three.oh.seven

I was supposed to stay on top of this blogging thing, but found that I just didn't have the time during the trip across America.  After living in Billerica, MA, for almost 11 years, it was finally time for a change of scenery.  I'm not in school (for the first time in my life) and I wanted to do something worth telling people about.  So I moved to Jackson, WY, with my older brother Jeff and one of our good friends from school Phil.  It took us three days to make it out here and it was quite an adventure.

We left Billerica Friday night, October 17, with a UHaul towing Jeff's car and Phil driving behind the truck.  After a few hours on the road we stopped at our first destination: Norwalk, CT.  Our friends Matt and Fran live there and we decided to stop and hang out with them one last time before we took off across the country.  We stayed with them Friday night and Saturday night, and then Matt made us a great breakfast before we left Sunday morning.

From Connecticut we drove through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and most of Indiana.  All in one day.  We passed through New York and New Jersey pretty quickly and into Pennsylvania. Driving through Pennsylvania might have been one of the most boring things I've ever done.  We passed a lot of farms and saw a bunch of cows.  Anyway we stopped at an Arby's on the side of the highway and then drove through Ohio and stayed in Hammond, Indiana, for the night at an Amerihost Inn...which none of us had ever heard of.

The alarm went off too early the next morning, but we didn't hit the road until about 8:30.  We drove through Illinois, stopping at about fifteen eighty-cent tolls, up into Wisconsin.  Just in case you ever get there, the highway patrol cars are blue and they're everywhere.  At some point we crossed the Mississippi River into Minnesota.  Minnesota turned into South Dakota.  More uneventful driving until we stopped at a Subway for our sole meal of the day.  I got the new chicken pizziola sub.  Like most of their sandwiches it was lame.  At this point we shuffled vehicles, Jeff driving the truck, Phil taking his car, and I finally got a break and rode shotgun in the UHaul.  I promptly passed out from exhaustion and woke up when we pulled into Wall, SD.  We spent the night at a Best Western in this small town.  We planned to get up early and watch the sunrise.

Day three started off even earlier than the previous two since we were trying to beat the sun up.  We stopped at the complimentary continental breakfast which wasn't very good, but we weren't expecting much.  I had a cup of coffee and then we drove into the Badlands National Park.  It was too cloudy to see the sun coming up, so we drove around and took pictures for awhile.  We headed back to Wall and stopped at the famous (I guess...?) Wall Drug and enjoyed a real breakfast before driving to Mt. Rushmore.  I'm glad we saw that, even though we stayed for about ten minutes.  We drove through the Black Hills National Forest which looked like it had been torched.  

We made it into Wyoming and stopped to take a picture with the sign.  Driving through Wyoming was sweet, most of the time there was no one else on the road.  We got snow at one point, the heavy, wet snow that we're used to getting in New England.  We stopped at a Wendy's for lunch and then got back on the highway for the last stretch of the trip.  It looked like it hadn't snowed in this part of the state.  Eventually we did the driver shuffle.  When we were crossing the continental divide at almost 10,000 feet we got more snow.  It started dumping and we could barely see ten feet in front of the truck.  Thankfully Jeff was driving, and I fell asleep again.  Woke up when we pulled into town on Tuesday night and have been living in the Antler Motel in town since.  We've been looking at three-bedroom places the past couple days.  Hopefully we'll have one before the end of the week. 

The job hunt starts tomorrow.