On the Road to Portland...By Way of Buffalo

I’ve finished the first leg of my trip from Arkansas to Portland, Maine. I’m headed off in that direction for my niece’s wedding. She’s to be married this weekend at some point…I can’t remember the when, just the where, well mostly the where. I’m going up and will meet my better half, who is flying up, and my daughter and her boyfriend, who are flying over and all four of us will drive back after the wedding. The Englishman wants to see America, so we are going to start with the east coast and Virginia and a bunch of trees in the long state of Tennessee.

But I have to get there first.

I’ve been to Maine a few times and the route is well laid out. Little Rock to Memphis, across Tennessee and up and so on. But I’ve done that before and it seemed a bit old and dusty. Looking about I spied Buffalo on the map. I’ve never been to Buffalo, but have always loved the name (I think because I remember the heyday of the Buffalo Bills when I was a kid). Looking at the map Buffalo has a direct…sort of…road to Boston which leads to Portland. So the route was loosely laid out to go to Portland by way of Buffalo. Lake Erie needed a look see anyway, so it all worked out.

I loaded my nephew, Dakota (who some of you have met at Garycon) into the car and we took off yesterday, sometime in the early afternoon.

I planned the first day to be short, and to stop on the east bank of the Mississippi, but the weather was good, traffic as light as it ever is and we decided to carry on through to Terre Haute, Indiana. We got to talking and apparently, I thought I was going to Gary Con as we took 55 north to Chicago and had logged a few miles before I realized it. We turned onto 140 east in Hamel Illinois, and had a very pleasant drive through some beautiful farmland with hardly a car in site. Makes me wonder sometimes if it isn’t better to take such routes and avoid the interstate.

We stumbled into Terre Haute and meandered around until we found a roof to sleep under and settled in.

Its then that I discovered the gallon jug of water I always carry had cracked and soaked into my duffle bag, my lap top, up through the lap top bag and into the garment bag that held Kathy’s beautiful brand-new blue dress. How in the sam fuck that happened was beyond me, but didn’t surprise me. It was a great deal of scrambling to get it hung and dried. And there are some marks on it, where they came from, I have no idea, so if I stop posting after Friday night you’ll know that the very patient woman I’ve been married to for 25 years finally lost her patience. You’ll find her wandering wild in Montana no doubt.

About 11 I set up the TLG mobile office and tried to get some work done. We have a kickstarter that needs some looking after, after all. It took me forever to get online as something was wrong with the connection. The call from the desk to the tech support line was fruitless and soon was elevated to “we have our senior engineers working on it” which I know is sign for “we don’t know what is fucked up, and can’t fix it”. Sometime later, I managed to find the problem and at last got to work.

I promptly fell asleep.

So today, we hit the road again, heading north to Toledo and then east to Buffalo. Somewhere in route is the town of Cleveland and I’m told a good burger joint…something I’ll no doubt need.