Tuesday 8th September 2009 - On the Road Again

          It has become apparent to me that sleeping in the saddle is only possible if I do it twice a day.  and sleeping twice a day for prolonged periods is going to make me fat (think about it).  I shall give it a try today, see how it works out.

         

          The day started badly.  I caught the end of a new item on NPR, as it was telling me that "Engineers might not be able to repair the crack in time".  A crack in Time?  Oh my god! Have they sent for Stephen Hawkings?  Will the crew of the Enterprise get there in time?

          Then, of course, I wakened up/calmed down/caught on.  They were repairing Oakland Bay Bridge near San Fransisco over the Labor Day weekend, planning to open it on Tuesday for its daily quota of 260,000 cars, when they found a crack in one of the girders.  They were working frantically through the night to see if they could "repair the crack in time".

 

         I got to today's destination by lunchtime, so I thought I would try my new regime, see if I could make tomorrow a little bit shorter.  I found the approprite brand of truck stop, since I still had some time left on my day's  WiFi purchase.  I even had the luck to find a space under where a tree's shadow would be at the appropriate time.  Then I settled down with my book and a couple of beers. (I decide to forget the slurs cast on J J Hill's bottom, and read on.)

          Then I had the worst meal I've eaten in some years.  Usually American waitresses with interrupt your meal countless times to ask you brightly if everything is OK.  Not this time.  I had a long catalogue ready, but she must have already been aware of the cook's capabilities: she gave me the bill as she gave me the meal, and I never saw her again.

          After I had snoozed for a couple of hours, two young men kindly decided to sit in the shade of my tree and have a conversation.  It was time to be off again.

 

          There was another stop of the same brand a hundred miles or so away.  It involved a bit of night driving, which was OK, but left me, later than night, in the middle of nowhere.  Which reminded me of a story I read in a comic book as a small  boy.  It was called "The Road to Nowhere".  I got most of the way through it wondering what now-here might mean.  Of course, it's kind-of the opposite of no-where, isn't it?  At least it would be, if you could slip through a crack in time.