Going West
There comes a critical time in any adventure where the road starts curling its stripes at you like a beckoning finger while the days of non-stop motion, thinking, tweeting, talking, posting, interviewing, photographing, driving, direction-following, gassing, eating, and sleeping, continue to hum and threaten to coerce a traveler to opt and plant roots in just about every new place visited. It’s a strange dichotomy.
I fought and followed both these notions as I pulled out of Charlottesville on Saturday morning. There was still nine hundred miles ahead of me. I made it to the Apple store in Louisville, KY, at 9:05 p.m. and just missed getting a new charger for my laptop. There’s a Starbucks that was open until midnight so I spent a couple hours reading and drinking coffee before hitting the road at closing time.
I made it just north of Indianapolis until the ghosts of sleep made continuing impossible. Even after a few late night hours at a Lebanon rest stop I found pure sleep in this car a hard thing to come by since the idling of sleeping semi-trucks and the quasi stillness in the long bench seat would sometimes ignite in dreams that forced me from sleep to frantically grab the steering wheel in preparation to attempt to steer away from the oncoming rest stop building. But the car was silent and motionless in its parking space. The trucks still idled with dim eyes in their rows. It was only my head that was moving with the momentum of nearly three thousand miles.
A dim and grey day broke after six a.m. and I continued with only a few more hours to go.
