Monday, May 18

Kelly
The day the trip really started. Jess and I bade farewell – her to go back to bed for a day of coughing and sniffling, me to points west. And my 33 hour streak of no traffic started, as downtown Philly is fairly empty of cars at 9am on a Monday. That doesn’t seem right to this city girl. From there I hopped onto the beginning of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and $20 later I left the very end. Sigh…

Anyway, between those two points I had my very first car problem as the transmission sensor, which had been threatening to die for the past several weeks, went for good. As I found out later, when the sensor dies, the car can’t tell how fast it’s going, and so it by default goes into second gear. This is really fun when your car is going 70 mph. I pulled off at the next exit (near Hershey) to find a mechanic right there. The mechanic was friendly and competent enough to both get me a new sensor and to pull out a rodents’ nest that had been built in the bowels of my car. He assured me that he saw that a lot in wooded areas, but this made me doubt the Hyundai dealers who never noticed it during their ‘thorough’ check-up of the car.

Several tolls and hours later, I made it to Cleveland, where I had enough hotel points for a room at the Doubletree downtown. While the hotel was nice, it would have been great to see Cleveland at night. It doesn’t seem that anyone does that, as that city follows the great Midwestern tradition of people not walking around their very nice, rebuilt downtown area any more than they have to.


The one exception to this – Minneapolis. Great downtown. Very busy, even in mid-January.

So, I consoled myself with a fluffy bathrobe and the season finale of Gossip Girl. Not a bad night.