, Disney made another appearance at this point. Well, Pixar did. The film for this part of the trip was Up (and if you can watch the first bit of this film and not shed a tear or six, you aint gots no feeling atall). Entertaining as it was (and it was), it still only lasted a couple hours, so we spent a good bit of time looking out the windows.
As my son pointed out latter on
this is what Virginia looks like:
That pretty much sums up the whole state (at least the large chunk of it that is traversed by I-81). You could have closed your eyes for a half hour and opened them back up again and the scenery would basically have been the same. In a word
pastoral. Nice enough, but like most other Interstates, there just was not too much visual stimulation to be had. After a bit we left VA and entered a twenty-mile stretch of W.Va. and then hit Maryland. We all rather liked Maryland; it wasnt that the state was all that amazing; it was just that we got to stop for lunch.
Chick-Fil-A anyone?
Well thats where our bus came to rest.
We split the five buses up across all the various fast food venues in the general vicinity of Hagerstown, Maryland to make the stop as short as possible. Fast-food chains arent high up on the list of new experiences, but they do know how to quickly handle a busload of people. Forty-five minutes and a couple of chicken sandwiches later and we were back on the road.
Five more miles up the way and we hit what for many of us was an almost earth shattering experience
We crossed the Mason-Dixon Line.
You scoff
But for folks that were born and raised in The South
thats almost like losing a small part of your sole. We were strangers in a strange land now. It was almost as if wed actually landed on Mars.
I mean... well, here
just look for yourselves
Hummmmmm
you know
now that Im sitting here looking at that again
It looks a whole lot like Virginia did (and that looked a whole lot like South Carolina). Ya know
. just maybe it wasnt all that Earth shattering an event after all. But then again, I wouldnt be much of a Southrn Story Teller, ifn I didnt make-out that at least some otherwise minor detail was a matter of life and death
now would I?
About an hour-ish into Pennsylvania and we crossed the Susquehanna River and entered the outskirts of the state capitol: Harrisburg.
No, no, no, no
not that river!
This one
(that was actually a lot prettier than it looks
the mix of gloom, bus windows, motion and camera came together to make it less impressive that it might otherwise have been.)
Its about this spot on the map that several things happened. None of them were particular noteworthy in and of themselves, but being board out of our skulls, any kind of change was welcome. Now as I was saying, several things changed, First we left the now mind numbingly familiar confines of I-81 and begin traveling via East I-78 bound for the Lehigh Valley
(odd
the landscape didnt really change much.)
Save for the Hexes painted on the side of that barn, it looks a whole lot like the rest of the country wed just traversed. The other couple of things that changes were the movie (which was now the still family friendly National Treasure), and the weather. Rain began coming down in earnest about here and we really wouldnt see the sun again for the rest of the day.
Truth be told
we wouldnt see the sun again for nearly three days.
Long about the time that Nicolas Cage was finding a vast treasure hidden beneath Trinity Church (a real spot that wed be getting a better look at in a few days
the church that is
not the treasure
dang
) as I was saying, it was along about this time that we crossed into New Jersey (but I did take a moment just before that to wave at Dave as we drove through the Easton / Nazareth area). We made our next stop of the day just inside Jersey
(Nice eh
)
and then picked up I-287 heading north toward a rendezvous with Interstate 80 (the sun was long gone by now and there really wasnt much to see at this point except billboards and taillights).
After this last northward sojourn and a little bit of eastward progress on the Eight-O, we pulled off to partake of a bit of dinner. So
what exotic new type of cuisine would our collect of bleary-eyed Southern travelers encounter now that we were completely ensconced in that mythical foreign realm previously known to us only as: The North?
Why fast food of course.
Surprised?
Yah
we werent either.
The five Cross Country Lines buses pulled into the Willowbrook Mall, conveniently located in scenic Wayne, NJ (07470), and commenced to disgorge their human contents directly into this fine gourmet establishments well stocked food court.
Well
were finally just about done traveling for the day. From here its only about another fifteen-ish minutes until we arrive at our designated base of operations for the rest of this expedition. So, if yall will excuse me for just a bit here
Im going to go on in and grab me a bite to eat. Then well get back to the story. For now, the only question is whether Im just in the mood for "toasted white bread" or hungry enough to down "four whole fried chickens and a Coke"
I s'pect I'd better "Think" about that one for a moment or two.
Money... why does it always have to be a limiting factor in everything?
<---Tears of joy
