New Year’s Road Trip

Coming to you from Eastern Pennsylvania. I’m spending the next few weeks helping Editor Friend as she recovers from ankle fusion surgery. I drove from Oklahoma to Ohio on New Year’s Day, then on from Ohio to eastern Pennsylvania on the 2^nd. Stopped off to have lunch with Oldest Son, too, which was nice. I hadn’t seen him in several years.

We took our Christmas tree down on the 29^th, which is kind of early for us, because we usually leave it up until at least New Year’s. But I planned on leaving stupid early Wednesday, so we decided to do it Sunday.

The surgical waiting area at Hershey Medical Center is very nicely appointed. The chairs are comfortable, there’s plenty of outlets for various tech, and they have free portable chargers available, too. The food in the café was tasty and affordable.

Forgetting Things

I’ve written before about forgetting things on a road trip. This trip was one of the more embarrassing times. I was somewhere around Joplin, Missouri on my way for a 3-week trip when I realized I had forgotten something rather important.

Many diabetics require insulin, and I’m no exception. I have my handy insulin pump and a full cartridge lasts me two-and-a-half to three days. But that’s not enough for a 3-week trip. I had prepped myself pretty well, I thought, packing my suitcase the night before. I’d packed all my meds for the trip in a backpack with my CPAP and that was squared away.

I made a checklist on the whiteboard on the pantry door to remind me to pack my drinks, grab my insulin, take one of my meds, and then hit the road. I did indeed grab my drinks out of the fridge. Did I grab the bag of insulin?

No, of course not. Completely forgot about it for whatever reason.

I convinced myself that the best solution, rather than driving back home to get them, losing four hours of travel, was to have Diana overnight them to Editor Friend’s house. Funny thing though. Because I was driving up on New Year’s Day, all of the offices for the major shipping companies were closed. She offered to jump in her car at 6:00 in the morning and drive up to meet me so I wouldn’t have to drive all the way home. I thought that was pretty awesome on her part.

And I’ll note for the 5th or 6th time that while I really appreciate the rumble strips that Missouri has on their interstate highway system, I wish they weren’t right up against the fog line. I mean, I get it. They’re designed to let you know when you’re drifting off the road. But sometimes it seems a little aggressive.

Columbus

Thursday morning, I passed through Columbus on my way to Pittsburgh and Shippensburg. It was very interesting to see what had and hadn’t changed in the 15 years or so since we lived here. The downtown construction still isn’t done. That project’s been going on for 5 or 6 years I think. Although I think the ramp that I’m driving on right now is brand new. Some of the westside freeways look nice and new with better signage and better traffic flow, but it’s also interesting to see that trash still collects in the same places that it always has.

I passed more than a few of the many churches that I pulled funerals out of over the years.

The east side of the downtown interchange has gotten a lot better. I remember that it used to be such that the right-hand lane was the only lane that passed all the way through downtown to 70 East. Now they’ve got a nice clear two-lane section of road to do that instead. I’m sure that’s cut down on the crashes in that area.

The interchange for Etna and Pataskala has really grown up a lot. I remember when it was just one or two places and now there’s like half a dozen truck lots and another half a dozen warehouses and whatnot.

Once I got outside of like Newark and into the rural part of the state like Muskingum County, it felt like 30 years ago when I was making a trip between Columbus and Marietta. I’m sure there are new structures up here and there, and Dollar General stores dot the landscape way more than they did back then. But parts of Ohio look like they haven’t changed at all.

As I made my way across eastern Ohio and recalled all the trips between Columbus and Marietta, and Columbus and Pittsburgh, I had to marvel at the technological advances. Back then I was using a handheld Garmin GPS intended for boating and hiking to keep track of where I was going. I would manually enter the map coordinates of various road junctions and then build a list of waypoints from those entries. Setting up a route was more than a little tedious. Now I’ve got two different GPS units, one on my phone and one in my car. I just enter the address and it automatically maps my route. The one on my phone tracks construction zones and speed limits and traffic conditions. The phone is about the same size as the Garmin unit and probably a hundred times more powerful.

And yet, as much as tech has advanced, the new stuff still falls short of the old. Back then I used Delorme Street Atlas to build my waypoint lists and routes. Street Atlas had a cool function that let you set a distance you wanted to travel between stops. I figured out what the average range for my car was and set that as my travel distance, which made it easy to plan fuel stops. But you can’t do that natively with Google Maps, at least not that I’ve found. I’ve complained about this more than once to a variety of Google social media accounts and haven’t gotten a response. Shame on them.

Reading

I’ve started reading Tied In, one of my Christmas presents. It’s a collection of essays and interviews about writing media tie-ins, sometimes known as movie novelizations. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the works I’ve read over the years, from Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Star Wars and others. I’ve wondered often over the years how authors got into writing such works and I’ve considered more than once trying to do some of my own (because it’s not like I don’t have enough other ideas). I may never actually get around to doing any, but I thought it’d be fun to learn about the concept.

Writing

Here are the top ten most-visited posts for 2024, not counting pages like my About page.

1. In Review: 5.11 Tactical Rush Delivery Lima Messenger Bag
2. Thirty Years On, The Ghosts of Fort McClellan Still Beckon
3. New Year’s End
4. Cover Songs – The Phil Collins Edition
5. An Atheist’s Perfect Christmas: Music, Memories, and a New Perspective
6. Berkeley vs USMC (from 2008!)
7. Frozen Doors and Football
8. Setting Writing Goals and Sweating Writing Dilemmas
9. Holiday Memories and a Living Room Wedding
10. Escort Dies (Also from 2008)

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share a thought in the comments. Sign up for my infrequent newsletter here. Find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar or follow it on Mastodon. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader.