Well it all started out one morning with the desire to be somewhere else. I had just relocated to Los Angeles after 3 and a half years in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There really wan't any work going on for me and I felt just like I needed to get away and reconnect with my old self.
I had been avoiding Vermont like it was the plague of death for far too many years. Things about Vermont just always made me feel like they would never really make me feel anything about home anymore.
I had been gone for 9 years. Was back once for about a month 3 years after I left and once more for 2 days about a year after that. Then I hadn't been there at all for over 5 years.
I was enjoying traveling around to all the exotic places in the west. I mean when you walk in to a bar in Jackson Hole that has saddles for seats, that is getting way far away from the reality that everyone surrounds themselves in.
So anyway on with the stroy...
In short I quit my job, left all my furniture behind, packed my clothes and bikes and my dog in the car and drove from LA to Gallup, New Mexico. Now I have only 8 states left and then I have been to all of them. But at the time I had not been to New Mexico. It was cold. 100 miles outside of LA and them temperature never got about 25 degrees. Of course this was all 2 days before Christmas.
I stayed there for the night. No hotels allowed my dog to come in and I was too tired to continue driving down the road. I had packed everything and mailed a couple of boxes before getting in the car and then driving for 9 hours.
Slept for about 2 hours, got showered and back in the car to keep on going. I made it to Clarksville, Arkansas, another state that I hadn't been too. Not that I have ever had any desire to go there. Stayed the night there for about 4 hours. I had put in a 15 hour day of driving that day. I was in between a huge western storm front and a noreaster storm. I needed to make some good time.
The next day I drove to just north of Cleveland, Ohio. That was a 16 hour day. Too tired yet again to keep going. But it was great to travel through Louisville, Kentucky, although if my friends had answered the phone when I called I would have been staying the night there and it would have been a 5 day trip instead of 4.
I got about 3 hours of sleep and Got in the car to hit a little bit of the Storm in Buffalo, New York. But kept on drving til I got to Rutland, Vermont. Got stuck in traffic for 15 minutes watching all sorts of emergency vehicles going by, when I olny had to drive 200 yards to make the turn to head to Woodstock and Quichee to then only have another hour after that to make it to Lyndonville, Vermont where I grew up. Well I ended up getting through it alright. The dog at this point is pissed that we have been in the car for so long. I got her a dog bone and she destroyed it in about an hour.
So that was the long haul. Not time to stop and look at the balls of yarn and large oversixed fry pans. Nothing in the Grand Canyon, and no casinos. But I made it in 4 days. Slept for an entire the next day which would have been more sleep then I had had in a year.
I reccommend to people that if you do the cross country drive, do it with someone else that can help you drive the car. My dog could steer just fine but she could handle the shifting.
