IN WHICH We Leave Connecticut and Head Toward Binghamton, Make a Fateful and Interesting Choice, Shudder and Shake, Get Ripped Off, Lose Power Repeatedly, I See Something Vile, AND - in the Meantime - Our Trip is Put in Peril.

My grandmother has an aversion - a perfectly logical and normal one, I think - to heavy traffic on the expressway.  And quite frankly, if I was entrusting my car and my safety to someone whose father I had bathed as an infant, I would feel exactly the same way.

Add to that my love for maps and finding shortcuts, and we had a recipe for avoiding Hartford and the Mass Pike.  "You know, Grandma," I said, "if we got off at this exit up here, we could take this other way to Binghamton, and get on Rt. 17 in New York."  I pointed to the exit on the map.  "Oh," she said.  "Well, if you want to do that, go ahead, I don't mind at all!"  Okay then!  I was excited about taking some back roads.

We got off the highway in Marlborough, and the hills began.  First, we went down.  Wheeee!  But then, we had to go up.  Way, way up.  And then back down, but then way back up again.  The scenery was nice, but when we stopped at a light in East Hampton, the car was shaking.  We stopped at a McDonald's to use the facilities, and Grandma was worried.  "What should we do?," she asked.  We both agreed to keep going - we were in the middle of nowhere, practically; the car was still running; we didn't have money to stop somewhere; and we really needed to keep going anyway.  So we did, without looking under the hood, since neither of us could have done anything useful even if we knew the problem.

I got back on the highway after Middletown, and the car started acting up again.  In addition to shaking while idling, it would completely lose power from time to time, whether I was using cruise control or not.  This first became evident when I pulled out to pass someone, got up to them, and suddenly fell behind - at first I thought he had sped up to avoid the pass, until I noticed we were currently going 55 miles per hour.  I gave up on cruise control, but any time we went up a hill, the accelerator became useless.  It was all I could do to keep out of people's way at those points, and merging onto highways was awful.  I started building up momentum on downslopes, which we could then use to forestall the inability to use the gas on the hills.  However, I made the mistake of telling my grandmother one time when we topped 75, and she started paying closer attention to the speedometer.

My tactics got us into New York, where we stopped in a small town called Liberty for gas (which the car was sucking down like crazy) and lunch.  We went into a Pizza Hut, where the waitress called us both "honey," and took our order for a medium pepperoni pizza.  I left Grandma in a booth to wait, while I went back and visited the bathroom.

Some of you know that one of the most disturbing experiences of my life came in a restaurant bathroom - where an irate black woman and her very large black male companion followed me in, screaming.  So it should perhaps come as no surprise, on a day that was already going poorly, that when I opened the door to this bathroom, something bad would happen.  Perhaps it turned out to be a very small room, meant for one person at a time.  Perhaps that one person was already in there.  Perhaps he was large and hairy.  Perhaps the toilet was right next to the door, so that when you open the door, whoomp, there it is.

I later checked, and the lock was in perfect working order.  Sick.

The pizza was too expensive (almost three times what I paid for one this Sunday), but it was good, and it got us the rest of the way to Binghamton.  Have you been to Binghamton?  It is the hilliest city in the world.  After a few false starts, we finally found my great-uncle's house (located on Hospital Hill Road, probably so named because they needed a hospital at the top to treat anyone who tried to climb the horrific thing) and parked the car.  It shook as I brought it to a stop, and it smelled like something inside was melting.  We got out, thankful to have gotten this far, but still 160 miles from home.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

Round TWELVE

NHS Speech

"My View" Editorial

The October Surprise
|  Round 1 |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |
|   6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |
|  11  |  12  |  Final Bell  |

Journey to Jersey II
|  Intro  |  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |
|   6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |  11  |
|  12  |  13  |  14  |  15  |

Journey to Jersey I
|  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |   6  |  7  |  8  |
|  9  |  10  |  11  |  12  |  13  |  14  |
|  15  |  16  |  17  |  18  |  19  |  20  |

An Epic Saga
|  Act  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |
|   6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |  11  |
|  12  |  13  |  14  |  15  |  16  |

Christian Rock Email

Freshman Room Draw
|  Part One  |  Two  |
|  Three  |  Four  |  Five  |