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May 05, 2004
The Incredible Journey
So I'm back in NJ after a harrowing 23 hour drive. Really, it's an interesting story, so sit back and relax and enjoy a Coke.
It all began the night before I was to pack things into storage. I stayed up all night packing so that I could move out on time, and despite the complete lack of sleep I still screwed up the packing and forgot to move two boxes full of art supplies to storage. So after it was all said and done, I still had a lot of extra work to do before loading up the car to drive back.
That evening I threw out a lot of trash, trying to get rid of anything that wasn't precious to me in order to save packing space. I had to dispose of my super awesome Halloween costume that my friend made for me. Now, this isn't a total loss because that costume *stunk.* I mean it reeked like a month old onion. See, the last I wore it was on Halloween, when we played DDR pretty much nonstop throughout the whole night, and I must have sweat an entire human body's worth into that costume. Anyway, I was so tired after DDR that I threw it into the closet and forgot about it. It dried up into a funky clumpy ball that I only took out every now and then when I was out of caffeinated beverages in order to stay up all night and work. Seriously, one whiff of that shirt and you'd be afraid to sleep because you might just die. So that morning when it was lying on the floor, I managed to dump some extra stuff on it, since I was throwing it away anyway. I emptied an overflowing glue bottle into it, and when I managed to slice my finger open on an exacto knife, I bled it into that shirt. I looked out my window that evening and noticed that someone was dumpster diving. Wait let me rephrase that: dumpster diving in my pirate costume. I looked as the kid was pulling the last boot out of the trash and putting it on to complete the ensemble. (It's a good thing I had just finished pooping cause I would have lost my bowels right then and there.) This person must not have noticed the smell... NO! How could anyone not have noticed the smell! It was so bad! You could smell that thing upwind in a hurricane and still be nauseated.
But I digress... we left the next day at 2 pm (we being Pushpita, my future roommate, and I). I felt so bad because even after throwing out a ton of things -- including my giant stuff ALF :'-( -- I still managed to fill up 80% of the car with my stuff. Sigh... well I guess I can justify it by the fact that I was driving the entire trip since Pushpita does not have a license.
So the trip went well for the first... many hours. Very well, in fact, despite having to listen to the second most awful music of all time that Pushpita insisted on playing. The only real hitch for the beginning of the trip was that every state from Georgia northwards was covered in some ungodly cloud of piss rain. By piss rain I mean not real rain that hits you and gets you wet, I mean wimpy-ass rain that just piddles around in the air and sticks to your windshield so you can't wipe it off. We hit a snare in South Carolina because of the rain. See, I missed the exit that was not clearly marked... the ONE exit to get on I-77. When I finally realized this mistake, I decided to stay on this road instead of backtracking 30 minutes, because the road connected to I-95 and was still a direct route home.
If that was the end of the problems I'd have been elated. However around the middle of North Carolina, I was getting low on gas. I decided to pull into the next exit and get a refill to avoid my worst fear -- getting lost in the Boondocks (which inevitably happens every time I drive through that evil state). I was too late, though... the gas station was closed. Suddenly I knew that lightning had struck twice; my bad luck had hit again. As I took each and every exit that I saw, I began to realize the direness of the situation. It also reaffirmed my hatred for the American South.
We travelled down that road for 37 miles, hitting every single exit along the way. Not one exit had a gas station that was open. In fact, not one of them had streetlights either. I wonder to myself if even one of those towns had more than one last name to them. When we finally found gas, it was so far away that we were running below the red E... I don't know how we got there but, praise be to the gods, we did. When I filled up my tank, I bought 8.972 gallons of gas (and I didn't top it off). My tank only holds 9 gallons. I was running on less than 3/100 of a gallon of gas. A strong Russian could have drank the contents of my gas tank and not even have felt a mild buzz.
If there was one positive thing that came out of this trip, it's that Pushpita gained a healthy understanding of why the South is the worst place in the world. Keep on reading to hear the rest of my story.
you know the saying "It's always darkest before dawn"? Well that saying was quite literally true on this trip. I have never seen a phenomenon like this in my entire life, even in photos, but as we were nearing sunrise, I saw an object looming in front of us in the darkness. Now, it was nighttime, so to see anything looming would be a feat, but this was no ordinary thing... it was an anti-thing. It was darker than the night. It was like a cloud, only shaped like a giant sphere of pitch blackness. There has never been anything so black. I was seriously scared of driving into it. It was like some miles-wide cloud of magical darkness. Since I was the only car on the road, it was extra scary.
When I arrived at the foot of the cloud, I put on my high beams. They did nothing. I could only see about 30 feet. It wasn't foggy or anything... the light was just snuffed out. It was like the South didn't want me to leave. Like it didn't want me to see the light of day ever again, and for a while I really didn't believe I would. I was just so glad that by then I had a full tank of gas, and that Washington would arrive soon and not even the darkness of the Carolinas could hide that light pollution.
We finally got out of the Twilight Zone an hour after sunrise. I thought I was in the clear when I saw D.C., so I got excited. I was really hungry and tired, though, so I grabbed an exit to go find a McDonald's. However, the South had one last trick to play: the exit was an illusion! It was actually another highway that took me straight south for 30 miles before having a single exit. I went from D.C. to Richmond all for an Egg Mc-fucking-Muffin. I was so angry with the evil trick the South played on me, but what could I do but keep driving and hope to have better luck on I-95 than on whatever-the-hell cursed road I was on the night before.
In Washington the frustration was finally starting to get to me. I took the HOV-lane to avoid the morning traffic, but I was quite dismayed when I-95 split into 95 and 395, but the HOV-lane did not split. I was stuck on 395, which would've been OK if it didn't empty right into the middle of the city. Well, I gave Pushpita a nice little tour of our nation's capital, we saw the Great Phallus and that thing on the back of the penny, and then got lost somewhere in a very scary neighborhood.
We stopped to ask for directions 3 times, and each time we followed the directions to I-95. Of course, the moment we got on, we got a little sign that said "Congratulations, you're driving on 95 South, straight to Richmond!" "How could this be?!" I thought to myself. "Surely if you get on the road, you should have an option to go north or south." But I guess that's not how it works down there. Afterall, why would anyone from the South want to go north?! Finally, after 2 hours and on the verge of having a nervous breakdown, I found my way north on 495, which led to 95. That was the end of the insanity, because I was beginning to enter states where the roads make sense (although Maryland is definately the *least* logical of the logical states).
I killed a Red Bull and a KMX, but still found myself dreaming awake while driving. A couple times there were large fish swimming alongside my car, while other times I was having conversations with funny looking brides who were floating in front of my car. But for the most part, my eyes stayed open and didn't jiggle so much after the energy drinks. When my beloved New Jersey hit my eyes I woke up entirely. I could have cried it was so beautiful. Unfortunately the piss-rain was still going on, so I couldn't leap out of the car and kiss and grass, but I did have a hot shower and crash for many many hours.
I'm still crashing from that trip, in fact, and the trip the next day where I took Pushpita to NYC and saw Dave as well. But that, my friends, is another story...
Posted by dminky at May 5, 2004 11:53 PM
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Comments
Matt! I never see you online anymore. I decided to read up on some of your summer adventures. I hate the drive from the South to the North. Getting onto the Beltway (495) around D.C. is the hardest road to get on in the world! Glad to hear that you made it home to NJ and off of the never-ending 95 South! :-D
Posted by: Jen at June 16, 2004 04:14 PM