e s p b L r

Tuesday, August 8th, 2011: “Day 2: New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio”

Day 2 starts off with promise: I get a wake-up call at 8AM saying that the Jetta will be ready by 1PM. Awesome. Just a few steps away in the kitchen, I hear my mom preparing her world famous breakfast. Double awesome. To top it off, it’s a beautiful day in New York. Things are looking up for the Fhat Boys.

By the time 1PM rolls around, we get a call from Volkswagen Lynbrook. The Beast (aka “Tinkerbell”) will “definitely” be ready by four. Nervous time, yet again. Tip of the day: never get your car serviced here. Worst experience of my life. Anyways, four days, five delays and six false promises later, we finally get the go-ahead to pick it up. Of course, the minute I leave the house, the sky turns black and I am suddenly caught in a torrential downpour. Just our luck.

The good news is that the car is FINALLY ready to roll. It takes us about 45 minutes to pack everything, but all in all, we’re able to squeeze all of our stuff into the back seat and trunk. I kiss my parents goodbye and hug my sister, then take one last look at my house and throw up the deuces to my life in New York for now. How nostalgic. (I would come back about ten minutes later after forgetting my I-Pod).

We’re actually doing it! 3,000 miles and more than a dozen states ahead of us! Cue “Born To Be Wild” music now. I decide to take the wheel first.

If any of you reading this are planning to take a cross country road trip in the future, heed this advice: plan ahead, but don’t expect that you’ll follow your itinerary from start to finish. In retrospect, the best part of our entire escapade was being spontaneous and adventurous, doing whatever we felt like doing at the moment and making sure that there wasn’t a single dull moment. The fact that we were delayed two days forced us to be creative and made for an even better experience.

Anyways, the first day was spent primarily on the road. We were unfortunately heading into rush hour traffic through the George Washington Bridge, which, as you know, can never be good. Not to mention it was still raining pretty hard. Thank God for those windshield wipers, right?

Once we drove over the GW, it was smooth sailing. In fact, we didn’t hit any kind of serious traffic until we got into Los Angeles (go figure). The sun came out as we drove along the I-80W, cruising through New Jersey and Delaware with my sister’s mix of Disney songs blasting through the speakers. This would be the first of many times I would hear the “Circle of Life.”

Our first pit stop was Long John Silvers in Pennsylvania, where we stuffed our faces with fried fish, chicken and lobster bites. This rest stop was significant for three reasons:

1. It would also be the site of our very first “plank” (seen above). Our master plan was to plank the U.S.A. by the end of our road trip. Stay tuned for our progress on this mission.

2. We followed the advice of Christina Hoang and Tony Du (who had road tripped from Seattle to New York previously) and took pictures of my license plate as our journey progressed. Each day, we would take a new picture to see how much dirt and bug guts had accumulated. We took one here - at this point, we had only logged in a few hundred miles and it was relatively clean. In just a few short days, it would be a graveyard for insects and other small unidentified creatures.

3. In addition to “Planking the U.S.A.”, you can also look forward to another photo series - “Clinton Eats the U.S.A,” a collection of photos dedicated to Clint’s masterful eatability.

We switched cars at this junction. Our goal was to switch every 3 or 4 hours each day so that we could keep each driver fresh. For the most part, it was a good strategy.

As we drove through Pennsylvania, we had the opportunity the experience the first sunset of our road trip. In a few days, we’d get the chance to see the same sun set in the Badlands of South Dakota, the Colorado Rockies and Monument Valley.

We passed LeBron James’ hometown of Akron and at around 1:30AM, we finally arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, and spent the night at the Homestead Studio Suites - a sweet $40 value that even came with complimentary mystery stains on the bed sheets. Nevertheless, it was a relief to be able to sleep on a bed after a long day of driving, even if it was next to Brian who tried to spoon me all night.

Our road trip was only beginning. History was in the making!

Pictures from Day 2 of our cross country road trip can be found here:
August 2011: Road Trip - Day 1 & 2 - NY, NJ, Pennsylvania, Ohio