The Sweatiest Road Trip Ever - Day 1. Sort Of.

Day 1. (Sort of.)

Our daughter,Tori, has decided to abandon the lovely, idyllic, temperate world of New Hampshire and spend the next 4 years or so sweating in the concrete jungle of Florida.

She's off to college and we, as her parents, are obligated to get her there even if it involves 80+ hours cramped in a hot rented minivan, blasting down the east coast of the U.S. (spoiler: It involves those things. And sweat. So much sweat. I mean, you would simply not believe how much sweat.)

The trip started a bit earlier than originally planned. The plan, as originally conceived, was for us to leave on Monday morning, bright and early. Alex had to work all day Sunday and, for some unexplained reason, he actually wonted to join us for this trip. It seems that sitting in a van for the equivalent of 6 months straight sounded appealing to him.

After some deliberation, we decided that it might make more sense to leave Sunday night after Alex got home from work. That way, we could be tired while we drove, plus our ride would be made more pleasant  by the delicious aroma of french fries that always clings to Alex after a shift as a waiter at a local restaurant.

We picked up the super-cool, image-enhancing maroon Dodge Grand Caravan (even reading the name ages you several decades) on Sunday afternoon while Alex was at work.

Sporty and stylish. Just like your Great Aunt Mildred.

We left a little room in the glove compartment for Alex's stuff so he could throw it in when he got home. 

After the van was packed and Alex got home, it was time to hit the road. Toasting a safe trip with a ceremonial nip of Oyzo would be illegal, as both of our children are under 21 years of age.

So this is only water.

And that is how you drink water.

And this is how water makes your face look.

Yup. Just like that. Water.

As I was driving, I declined the water, opting instead to enjoy life.

Tori bade a slightly damp farewell to her best friend, Sloane,

Awwww...

climbed into the van,

I promised Tori I would never share this picture. Please destroy your computer after viewing it so she doesn't find out.

and we hit the road.

Off to college.

Southward!

Day 8 - The Mystery of the Missing Roommate

Day 8
Miles Driven - Even fewer than yesterday
Total Time in Transit - Not long, unless you count that stupid trip to Target
View from Hotel - Still the I-90

Today is the day.

Alex is going to college.

MSU had worked hard to try to arrange the move-in so that things actually kept moving. Because otherwise it would be a still-in and that doesn't even make any sense. We were told to arrive at school for move-in between 8:30 and 9:30.

They were trying to stagger things a bit so there wasn't a huge traffic jam of girls with carts full of fluffy stuff fighting for space in the elevators against guys with garbage bags full of semi-clean clothes.

We had breakfast and Alex made sure to tank up on waffles, just in case something dire happened and there were no waffles available at school.

Since Tori has done so well matching carpets in hotels, I thought that I should up my game and try to match the bathroom.

Tori still did it much better than me.

Our traditional Back-to-School picture was in a slightly different setting this year, but we got it.

True fact: The backpack on his shoulder is the same one he took to school on his first day of kindergarten.

We arrived at school at our allotted time, the delicate scent of waffles still lingering on Alex's breath. At least, I assume it was. I sure wasn't going to smell his breath.

We were greeted by smiling greeters and colorful banners and streamers. It looked more like Chinese New Year than the first day of school, but it was festive.

And there were cinnamon buns! They had no doubt been baked in the top secret salad/bakery building that we spotted yesterday.

Excuse me. Are you in line for cinnamon buns? No? Then outta my way!

Alex in front of his dorm. A necessary, but ultimately pointless picture.

Alex checked in and got his key while I made sure that the coffee was hot and the cinnamon buns were fresh.

They were.

Good job, secret salad/baker people!

We went upstairs and found Alex's room.

He's in room 218 if you want to send him a nice letter. Or some waffles. 

You may have noticed that the door has two names on it: Colton and Alex.

Alex had had a bit of trouble getting his room assignment. It had come very late and he only got his roommate's name and contact information a few weeks before school started.

In contrast, Alex's girlfriend had been given her roommate's name and contact info months before school started. They had been in frequent contact with one another deciding–and Alex swears this is true–on a theme for their room.

I don't want to go too far off topic here, but a theme? For your room?

When I was in art school and got an apartment with my friend Ben (no dorms were available), our theme could have been considered "What Is That Smell" or "Was That A Cockroach or Small Dog Scurrying Under the Couch?" or, possibly even "Will You PLEASE Flush Next Time? But, Yeah. That's Pretty Impressive, Dude".

Alex's girlfriend and her roommate were coordinating colors and choosing matching comforters and probably deciding on a general small for their room, too.

Alex, perhaps inspired by that display of camaraderie,  reached out to his roommate and introduced himself. He told him a bit about himself. He said he was looking forward to meeting him.

His roommate responded: "Yeah. I'm your roommate."

And that's all Alex ever heard from him. At all.

Perhaps Alex was disappointed that he didn't get to coordinate his comforters. I don't know. He plays that sort of thing pretty close to the chest.

We gathered in Alex's room to await the arrival of Colton, The Mystery Roommate.

While we're waiting, let's make your bed! 

While we're still waiting, let's put your stuff away.

