Made It To Boston

 Japanese Language, Travel  Comments Off on Made It To Boston
Oct 182012
 

Before I left this morning, I had a 30 minute Skype session with my business Japanese tutor. We worked on greetings and self-introductions, because those are always important. A bad first impression can take a long time to fix, so I need to learn how to do it right.

The connection quality was good. No surprises from the hotel’s network. I’m pleased.

Then I packed up the car, left the hotel, and started to make my way up to Boston.

The New Jersey Turnpike was congested. Lots of construction slowed everything down, so we couldn’t zoom like we usually do. Lots of 45 mph zones. Let’s see, I think it was $13.35 to get there on the Turnpike.

Another $7 and I crossed the George Washington Bridge and steeled myself for the drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which is a sort of like the old game “Moon Patrol.”

Everyone around me is flying, and road is in horrible condition. Every 20-30 seconds, SLAM, the road drops out from beneath me, or I hit a crater-like pothole. My three yellow lights are still on, and I have a tight grip on the wheel. Randomly, lanes peel off to various directions, but thanks to Google Maps, I didn’t get lost.

I think I paid more money somewhere else, and then I was in Connecticut, where the traffic had somehow managed to get worse. Google said it was green before I got there, then it turned bright red.

Shoot.

I pulled off to check my maps and freshen up (the service area was closed), and figured out a way around the congestion. I drove on the city streets for a bit, then pulled back on to I-95.

Right into a traffic jam.

It was slow going the whole way to the I-91 split. After that things smoothed out a bit. I got on I-84 when I hit Hartford, then eventually got on the Mass Pike to Boston. Nothing really eventful happened. I payed out another $6.50 or so in tolls, I guess. I’ve lost track of how much it costs to drive all the way up here.

The hotel is nice. My room wasn’t quite ready, so they comped me a night of valet parking, and gave me a room with an incredible view of the harbor. If I look out the window, I can see the Garden. It’s pretty cool.

Tomorrow, the job fair starts.

I Hate I-95 (But My GPS Loves It.)

 Travel  2 Responses »
Jun 142009
 

I made it safely to Wrightsville Beach, NC, where we have a big family get-together every year. It involves eating way too much food and a lot of staring at the ocean. There’s also a lot of setback involved.

Setback is a card game that apparently only the people in my family know how to play. I’ve never met another soul who knows how to play it. More importantly, it requires four people, and that means it requires a family gathering of some sort to get enough people to play it properly. The best way to describe it is “Redneck Bridge,” and I’ll just leave it at that.

But getting there is half the fun, or so they say.

I managed to get out of the hotel in Baltimore at about 12:30, and made it on to the highway okay, only to get caught in the usual Sunday gridlock just south of DC on I-95.

Of course, as I approached DC, my TomTom tried to tell me about all of these great shortcuts, but this time I ignored it. No more shortcuts through hospital parking lots, thanks.

Why do I use it then? Mostly as a trip computer, or for when I get lost. It’s really handy for those sorts of things. I also use it to find places I don’t know how to get to, but I don’t particularly like relying on it alone.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling not knowing where I am, and just relying on a random black box to tell me where to go. I always keep a few maps lying around the car. I don’t use them, but I have them, just in case. (And AAA gives them to me for free.)

As I fled DC, I got stuck in the usual I-95 southbound gridlock. It lasted for about 10 miles, and can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to get through. There’s no particular reason for it, other than that there isn’t any other way to get out of DC and go south.

After crawling through Northern Virginia, I wound up grabbing some junk food along the highway south of Petersburg at some anonymous truck stop that had a Burger King nearby. Sometimes hunger trumps common sense. At least I won’t have to eat there ever again.

It was a good reminder that making your own food is a lot smarter than trusting a faceless corporation to do it for you.

Have You Seen I-795?

As I headed back into North Carolina, I started looking for the exit for I-795, which is a shortcut. It cuts about 30 minutes off of my travel time to Wilmington, and, more importantly, gets me off of I-95, which is full of people falling asleep at the wheel or driving like maniacs at this point.

If you’re not familiar with I-95, it’s the main freeway from Maine to Miami along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.

For people driving from New York to Florida, North Carolina is the state where many of them tend to fall asleep and run into things. The news here is full of reports of these kinds of accidents. The results are not usually very pretty.

So while I was looking for I-795, I wasn’t seeing any signs for it. The problem was that nobody in the NC Department of Transportation had decided to put up a sign for the road until the last second, so I missed my exit. The sign was actually nailed onto the exit sign as an afterthought.

Thanks, guys. Way to put my tax dollars to work.

Actually, I could have made the exit if somebody in a van from NY would have let me pull over, but instead she honked at me and gave me the finger.

Thanks. You’re a giving person, aren’t you?

Of course, the GPS wanted me to stay on I-95. It wasn’t convinced that I-795 would save me any time. So I took the next exit, pulled out my free AAA map, and managed to find I-795.

Or so I thought.

When I saw the signs suddenly saying I was on US 264 East, headed to the Outer Banks, I realized that the score was now NCDOT 2, Rich 0.

At this point I admitted defeat, and started listening to the GPS.

Fine, I give up. Just get me back on a road that will lead to Wilmington. I’ll even go on your stupid I-95.

The little box started leading me on all kinds of back roads for about 15 minutes, until by some miracle, I wound up on I-795. Amazing. It really does exist!

And this time, I didn’t have to go through a single hospital parking lot.

About 20 minutes later, I was on I-40, zooming towards the beach.

So I guess these things do eventually work out… sometimes. I finally got to the beach at about 8:30 that night, so I only lost about half an hour overall.

I highly recommend taking I-795 as a shortcut.

If you can find it.

Arrival in Baltimore

 Travel  Comments Off on Arrival in Baltimore
Jun 112009
 

So, after a somewhat uncomfortable drive on I-95, I made it to Baltimore for the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference.

Along the way, my TomTom GPS decided that no, the Beltway isn’t a perfectly good way of going around Washington D.C. Instead, it kept insisting that I wanted to get off of the Beltway RIGHT NOW and go on some random city streets that certainly didn’t feel like they were heading towards Baltimore.

I had the same kind of feeling you get when you’re following dodgy directions, and you wind up in a cornfield somewhere, completely lost.

Only this time, the stupid box was leading me through a hospital parking lot in the middle of a downpour.

Isn’t technology grand? It eventually led me to some highway, which led me to another highway, which eventually dumped me back on to I-95, which I should have stayed on in the first place.

Stupid machines.

Needless to say, I wound up getting to my hotel right around midnight, only to stand in line behind about 15 other people who had just gotten in to check in.

I’m betting they were driving through the hospital, too.

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