Back in the saddle

It's great to be back on the road. A few noticeable differences this time, though, unfortunately for the worse.

First off, it's COLD! I'm in Virginia now... about 25 miles northeast of Richmond. This is the South, isn't it? And yet it's about 40 degrees. I'm really not excited about sleeping in the car when it's this cold out (though come to think of it, I did spend some chilly nights up in the higher altitudes this summer.)

Second, it's DARK! When I was doing this during the summer, it would still be light out at 9:30 PM. Tonight it was dark before 5:30 PM. That means more driving in the dark, which is lame, plus more difficulty in finding things like stores, restaurants, and motels in the dark in unfamiliar territory. In addition, the drive is far less interesting, since you see a heck of a lot less scenery.

Third, I had to drive through NEW JERSEY, a state I blissfully skipped during my summer trip. I was in more traffic today in the entire state of NJ than I was in all summer. And the NJ rest stops were dirty and did not have wifi. Plus, strangely enough, it began raining as soon as I crossed the border into the state, and immediately stopped raining as I paid my toll to leave.

Though I guess I will concede one positive about NJ: they figured out how to make EZ Pass work at highway speeds. And they seem to have managed to grasp the exceedingly complicated notion that if you put the EZ Pass lanes on the outsides and let the cash-paying fools dawdle in the middle lanes, you don't have as much problem with people not realizing until the last second that they're in the wrong lane and then trying to move over into the right lane, all the while blocking as many lanes as they can and generally looking like idiots, thereby eliminating all possible gains of installing an otherwise speedy RFID-based toll system in the first place. That's right, Massachusetts, New Jersey is making you look dumb.