While we're STILL waiting, let's take a random picture of the back of Tori's head

While we are STILL waiting, let's wander aimlessly around the room.

We got the room set up, got Alex's stuff put away, and still there was no sign of the quiet and elusive Colton.

"Maybe he's outside, smoking with that bird we saw yesterday," I suggested.

We tried to fix some of the more glaring design flaws with the set up of Alex's room.

The bed is built in. And it's built in directly in front of the drawers, which are completely inaccessible.

This light will be great. For cooking your hair while you try to read.

 We were not able to fix any of these problems. "You're going to be an engineer," I said, "Maybe this is how they test the incoming freshmen!"

Alex brought exactly 1 photo with him. It's a photo of him with my step father, who died when Alex was rather young.
This may have made me a bit weepy. Shut up.

Room Selfie!

There is an old-fashioned intercom on the wall. I tried calling Colton on it, but he didn't respond.

Soon, we tired of waiting for Colton and decided to wander around campus a bit. Alex's dorm is three circular towers. The idea being that all the rooms in each pod will open into a small common area. Students can leave their doors open and chat with friends in adjoining rooms.

Let's see how that worked out.

Hello?

Um, hey? Guys?

Alex left his door open, anticipating Colton's imminent arrival.

Here is the view out Alex's window. It's more scenic than the I-90 out our hotel room window.

Here is the large common area for the floor. I suggested putting up a "Missing Roommate" poster for Colton, but everybody thought it was still too early.

They planted salad makings in the planters around the building. Kerri would not let me take a tomato.

Alex decided that he wanted to wander around on his own and asked us if we could run over to Target to pick up some plastic crates that he could stack in his closet.

"Plastic crates?" Kerri asked. "You mean plastic crates like the ones that you had in your room at home but refused to pack? Plastic crates like those?"

Alex was unfazed. "Yeah. Just like those."

We headed off to Target in a college town, on freshman move-in day.

I'm sure that someday, years and years and years from now, I will be able to forget the experience. Perhaps with therapy or strong psychoactive drugs.

For the meantime, I will share just one photo to give you the flavor.

There was an ENTIRE AISLE of clothes hangers.

Don't be fooled by the seemingly empty aisle in the photo. It was a unique moment in the store, and lasted only a second.

We escaped from Target, clutching three crates that seemed quite similar to three crates we had at home.

I decided that the only way to purge The Target Experience from my brain, would be some tasty Mediterranean food for lunch. We had a tasty lunch and were treated to the fun sight of somebody getting arrested and stuffed in the back of a police car in the parking lot.

Cuff 'im and stuff 'im, Roscoe!

Alex texted us with an update: "Still no Colton."

We arranged to meet Alex for the family and friends dinner that was being held on campus that night. It would be our last time together before we left him.

We passed the few hours in between with some swimming at the hotel and making idle, yet implausible conjectures about Colton's whereabouts.

We returned to the school, gave Alex his plastic crates, and headed to dinner.

One last family selfie!

On the whole, the dinner was wonderful. Unless you happened to be Tori.

Montana, in case you were unaware, is beef country. Tori, in case you were unaware, has been a strict vegetarian for many, many years.

"Don't worry," we told her. "It's a college campus. There are bound to be lots of crazy vegetarians like you here. Of COURSE there will be something you can eat."

And, technically, there was.

There was a salad. With bacon mixed in.
There was macaroni and cheese. With more bacon mixed in.
There were huge slabs of campus-raised beef. With heaping sides of... MORE beef.

There was also a small assortment of vegetables and hummus.

So, after carefully inspecting the carrots and hummus for any signs of meat, Tori had a delicious meal of appetizer vegetables.

We had a nice meal together and, with a unique mixture of joy, sadness, excitement, and anxiety, gave Alex a hug and sent him off to college.


Tomorrow - The Colton Mystery Deepens.

Road Trip 2017 - Day 1 - Welcome to Canada, Eh?

Day 1
New Boston, NH - Woodstock, ON
Miles Driven: 532
Time in Transit - 12h 30m
View From Hotel - Tim Horton's Donuts


Our oldest child, Alex, is headed to college in Montana. (Note: Montana is far, far away from New Hampshire.) Naturally, our only choice was to plan a huge cross-country road trip to deliver him to school.

Our daughter, Tori, has had a life-long obsession with California and the west coast. "Can we just zip over to California after we drop him off?" she pleaded. "It's only 17 more hours."*

(*It is technically true that you can drive from Bozeman, MT to the closest point in California in just under 17 hours. It is also technically true that California spreads across several hundred bajilliondy square miles and can take up to 256 years to drive across, depending on the traffic around L.A.)

We thoughtlessly agreed to her request and the 2017 Family Road Trip To Deliver Alex To School and Then To Go To California was officially underway.

Alex was very excited about the trip, as shown in this, a photo of him at the last dinner he had at home before leaving.

No, he's not looking at his phone. He's fast asleep at the dinner table.

Kerri and I rented a minivan to serve as our chariot for this trek. Alex was a bit disappointed that we were not willing to splurge for a Lamborghini so he could arrive at school in style, but they didn't have one with heated seats and Kerri and I were simply not willing to compromise.

