I’m up again by 6:15 and out by 6:45. The entire process of waking up, showering, getting ready, and cleaning up the room takes half an hour from alarm to sitting in my car. I slept better last night, and could definitely have used more sleep today. I guess these trips take a little more out of me than I suspect.
After thinking about this a little bit, my plan for the day is as follows. I’m going to the coffee shop to start my day again. Then I will drive to the office just as I did yesterday. We will do our workshop from 9 to 1, then I will be done with that. I will then go grab some lunch at the Ramen place Curtis (my coworker) suggested. After that I will drive home.
Normally I would ride my bike before I hit the road, but the conditions up here with all these leaves, plus a little bit of wet, plus the cold makes it a moderately ok plan to ride bikes. I mean, it would be fine and I’m sure I would enjoy it. But the place I had in mind is the counterpart to what I did yesterday, which was pretty leaf covered. After reading some of the reviews, it seems like you can get some speed and fun downhill runs there. Doing this with no knowledge of the park under leaf cover is not an ideal experience. I reserve the right to change my mind, or come back another time.
At 6:55 I’m at the coffee shop and I wait in the car again for the shop to open. Temperatures are lower today, as it’s at 27° at this time of day. This is a solid 5° colder than yesterday and it feels that way. All the cars were covered with frost when I left the hotel. Winter is definitely coming, which reminds me I should continue watching Game of Thrones this winter.
I spend an hour at the coffee shop doing a little work as well as a little screwing off. I checked the Ramen bar and it’s not open till 5 o’clock so that plan is already out the window. I will probably grab a slice of pizza then hit the road trying to cover my 280 miles as fast as possible. But there’s a lot of time between right now as I talk into my phone driving down the highway and 1 o’clock when the workshop ends. I may decide to go skiing between now and then. Side note, next time bring your skis with you.
I eat a Boston cream donut in the office. When in Rome?
We are done with the workshop by noon, so I’m out of the building almost an hour earlier than planned. Today’s workshop went just as well as yesterday, if not better. Everybody we’ve dealt with is very positive and optimistic that their world will be better in 3 to 4 months from now. That’s generally the outlook we want to instill upon the clients. That your life will be better, things will be better, and we are here to make it happen. In reality you know that things can go this way sometimes, and other times they don’t. But you do what you can to make it go right.
I stopped by a pizza place just outside the office called The Pizza place. It’s about as good as you would expect a place called The Pizza Place to be. It is pizza and technically edible, but I probably will not be going there again if I come back up here. I hit the road by 12:30 and start my long drive home. It’s about 280 miles and the GPS is already routing me around New York City by a lot of miles. It’s taking me all the way down 84 to the New York State Thruway. Then I will shoot straight south into New Jersey. I have done this before and it’s not actually much longer in terms of time, but it is a few more miles. It should help me avoid all rush-hour traffic around the city.
It’s 46° today and the idea of going for a bike ride has briefly crossed my mind, but I am just not mentally in the mood for it. So I will scoot my way home and take part in the usual post day family Olympics that we have every Wednesday. I will probably ride and lift weights when I get home but we will see what kind of energy I have when the time comes.
At 1:31 across my first state line of the day going from Massachusetts to Connecticut. As mentioned in an earlier blog, this is a completely meaningless and arbitrary demarkation, but it does mark the time and distance as something else between point A and B by changing it to point A to B to C to D to E. These mental constructs seem to be important in dividing up what otherwise seems to be an arduous task into smaller, more digestible tasks. This of course is a total human construct and it is a construct that is dependent on the day the time of day, the people you are with, the time of year, the destination, the road, the audiobook, and some number of things that I probably am not remembering, up to and including what you had for your last meal.
At 1:56 I see Hartford.
At 3 o’clock even I cross from Connecticut into New York just hitting point C in my ABCDE journey. In total that took just 90 minutes to cross Connecticut which is such a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. In comparison it took us 19 hours to drive from New Jersey to Arkansas, which saw us crossing some massive stretches of land. That said, they are massive compared to these Northeast states that we live in. Compared to some of the Midwest and western states, they are of average to below average size. Now, having rationalized that all out, this 90 minute stretch of Connecticut was mentally long. I think these stretches of road are harder in some respects because there’s so much more traffic here than anywhere else in the country. I’m sure people will argue that certain cities have traffic at certain times of day. A place like Chicago is always bad, I will grant that. And Los Angeles is another ballpark entirely. But compared to a St. Louis or in Indianapolis or Columbus or Louisville, we have so much more traffic out here. So every mile is much more stressful than in other places.
Shortly after I crossed into New York I stop for gas, a bathroom break, and a few snacks. I jump back on the road and my ETA is 5 o’clock. That will pretty much be the earliest I get back from one of these trips. This assumes all goes well but I should be able to avoid the traffic from here on out. Another 90 minutes to cross the two states and I will be done.
At 4:10 I crossed into New Jersey which is point D on my trip home. The traffic looks to be building up a little bit so my ETA to get home is sliding ever so slightly. But this is where we live. I should be home by 5:10 which is in plenty of time for dinner and the various things that follow today.
In the end I pull into my driveway at 5:03. I’ve driven almost 619 miles exactly over the course of the last few days. The trip was a success but I am tired. I got a couple of good bike rides in and a couple of good meals. The goal of the trip was for work and on that note it went very well. In all, this was a pretty compact 53 hour trip from door to door and with the exception of the early sunset, it probably went about as well as could be planned. Granted you can’t plan the sunset so that’s not something of a variable that you can control. Anyway back home and another work trip is in the books.
Traveling Normandy 