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Grizzly all seat belted in and ready to go

I just finished what was hopefully the longest drive of the summer. I planned my road trip so that all of my drives are under eight hours according to Google maps. Of course those estimates don't account for stops or traffic, but I figured my longest drive even after accounting for everything shouldn't be more than ten hours. Unfortunately my very first drive proved me wrong. After living car-less in Manhattan for the last ~10 months, I rented a car and got behind the wheel for the first time in quite a while. And drove for fourteen god-damn-mother-fucking hours straight.

The car I ended up with is a Nissan Altima. Which I wouldn't have thought of as a "full-size" car previously, but it ended up fitting everything pretty well. I also ended up getting grizzly a doggy seat belt, which turned out to be a great use of $4. One side clips into his harness and the other straight into the seat belt slot; now he can lean his head out the window while I'm driving and I don't have to worry that he'll make a jump for it. My cellphone is getting old since I'm waiting to get to Microsoft to get a Windows phone, so I decided to get a Garmin to do my navigating. Funny thing is that apparently Garmin hasn't figured out how to detect or avoid traffic yet. I found that out the hard way when I ended up stuck behind a fatal car accident for four hours.

This is Waze telling me to get comfortable

While I was stuck in traffic I decided to download the Waze app to see
what the heck was going on. Something I apparently should have done beforehand, since there wasn't much it could do for me at that point. Turns out that at around 3pm I was stuck behind 13 miles of traffic that had been stopped due to an accident that happened at 1pm.

After a couple of hours of sitting at a dead stop traffic started moving again but it was stop and go, moving around 5 mph. Slow enough to not make any real progress but just fast enough that I couldn't stop and get out of the car or use my phone. Eventually I decided to ask Waze to navigate for me to see if it could find a path around the traffic. Unfortunately, as good at Waze is at reporting traffic, it isn't actually that good at navigating around it. It just told me to get back on the highway, which was closed. The whole reason I was off the highway was because I was being detoured. Apparently Waze just noticed that there were no cars on the highway but didn't realize why, and attempted to navigate me back onto it. Instead I looked around on my GPS and found a street parallel to the highway a little ways out and decided to make a break for it. As soon as I got to an intersection I broke away from the traffic and headed to the parallel street. Apparently I was the only person who thought of that idea, because the road was pretty much empty. It was a small, 35mph street but I was able to bypass a few

This was my view for a couple of hours

of miles of traffic with it.

Eventually, after what was possibly the most boring and painful drive through the entire state of Pennsylvania, I made it to Cleveland. Well, Willoughby to be exact. My destination was a Red Roof Inn, which I checked into at 1am (my GPS had initially estimated an 8:30pm arrival). I'm not sure what goes on in the greater Cleveland area, all I know is that their Red Roof Inns come equipped with what appears to be bullet-proof glass between the guests and the receptionist. I'm definitely not staying here any longer than I need to. Next I'll be off to Chicago to visit my good friend Kevin, who I haven't seen in a while since he's been away at Medical school.