Not a Lamborghini.

We packed up the van, including the new mountain bike Alex purchased for school, and we all piled in to begin our grueling family ordeal of traveling in propinquity for 21 days.

Alex is settled in and ready for anything with his fancy biking goggles.

We weren't more than an hour from home when Kerri and I overheard Tori ask, "Alex, why are you smelling your bike?"

"Shut up," he answered.

In a brilliant parenting diversion, Kerri suggested that we name the van. After a long, and occasionally heated, discussion, it was decided that she would be christened "Tawanda"–an exotic name that has the added benefit of sounding slightly like "To wander".

Our first stop along the way was a scenic lookout point on Hogback Mountain in Vermont for lunch. We would get very, very good at eating in the back of the van.

The guardrail along the road was covered with graffiti - some clever, some less so.

An incredible coincidence - some of the graffiti on the fence appears to be a character from my Molly Mac books. Just below it, it says "Montana or Bust 2017". You cannot explain that.

We piled back into the car and headed westward. Our journey was taking us very close to Niagara Falls and a small jaunt into Canada wouldn't add any time to our trip, so we decided to hop the boarder and spend the night with our neighbors to the north.

We drove through the endless wastelands of northern New York and arrived in a town called Amherst for dinner. We threaded our way through traffic along the main street looking for a place to eat. Eating is something of a challenge as Tori is a vegetarian and Alex will not eat anything that even looks like it might contain vegetables.

We finally decided on a small Italian place that had outdoor seating. "It's crowded," we said. "It must be good."

This maxim has officially been proved untrue.

Remember this name. Never. EVER. Eat here.

Sorrentino's was home to Tragically Disappointing Meal Number 1 on this trip. Their menu says that they have a "Special Spaghetti Machine" that makes perfect pasta every time.

Really. It says that.

The pasta may have been perfect, but Alex found the sauce excessive, even by his lax culinary standards.

Manicotti soup, anyone? 

I opted for a pizza, which I always enjoy.

Until now.

Despite their claim, it was not the best. It was, possibly, the worst. How can you ruin pizza?

We slogged through our meal, enjoying the exhaust fumes from passing traffic and listening to the soothing sounds of car horns and screamed obscenities involving rich, evocative character studies of other driver's mothers and their bestial proclivities.

We watched in curious wonder as more and more police cars appeared in the area, diverting traffic and setting up cones, barriers, and detour signs.

They blocked off the street where we had parked Tawanda and a slight unease tugged at my guts. Or, it could have been the crappy pizza trying to escape.

We found out that there was a 5k happening in town and that many of the streets were to be closed.

"We have to get out of here!" I gasped. "Where is the check? We need to pay and get out of here before we get trapped here forever!"

Our waitress eventually wandered over with the bill, I slapped some money down and we sprinted to the van, hopped in Dukes of Hazzard style, and roared up the street 100 feet until we were stopped by a police officer who pointed us toward a thin column of cones set up for us to drive through.

Driving through construction cones would become a familiar theme on the trip.

We blasted back on to the highway and headed for the boarder.

"Niagara Falls, here we come!" I sang.

"I think I have sauce poisoning," Alex moaned.

"I have to go to the bathroom," Tori said.

"Hold it until we get to Canada!" I told her. "And, Alex, please don't die in Canada, there's bound to be a lot of tedious paperwork."

We saw the great plume of mist rising above the American side of Niagara Falls and crossed the bridge into Canada.

Welcome to Canada, eh?

We planned on stopping for a few minutes to admire the majesty of the falls before continuing along our merry way.

It was dark. I was tired. There were no signs, okay?

Okay?

We continued to drive. And drive. And drive.

"We seem to be going a long way," Kerri said. "Aren't the falls waaaayyy back there?"

"Maybe it's the scenic route," I suggested.

"Maybe you missed the falls," Tori suggested.

"Zzzzzzzz," Alex snored.

Somehow, I completely missed the falls. The one bright spot in this goof was that Alex was asleep so we all agreed to tell him that we went to the falls and the he really enjoyed it.

Soon, the memory of the falls faded and we needed to stop for the night. We found a Days Inn and pulled in, looking for a room.

As we walked past the crowd of gentlemen smoking around the lobby entrance, I overheard some of the amazing courtesy and kindness that Canadians are known for. One of the guys laughed loudly and said to his friend, "Oh, yeah, he's a f*&kin' idiot, eh?"

I assume he wasn't talking about me missing the falls.

At the front desk, I was greeted by a cheery young lady who told me that the room would be $89/night. "Unless you saw the sign out front..."

She nodded knowingly.

I stared dumbly.

"The sign?" she said, nodding toward the huge lighted sign in the parking lot.

"Ummm, yeah. I sure did see that sign. Heck of a sign you guys have. Yup. Yessir," I agreed.

"Well, then," she smiled. "Your room will be $69/night."

I smiled and craned my neck to read the sign, hoping I wouldn't see "$20 Discount For F*&kin' Idiots, eh?"

I couldn't actually see the sign through the clouds of smoke from the guys outside, but I decided that I was too tired to care. I could read it in the morning after the smoke cleared.