Day 1: Miles and Milestones

My inability to stick to the simplest plans absolutely blows my mind. We're gonna meet for dinner and a drink? Nah, I've decided to stay home and play PS2 instead. I'm gonna train for a 5k? Might as well make it a 10 miler. We should start off easy and only drive 500 miles? Pa-shaw and screw that. We're doing 700+. And so was the first day. With the big blue monster filled to the hilt and the saab not far behind, the first real day of the journey was underway. 725 miles, and 12 hours later (not to mention 4 hours after our original destination) we finally reached East Harbor State Park on the Ohio section of Lake Erie.

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"How", you may ask, "are you blogging if you are in state park?". Well, it has come to the attention of many state park agencies (including Maine and Ohio) that people don't go camping to actually camp. They go camping so they can drag all their worldy possessions to a location where no on can contact them on a cell phone. They then set up their DVD players, tvs, microwaves and MacBooks to enjoy the luxuries of home with ringing phones exchanged for mosquito bites. Needless to say, said MacBooks MUST have a WiFi connection to be fully effective, so the state parks have met the demands of the people. I am not completely happy about this, so I am frowning while taking advantage of the WiFi. That'll show them.

Anyway - not a whole lot of sites were seen today. As my brother pointed out, "New York State is freakin' huge" - about 400 miles east to west to be exact. This span is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, Women's Rights National Park in Seneca Falls and Niagara Falls all within a few hours drive of each other. Not a bad stretch of history, but we had places to be and miles to drive, so they all were skipped for this leg.

The real excitement came towards the end of the short Pennsylvania stretch of Day 1 as my trusty Saab hit 100,000 miles! Nearly 70,000 of these miles have been driven by me. And despite one new turbo thanks to a botched oil change, leather seats ripped form my brother's car and numerous new tires and brake pads, this dark blue beauty still seems to be running well.

Two last notes - 1. I drove through Sandusky, OH today. That's right - the home of the fictional Callahan Auto Parts. Just awesome. 2. Northern Ohio is GREAT when it comes to water parks. Why? Because they are all HUGE and indoors. But not completely indoors, as the below photo can attest. No, the slides actually go outside than back in. Yeah, that is some cool stuff.


Anyway - a rather bland post today. Notre Dame and driving through Chicago tomorrow. And if you don't own walkie talkies, go buy them now. They are AWESOME...