Roadtrip!

The past seven days I mostly spent driving. I needed to get an apartment lease before actually relocating to a new state, and this week break between Finals and Graduation was the best time to do it.

The stats went something like this:
~1500 miles (hmm, time for an oil change?)
-7 states
-9 state border crossings
~$20 in tolls
~50 gallons of gas
-4 audio books
-17 apartment viewings in 2 days (13 on Monday, and I finished ahead of schedule! If you can believe it)

It was fun!

There were two short adventures of note:

-Rt 23 from Toledo OH to Ann Arbor MI was a cute little road. For about 15 miles I was confronted with many signs: "State Prison in Vicinity. Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers."
Indeed.

-I stopped for gas and lunch in a little WV town just outside of Charleston. In fact, it may have been the outskirts of Charleston, I forget.
I was innocently washing my windshield when a Marine recruiter approached me and asked if I'd ever thought about joining the Marines. (I didn't know their recruitment policy involved patroling the gas stations.)

I didn't know how to tell him that I am really not the person they want enlisting, so I blinked at him a few times before I finally just said, "Erm... no..."
He then asked if I had any friends interested.
So I wished him good luck. I didn't know what else to say to a Marine recruiter.

Written at 7:45 AM

Never before have I been to Michigan. I left VA this morning at 6 AM, on a flight with about fifteen passengers of a possible 80? or so. It makes me wonder why short, domestic airfares continue to be $300 roundtrip when the airlines have so much trouble selling seats. Or for that matter why I’ve been having so much trouble finding tickets. Further, I set off the automatic lights on my way to the end of the main concourse in Dulles at about 4:30. Apparently most sane people do not go to hang out in the airport at such a time.

Detroit was just a one-hour, fifteen-minute flight away. I guess it’s one of those uni-airline airports, because I have not seen any airlines but Northwest and affiliated friends.

In the underground walkway between Concourses A and B&C, the kind with the people-movers, the walls are coloured and flash corresponding to the music playing. When I first entered the lights twinkled and shifted merrily like an aurora; as I left the music became more dynamic and the lights changed to fit the tone of the piece, the left wall an angry, pulsing red with the low register and the right wall a softer aqua when the higher instruments answered.

I feel I must be spending too much time in airports when I start to sing along with the muzak.

When traveling I spend a lot of time thinking about inertial and non-inertial reference frames.