Fuck you, Hooray for me.

It has been a while. Lack of a home, and limited internet access will cause these types of gaps between posts. Here is a story that I have been meaning to tell for the last... four weeks, or so:

My lovely accomplice, Callie, and myself drove for nineteen hours, went through ten different states, and put over 900 miles on the car in the span of one day. It was epic. It was cramped. It was uncomfortably wired by red bulls, accented with patches of severe hunger and an intense need to pee. Stops were made in the most random of towns, some of which I have already forgotten the names of. Frustrations of limited personal space and a desire to stretch out our limbs were dealt with in as best a way as we could manage- we were silent. Save for a few carefully chosen comments about how long we had left to go. The I-Pod was incapable of satisfying our ears because it had been on repeat for two months. We opted for romantic tunes by Steam Boat Willie, which we had on repeat for the final five hours of the drive. To say it was a long day is an understatement. Duh.

Around the 15th hour, we entered New Jersey, and a whole new world of highways and toll booths opened up to us. We immediately got lost. New Jersey's roadways consist only of highways and interstates from what I can gather, and I don't like this one bit. We exited Interstate-95 in search of a place to take an emergency bathroom break at 8pm, and didn't make it back on track until after 9pm. We desperately tried to find our way onto I-95 north and managed to do so a few times only to have it mysteriously become I-295 and start heading south. Holy fuck, was that confusing. We eventually ended up on rural highway 553 (or something), with deer and sparsely placed homes lining the roadside. In desperation we pulled into an unknown driveway and proceeded to knock on the door hoping that a kind stranger could guide us back to the light. No one answered. Fair enough. I wouldn't answer either if I lived in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.

It was time for plan B: we started driving again. Finally, we found a grocery store. At this point we weren't sure if we were still in New Jersey. Turns out that we were, and for some absurd reason there are two separate I-95's that run north-south. Why this is, I don't know. It's over now, and I will not go back to New Jersey by car ever again if it can be helped.

Feeling as though we had conquered the world, we continued our trek north up the east coast. We made it to New York and hit stand-still traffic at eleven o'clock at night. This traffic slowly but surely guided us through a series of toll booths that cost us nearly $20 in total. It had been a little over 17 hours. We had left Charleston, South Carolina at 6:30am with the intention of making a mere 16 hour drive to Providence, Rhode Island. What a joke. We called our dear friend Seth from New Orleans. He had recently returned to his second year of law school at Yale in New Haven, Conneticuit. Bless his heart, he offered us a place to stay and promised some delicious pizza, one of the few things that New Haven has to offer besides Yale. It helped. Pizza gave us hope. Melted cheese became a saviour that night, and I will be forever greatful.

The evening ended with a cuddle pile in some obscure apartment building a few blocks from Yale. It is home to Seth when he is on the grind, bad-assing his way to lawyerdom. We watched a few espisodes of Eastbound and Down and went to sleep. Morning came, and we were off and away to Providence. It was only an hour away by car. What a beautiful concept. Music to my ears. The sun was out, the longest driving day ever was behind us, and we had nothing to do but keep on exploring.

And that is exactly what we did.