I was sick of Michigan and her huge gas prices, so after gliding over the Mackinac Bridge, I booked it through the UP, down the coast of Lake Michigan, and deep in to through Wisconsin. I had a day before I had to be in Minneapolis, so I stopped halfway in Wausau.

Wausau is nothing to writing home about, so I won’t. I will say that, for the size and relative remoteness of the town, I couldn’t understand why they had a $200-per-night three star hotel. I opted for the Super 8, next to the McDonald’s.
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Posted: June 18th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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I approached the busy border crossing at Port Huron, afraid of getting charged for the wine again or of getting searched because I have so much junk in the car. It was finally my turn. I pulled up to the border crossing booth to be greeted by a dour border guard with a shaved head.
Guard: Where are you coming from?
I: Maryland. I’m moving to Colorado.
G: (suspiciously) Why did you go through Canada?
I: I’ve never seen it.
G: Whose car is this?
Not expecting that curve ball, I answered honestly.
I: My dad’s.
G: You’re dad’s?
I: Yeah. He’s selling it to me once I move out there.
G: Please put the vehicle in park.
Damn it.
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Posted: June 3rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Next stop was Toronto, a 350-mile straight shot sow-west along the US-Canadian border and Lake Ontario. I was doing fine until I hit the city where took a right instead of a left at a major fork. It was when the city ran out that I finally decided I was lost. So I pulled in to a gas station and asked for directions. The old man behind the counter coincidently lived a block from where I was headed and he gave me explicit instructions for the fastest route. Things were looking up!
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Posted: May 29th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Three days since I left the wilds of Canada and it seems like a millennium. I’ll try to reconstruct most of it from my notes. The rest I’ll have to rely on memory.

From South Royalton it is a straight shot north on 83 to Montreal, with a quick but painful stop at the Canadian border. For weeks I have been dreading the event since I’m carrying a lot of alcohol as gifts for future hosts on my trip. Everyone I visited along the way assured me that there will be no problem and that I’ll get across fine. So naturally I believed them.
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Posted: May 26th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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After Portland I drove over to South Royalton, Vermont, home of Vermont Law School and my old Schwaebisch Gmuend friend, Dustin. Google Maps, God bless them. They say the most efficient route is to drive 95 miles south-west to Manchester, New Hampshire and another 95 north-east to So-Ro. It’s all highway miles and slightly faster than driving straight across New Hampshire and then picking up I-89 to the tiny town in the middle of Vermont. Since I was sick of highways, especially I-95, I opted for the latter route. I’m glad I did.
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Posted: May 21st, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Updated: Now with fewer typos and poor sentence structure!
I headed up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire after Walden Pond and found a nice little city that looked like a super-sized Annapolis. The first thing I noticed a lot of high school students just milling about. I was a little mystified because the town didn’t seem that big, so I asked a returning college student in a bar why. He said that as a high schooler he used to come here too because there is nothing to do for miles around. Portsmouth is the big city, I suppose. Oh, the joys of New Hampshire?
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Posted: May 21st, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Hyannis was a bit of a dive; there’s not much to do there unless you had a huge yacht. So I jumped in the car and drove to Plymouth. Yes, that Plymouth.
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Posted: May 15th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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The day in New Haven didn’t go as well as I had planned. I was ready to leave my hotel by 11 a.m. (with a helpful call from the front desk at a quarter ’til that checkout was nigh). After paying an exorbitant fee to park around the corner, I explored New Haven with a fresh outlook. I walked the Yale campus admiring the buildings and photographing the scenery, probably looking like a terrorist to any passersby.
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Posted: May 12th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Day four of the trip and I’ve decided it’s time to update this blog. The past few days have been a dizzying blur of cities and disappointment, but I press on undeterred.
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Posted: May 6th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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The car is finally ready to go, but I’m certainly not.

Packing, up until now, has seemed like an lofty ideal that, when achieved, would bring eternal peace and happiness. Like Buddhist Enlightenment, it sounds great in theory but in reality I’d rather just make an egg sandwich and call it a day. Reaching Nirvana is a life-long (or more) endeavor. Extrapolating on my current progress, packing for this trip seems to be following the same schedule.
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Posted: April 29th, 2008 under Trip Progress.
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