Travels with Alex, finale

My alarm is set for 4:30am (2 hours from now) so I can get a nice early start. With any luck, I'll be in PA tomorrow night.

At 4:30am, I got on the road. At 4:45am, my tire blew out.

Fortunately it was the passenger side, so I didn't have to face traffic to change the tire like last time. Unfortunately, I had to unpack my trunk to get to the spare, so it looked like I was holding a rummage sale on the I-70. (If anyone had stopped, I probably could have made some money.)

As I took the car off the jack, the sun was coming up, and I saw two lakes shrouded in mist, surrounded by wildflowers. I took this as a good sign.

I limped to the next exit but the only store was a Walmart. Now, anyone who knows me knows how much I hate Walmart, but I didn't have any other options, so I pulled in and waited until 7am, when the auto service opened. By 7:30am I was back on the road.

My directions said, "I-70 (Columbus) to I-76" so I took the I-70 through Illinois to Columbus, Ohio, and saw no sign of the I-76. I called a couple of people (including my old co-workers, who were laughing so loud I couldn't hear the directions) but it turned out I just needed to keep going. Then I got to West Virginia.

At this point my cell phone was dead and I was freaking out, until I found a convenience store with a map that showed a finger of West Virginia sticking up between Ohio and Pennsylvania. So I got back on the road and, 15 miles later, entered Pennsylvania.

I mentioned that I was trying to take pictures of all the "Now entering" signs for each state, and so far I'd only missed Ohio (which was on a bridge) and New Mexico (which was just boring). I'd even caught the West Virginia sign from a Burger King parking lot. But the Pennsylvania sign -- probably the most important in the collection -- was only available from the freeway, at night, on a narrow shoulder, with a lot of big rig traffic. I mention this only by way of excuse of why the picture only includes my right elbow. I was so distracted by everything else that I completely forgot that I was using a telephoto zoom lens, and I stood completely out of the photo.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, at least for me. (When I nodded off, things probably got interesting for the drivers around me, but I was fine.) I finally rolled onto the farm at 4am and fell right into bed. Dawn begged me to take a shower first--it had been three days--but I couldn't move.

Thus the saga ends, never to be repeated. I hope to have the photos developed tomorrow, but my scanner won't be here until next week. I need to get a digital camera...