Road Trip - Day Two

Sandusky, OH to Cooperstown, NY – 500 mi

Today was a driving day, a day in which the full weight of “road trip” rested its full weight upon our shoulders. These things sound great on paper, when you’ve been working long hours all summer without a break, and you just want to walk out the door and walk until you don’t want to walk anymore. Road trips are kind of like that, except that you have someplace you have to be, so even when you don’t want to walk anymore, you have no choice but to keep on truckin’. And New York is not the state you want to truck across like that.

The day started with a failed attempt at finding functional wifi, as the Starbucks we stopped at before we left Sandusky was having issues with their system. So I had to settle for a cup of coffee, and then we hit the road, passing through Cleveland. If Milwaukee has a twin, Cleveland is it. An industrially-oriented Great Lakes city with a few skyscrapers and that rough-around-the-edges feeling to everything, you just get the feeling that the city is inhabited by people who work too hard to worry too much about keeping their city looking impressive at all times, which to me is impressive in itself and exhibits in the people a certain quality of confidence that while it might not be the pretty thing in the world, they are leading good lives. I could never live in Cleveland.

Upon exiting Cleveland, we realized that we hadn’t exactly stopped for food that morning, and it was approaching 11am. And it seemed as though as soon as that thought had been thunk, God placed a Waffle House just off of I-90. Anyone who knows Dustyn and I knows we have an obsession with the Waffle House, the cheap goodness that’s available there, and the refreshingly familiar yellow-block W-A-F-F-L-E H-O-U-S-E. For just a hair over six dollars, I got myself my “3-2-1” breakfast that I’ve developed over a period of 5 years sparsely frequenting the Waffle House: a triple hashbrown, a double waffle and a single glass of water, which is enough food so that toward end, you’re challenging yourself to finish it. It was wonderful.

So off we went across the little corner of Pennsylvania that reaches up and claims the city of Erie, and then into New York state. Now, to get across New York, you have two options: the first one is the New York State Thruway, which is a bit more direct but is also a toll road. And we’re cheap. So we took option #2, the Southern Tier Expressway, Interstate 86 which winds through the hills of the southern part of the state. We pulled off at a rest stop to grab a map and ask how long we were looking at until we reached Cooperstown, and were told it would be about 5 ½ to 6 hours. This blindsided us because we ignorantly assumed that a) once you reach the state that contains your destination, you should be at least kind of close to said destination, and b) all states out east are small. So we put our heads down and did the drive. The closest thing I can compare it to is driving the stretch of I-94 between Tomah and Eau Claire, except that the hills are a bit bigger in New York. And the stretch is 6 hours instead of one. It was a struggle, not only staying awake, but keeping our sanity. We began singing silly repetitive songs, and creating faux church names based upon towns on the highway signs we were passing, such as “Jerusalem Hill Tabernacle Fist Congregational Assembly of God, Scientist” and other such things.

We finally reached Cooperstown, which is set back in the hills on a lake in east central New York, and has to be about the most perfect all-American town. All the houses are neatly kept, and there are little mom-and-pop shops everywhere, and a big baseball field complex and then, just around the corner… a gigantic Howard Johnson hotel. Cooperstown is the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, so this makes sense, in a really odd way. It feels like plopping down a SuperTarget in a town of 300 or something. Anyway, we grabbed a variety-pack case from the local microbrewery, Cooperstown Brewing Company, and drove off to our campsite, which turned out to be about 25 minutes away from Cooperstown, set back on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. We set up the tent in the last remaining light of the evening and set about building our campfire and firing up the grill. Two steaks and a few beers later, we crashed for the night, and even in my dreams, I was driving across southern New York on a never-ending trip.