Dateline: Texarkana

[filkertom]

I slept in late this morning -- I was dead tired. I might do the same tomorrow. But, if I do, it's cool. Because today was exactly the kind of day I want to have as much as possible with this jaunt: I drove not quite ten hours, had a lovely time singin' along with everything from Assassins and Sweeney Todd to Beatles and BNL. The weather was great, the road was open, the traffic was light, and it was just a Really Good Travel Day. And I made it all the way from Terre Haute to Texarkana, and finished off with some good Mexican food. Somehow I doubt I'll have even one more day as good as this the whole trip, but damn today was everything I'd hoped for.

So, who's gonna be in Houston tomorrow? :) Alternately, what's your best travel memory -- not vacation, but the actual to-and-from?

Update: Small bit of late-night berserk. My BIPAP machine wouldn't work no matter what outlet I plugged into. Thought it was broken, until I got it to work in the bathroom -- and then it didn't work in the bathroom. I noticed that I had the light off the second time the same moment I realized that the laptop suddenly had no power. Turns out half the outlets in the room are based on the light switch at the front door. Aiee. I need to become rich and design motels for human beings, 'cause the shitheads actually paid for that have fucked this up time and again.

Comments

[ddrussianinja.livejournal.com]

"Everybody's got the right to be happy..."

Great, now you got that song stuck in my head. Have fun in the South!

[wouldyoueva.livejournal.com]

Best travel memory: renting a car and driving down the left coast (Seattle to San Francisco) and poking into interesting stuff along the way. We decided to have a baby on that trip.

[bald-ruminant.livejournal.com]

I'll be seeing you in Houston tomorrow.

My best travel memories are the ones where I test myself along the road. Last September's drive to Dallas for FenCon, which happened to coincide with the Hurricane Rita evacuation, was a pretty good one.

My absolute favorite journey I ever took was the one right after I quit my job in 2003. I drove from Houston back to L.A., stopping along the way to say hi to friends in Ontario and Orange County, then drove through Nevada and Utah to get to Denver to meet up with 2 friends that I hadn't seen since I was in junior high school, and then drove back home. I did the Denver to Houston leg of the trip in one day. I was driving solo all the way, seeing scenery I hadn't seen before and loving it. Plus, after the bull that had been going on in the office before I left, I really needed the time alone and sense of isolation that being alone in a car for most of ten days will bring.

[jonnorthwood.livejournal.com]

Houston, no. Next week, Austin, though.

And believe me, I feel your pain w/r/t horribly designed hotel rooms. Ugh.

[faxpaladin.livejournal.com]

I'll be in Houston tomorrow...

[danceswithlife]

My best travel memory was the first non-family trip I did with a few friends in college. We left So Cal about 2am after I got off work, and the intention was to drive all night and go to Yosemite to stay with another friend of mine. From So Cal you would usually go into Yosemite by way of Fresno (the south end of the park), but we didn't organize the travel well, and went all the way to Modesto, and cut back in from the northern end of the park. We drove into the Yosemite Valley at sunrise in August. None of us had been there before. I had never seen beauty in nature like the morning sun on the granite cliffs and waterfalls. So getting lost make the experience much more wonderful!

[naja-pallida.livejournal.com]

I'm in Austin now, but have no intention of being in Houston any time soon... sing loudly. :)

My best travel memory was from the early 90s. I basically just quit life and decided to hop trains from New Brunswick, Canada to El Paso, Texas. Despite the lack of "facilities" it was remarkably fun. The train is definitely the way to travel if you are in no hurry at all to get where you want to be.

I also used to fly standby across Canada, coast to coast, every summer to see my family... of course, with standby you're never guaranteed a flight, and I never really tried all that hard, so I'd often find myself living in airports for days at a time. It sounds like some people's worst nightmare, but I thought it was great at the time. Something tells me with newer security measures, you probably couldn't get away with spending days in a terminal anymore. :P

I used to never dream...

[seanmonster.livejournal.com]

I had only been using my CPAP for a few months when we lost power for a few days. It was miserable. Man, I can still hardly believe want a difference these little machines make.

[youngcurmudgeon.livejournal.com]

My favorite travel memory is hard, 'cause my family drives just about everywhere always forever. Probably the trip to Grand Teton/Yellowstone/Mt, Rushmore, just because my sister and I were at the age when we could be entertained by everything and also understand what was going on. We played the license plate game, and I don't care what anyone else says, we saw Hawaii driving up that mountain! :-)

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

Wish I could come to the concert.

By the way, thought you might like to know: the circuit dependency you mention in hotel rooms isn't a mistake. It's intended to work that way. Things can't draw power (from the hotel's perspective, waste money) if left on or plugged in by accident if the lights are turned off. It's a lot less likely that people will leave lights on accidentally than any other power drainer. It isn't a convenience-based design, agreed, but it IS intentional.

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

I encountered a sort of variation on that in London - the light switch for the overhead light in the room was a box on the wall that you had to insert your room key into. You couldn't leave the light on if you took your key with you when leaving the room. I wonder if the outlets were also hooked up to that.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I shall be there. I'm looking forward to the show.

[daundelyon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I don't know that I have a "best", but I do have a most memorable.
When I was 13 (that right there is a warning sign), my family moved from Dayton to Cincinnati. The move was schedualed to take place while I was away at summer camp in North Carolina. All was well until the day of my flight home...which I missed by two minutes.
Couldn't reach my parents, no one answered at the house because apparently I had the wrong number (plus they'd already left-this was just pre-cell phone craze), or their new address. Yes, my parents moved and didn't tell me where they were going. They didn't know anything was wrong until I didn't get off the plane. The whole mess finally got sorted out, and I made it home several hours later, tired, cranky, and dispirited.
Only to find out that my mom had sold my furniture in anticipation of getting a new set. There was a matress on the floor and a nightstand. I was too tired to care.
Then the next morning, we discovered we'd been given the wrong trunk. ARGH!