Road Trip!
Kimberly and I took a road trip this week, driving from Cincinnati to Danville, PA for my fantastic mother-in-law’s 80th birthday celebration. Packing for a car trip is always a strange experience. The amount of stuff we pack invariably expands to fill our vehicle, regardless of the length of our trip. We packed at least twice as much for this three-day trip to Danville as we did for our nearly three-week house-hunting trip in Italy and France back in 2023.
The trip from Cincinnati to Danville takes about seven and a half hours, but between talking, listening to the Philosophize This! podcast (mainly Nietzsche on this trip) and music (the Purple Rain soundtrack, Hotel California, and various jazz albums), the time passed about as quickly as one could reasonably hope.
Our long trips are much easier on Kimberly now that my driving no longer makes her sick. It wasn’t my driving specifically that made her reach for the Dramamine – whenever she’s a passenger the probability of her becoming motion sick is fairly high. But for some unknown reason, that’s changed. (Weird, because body stuff almost always gets worse, not better, with age.)
When I was in the passenger seat I tried to help Kimberly better familiarize herself with our vehicle. We’ve had it for nearly a year and a half, and you’d think that at this point we’d know how it works. That would almost certainly be true if it were the early 2000s, but as anyone who has bought a new vehicle in the last few years surely knows, modern vehicles have a ridiculous number of features. The manual for our vehicle (a 2024 Honda CR-V Hybrid) is well over 500 pages, which seems nuts. But we did learn that the basic cruise control we’d been using is not nearly as good as adaptive cruise control with lane assist, which more or less allows you to completely zone out when you’re driving. (What could go wrong?)
Our hotel in Danville ended up costing more than we paid earlier this year for our suite in downtown Geneva, Switzerland. That seemed absolutely insane to me until I realized that there are a lot fewer hotel rooms in Danville than there are in Geneva, and I’m fairly certain the lack of competition allows the PBI to keep their prices high and amenities...ah, I’ll call them ‘modest’. (I haven’t used a bath towel that small, thin, and scratchy since my time in the Marine Corps.)
On the plus side, the TV didn’t have the HDMI ports locked down, as many hotel TVs do, which meant I could use my streaming stick. It took a while to adjust from our 65” home TV to the 27” screen at the hotel (which is barely larger than the PC monitor on which I’m writing this), but I stayed strong and somehow managed. I’m old enough to remember when a 27” screen would have seemed absolutely enormous – back when Bill Clinton was President, Kurt Cobain was still alive, and it didn’t seem borderline delusional to be optimistic about the state of the world.
At home, Kimberly and I have turned our bedroom into our nearly ideal sleep environment – almost completely dark, with two white noise machines providing a comforting background murmur, and a very specific arrangement of sheets, blankets, and pillows to match the weather. The downside to that is when we aren’t in our painstakingly crafted sleep bubble, it can be tough to get to and stay asleep.
I’ve found pot gummies to be helpful – much more so than the prescription sleep drugs I sometimes took before Ohio legalized recreational marijuana. But every once in a while I get a rogue gummy and end up feeling like my body is on a two-second tape delay from my mind. (It probably has more to do with what I’ve eaten and how tired I am than the THC content of the gummy, but I believe in not blaming myself whenever it’s even remotely plausible to shift the blame elsewhere.) I know that for plenty of people, this sort of feeling is kind of the point of gummies, but after being sober for well over a decade, I seem to have lost my former appreciation for intoxication.
There’s not a whole lot between Cincinnati and Danville. The drive takes us through Columbus (where the interstate has been under major construction for what seems like the last 30 years), but that’s about it as far as larger urban areas go. As you’d expect, that means we traverse plenty of Trump country. It's still strange for me to see all of the big Trump signs, something I don’t ever recall for any previous president. My Republican friend and podcast co-host Jay likes to joke about how ‘Democrats fall in love, but Republicans fall in line’ when it comes to presidential nominees, but that’s no longer the case. To me, the whole MAGA thing feels more like a cult than a political movement. There’s been legislation introduced to carve Trump’s likeness on Mount Rushmore, make his birthday a national holiday, allow him to serve a third term, and even put his face on money. And who can forget the Trump Golden Idol from the 2021 CPAC conference? (God knows I’ve tried.) This isn’t normal, and I can’t possibly see how it's healthy in an ostensible democracy.
It was wonderful to spend time with family, but It's good to be home and with the dogs again. (They’re a key part of our carefully crafted sleep environment.) Heather, our dog and house sitter, takes great care of things while we’re gone, but there’s lots of laundry to do, news to catch up on, and (sadly) more basement waterproofing work for me. (I’m convinced that if I just slap enough hydraulic cement on the walls I’ll keep the water out.)
