Journey’s end, eventually

I’m home at last, but the start of my trip today wasn’t quite as smooth as I hoped.

I got what counts as a decent night’s sleep for a motel, i.e. I woke up in the middle of the night, got up for a while, and eventually drifted off after who knows how long, only to wake up and find it was nearly 8 AM. That was good, since that was when the breakfast room opened. I expected I’d take something back to my room to eat, but the breakfast room was empty, so I had a quick bowl of cereal, coffee, and orange juice there, and also took a honey bun for later, which I completely forgot about until unpacking my food bag at home just now.

I asked the guy at the front desk where the nearest garage was, and he named one he’d frequented and thought well of, after steering me away from a closer auto parts place that didn’t do repairs. So I packed up my car and drove about a mile to that garage… and they told me they don’t do tires. Ack! I guess the motel guy never needed tire service from them.

So that garage’s guy directed me to a tire specialist about nine miles away, which meant, this being western Maryland, that it was across the border in West Virginia. They had an office on one side of the road and a garage on the other, which seems an odd setup. But they got a new tire on within about 15 minutes, for a bit under a hundred bucks, and I was on my way — after asking the woman in the office where the nearest place was to get coffee, since I’d forgotten to get a second cup from the motel before I left. That turned out to be a gas station mini-mart, which let me fill up (just over enough to get home) and get a deli sandwich for lunch and dinner. It was close to 10:30 by now, and I figured I needed both food and coffee to be fully alert, so I had half the sandwich right there.

Then I had to do a long, long drive through intermittently heavy rain. Remember how I estimated on the way out that there was a swath of about 2 hours between rest stops? Even though I was basically taking the same route in reverse, plus the ten or so miles from the gas station to the road, either I went much slower, the rest areas are asymmetrical, or I just underestimated it the first time. When I finally found a rest stop — after passing through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the northern skinny part of West Virginia and re-entering Ohio — I checked the time on my gas receipt and found I’d been driving nonstop for nearly four hours!

Well, at least that means I made good time, though I stopped more often on the Ohio part of the trip. That went about as usual, aside from several slowdowns due to construction and accidents. Or rather, due to most American drivers having no idea how to zipper merge, so they always create a bottleneck trying to crowd into a single lane. If they’d just slow down and allow room between cars, they could merge far more quickly. But in their selfish haste to get ahead rather than deferring to others, they make things slower for themselves as well as everyone else.

Also, of course, whenever someone’s going too slowly in the right lane and you try to pass them on the left, they inevitably speed up just then so you can’t pass them after all. And when you move back to the right lane behind them, they immediately slow down again.

So anyway, I initially put my phone away once I was on the last leg of I-71 and didn’t need directions. But then we hit another slowdown, and I realized I could still use the traffic info, so at a point when we stopped moving completely, I put the phone back in the clip and restarted Maps. I kept it going all the way home, and it was interesting to see the overhead map view of the route through Cincinnati that I know so well from ground level.

I was wary about getting home and finding it smelling of insecticide from the cockroach spraying, so I kept my mask on and vented out the place right away. But I saw or sensed no sign that anyone’s been in here since I left. I’d think they would’ve left a note if they’d sprayed, but there’s nothing. I guess I’ll ask tomorrow.

The phone clip is already half-broken, by the way. It still holds the phone, but one of the two springy rods that hold the movable part of the clip in place has already detached from that part. I guess that’s what I get for buying a cheap one.

And my right wrist still feels like I’m wearing the proof-of-vaccination wristband I wore all weekend, even though I tore it off more than a day ago.

But I get to sleep in my own bed again…