Day: 1
Date: 6/2/2009
Miles: 277
Day One began notoriously late, but relatively calm. There just wasn't any planning worries left to have. And you can't forget the fact that you really are never in the middle of nowhere in the USA. If a flashlight or water bottle or propane canister or case of beer was forgotten, you'll be able to find any of that soon enough.
So we hit the road. We had very little in terms of itinerary, and what was there basically stated that we'd haul over on Interstate 70 to the West coast, and turn back Eastward at that precise moment when the return time calculations on the beer-stained napkin matched the number of days we had left before we were expected back at work. I mean, I was still unemployed, so this could be a year-long circus, if the money held up, but Tara was expected back in three weeks.
This was the first long distance trip for the Teardrop, and the fact did not escape me that it was nearly the longest first trip you could image. It would be about 7,500 miles on the odometer at the end of this road trip. In order to ease the wheeled wooden domicile droplet into the trip, we'd take it from Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania westward on Interstate 80 and mosey onto I81 South towards Harrisburg. At that point we'd catch the turnpike (I76), which would morph into I70 in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The alternative to catching onto the turnpike and I70 was running through Allentown and the Lehigh Valley, where a car fire is a twice-a-day feature and you have to go road warrior with cars ranging from BMW luxury sedans to Yugos with no exhaust system and possibly only three wheels.
For the sake of... well, everything, we took the high road. It's volumes more placid, if not more of a climb and descend in the Pocono Mountains, and we wouldn't be tasked with avoiding the toothless driver of a fire-engulfed Yugo trying to ride the bumper of a sleek luxury sports sedan piloted by a 30-something fighting on his cell about whether it'll be Applebee's or Chili's for dinner.
That's how accidents happen. And literally, that's how they probably happen daily on Route 22 in the Allentown area. Rather than enter that Thunderdrome of terror, we followed I80 westbound from the 'Gap and trundled up into the Pocono mountains. It was still nerve wracking towing this homemade camper up the highway, and keeping the needle at 55 MPH provided a little bit of confidence. We were quite aware that the most extensive road test the Teardrop had was a three mile trip down the highway sandwiched by a couple miles of local and rural roads. You'd think that my schooling in software engineering would have instilled more testing awareness, but no. Testing sucks. Let's just fire this thing up and see what happens.
That's also how accidents happen, but fortunately we experienced no problems with the Teardrop through its 7500 mile journey across the US. But we were still in Pennsylvania, and before we were at least west of Harrisburg, it would feel like the trip had hardly began. From I80, we would hook up with I81 in Hazleton and head southwest towards Harrisburg. We had to navigate the the hour west upon I80 before its intersection with I81, and we wouldn't see I80 again for weeks. It was a great respite.
This portion of I80, like all of I80 across Pennsylvania from Delaware Water Gap to nearly the western edge of the state north of Pittsburgh, is painfully boring. I guess it's scenic enough, and certainly more interesting than traversing Kansas, but you always have the itch to get out of it. It's just trees. Maybe a few vistas here and there around Lock Haven, but it just grinds your brain into hamburger. Maybe it's too familiar to me, but I'm sure newbies wouldn't think twice about skipping some of the near-I80 towns along the way like Frackville and Hazleton.
Hazleton is some kind of dusty truck stop conjoined with strip malls. Penn State University has a satellite campus there, and I'm sure the students present at this campus are highly motivated to garner acceptance to main campus. Thankfully, this was our turnoff to I81 south, which brought this horizontal grind of a highway into the rearview mirror.
Frackville was a little bit different. It had a discernible town, with a main street and multiple story buildings cozy up against each other. I had to stop there once, and determined that it was actually a set for a post-apocalyptic zombie movie perhaps. A saw a few people mulling about, but they had to be extras waiting for the next scene.
Or actually, they were unemployed like me, but with much more dust-caked clothing to show for it. We've all got a different story, so we just have to move on.
And moving on, southward from I80, on I81, can be a pretty drive, if not quite boring. But again, I've done this many times. You sort of drop out of Northern Pennsylvania and enter the flatlands. This makes it sound like New Zealand, but it's nothing like that. It's Harrisburg, ultimately. And you push this speedometer needle to 55 MPH toward Harrisburg, and get more grey hair watching fresh bearings break in on the teardrop hubs, but we had to face it: the camper made it up the Pocono mountains already and we're heading south and west, which are two words I like to combine, I'd find out later in the trip and even later in my daydreaming of different vistas to exist in.
I'll spare the details, but you drop off 81 onto I76, the Pennsylvania turnpike that traverses the state horizontally. This slides southwest-ward through the state, and magically becomes I70. Through this path, you encounter a fairly unexpected tunnel west of Harrisburg. It has some eminence to it, and definitely rings of the "this mountain's too thick to ride over, we'll bore a hole through it!" bravado. The video below is the approach to the tunnel and what beholds after the exit.
There is a mention in there of Ohiopyle State Park, which we did not happen to stop upon. There was certainly a discussion that brought us to the conclusion that three weeks is a fairly hair-raising curfew for a traverse of the continental US.
West of this tunnel, we're well into the darkness of the night. We'd further test our rig with torrential rains that would dampen our moods. There's nothing like night rain to evoke a pun.
Yet I will not evoke a pun here. We drove through the darkness, and eventually slithered through increasingly heavy rains in some dank Pennsylvania locales that lapsed in and out of nothingness to rural lonely consciousness. The rain increased, and the teardrop was not rain-tested, and we didn't want to be in Pennsylvania anymore.
We pulled the rig off the highway, somewhere unknown, but there wasn't an itinerary anyway, and we'd almost killed Pennsylvania and we just needed to huddle up somewhere. We were sitting on some asphalt acreage, indeterminate parking lots of gas stations and scattered strip mall, and made the decision to park it for the night. Out here, everything is space. Nobody is clamoring for real estate, so parking lots just stretched out into roads and solitary buildings. There was no life out here... out here, we were nowhere, even in the midst of an urban landscape.
We stashed ourselves in a Walmart parking lot. That wasn't because we love the big savings, it was more for the sake of safety in numbers. Other wayward RV'ers or guys in a van not by the river do the same, and there's some security to that. You'll see anything from a busted up lived-in van to a $100k space shuttle of an RV in these ad-hoc campgrounds. That said, we still had door locks on the teardrop and left the thing hitched to the car for a getaway if necessary.
There was no getaway needed, and we rose the next day to dry but overcast skies, and a day that would take us through four states, to Illinois. Lincoln would be proud.
[g]
