The GPS once again proves itself retarded.
As I was leaving the restaurant, I remembered I needed to get gas, so I poked the “Gas Station” button on the GPS and followed its lead… but the place it took me was not a gas station… looked more like an airport rental car place, so it probably did have gasoline, just not any to share with me.
So I tried again… and this one didn’t even vaguely resemble a gas station!
No longer trusting the gorram gizmo, I looked at the map of all the places it was claiming were gas stations, and saw that two of them were on the same road. I figured at least one of them had to actually be for real, so headed that direction. I arrived at the first one, and lo and behold, an actual-factual gas station! Slightly shifty and deserted-looking, but a gas station nonetheless, so I pull in and go to get some gas… but there isn’t any. The pumps were on and functioning, there just wasn’t anything to pump. -_-
So I got back in and continued on to the next place, which finally actually had gasoline for my sad little car. Filled up, got back in, punched in my uncle’s address, and headed out.
Of course, instead of taking me back to where I’d gotten off the highway near Glenn, it took me further into Cleveland (pretty much the opposite direction of where I really wanted to go, only I didn’t realize that for a while) and I never quite figured out what it had in mind, because when it got me back near anything resembling a highway, half the turns it wanted me to make were blocked off for construction!
Eventually, no thanks to the GPS, I found my way to a road pointed in the general direction of my uncle’s and found my way back. Oy!
[Insert sleep here.]
To Canada!
The following morning, I loaded up and headed off again, Canada-bound! About 11 hours on the road… not much to report! I-90 is long. (And boring. Thank goodness for audiobooks! (Or really, just the one since it turned out to be really long!)) Followed it along Lake Erie for the rest of Ohio, through the weird little nub of Pennsylvania, and into New York. I thought about detouring to Niagara Falls, but decided it was gonna be a long enough day already without a 2 hour side trip, so just kept on I-90 over to Syracuse, and then 81 up to Canada!
For some reason, they let me in 🙂 so I kept going! It was kind of wacky to see everything marked in kilometers and kph… luckily they also included miles for the first while for us silly southerners. Soon every sign in sight was in French, and it really started to feel like I was in another country! (Which is kind of hilarious, because in the grand scheme of Canada, I was barely over the border!)
By the time I was driving through Montreal on the “Autoroute Transcanadienne” it was dark, and the moon was hanging low and huge and gorgeous, right in front of my face, honestly the biggest and deepest colored I’ve ever seen it… it kind of felt more like another planet than another country!
At long last, I made it to my hotel, (assured the girl at the desk I had not, in fact, cancelled my reservation,) got to my room, showered, and crashed! Nice room, comfy bed, epic sleep.
I didn’t have to arrive at the Canadian Space Agency for the first installment of the CSA tweetup and Curiosity’s landing until midnight Sunday night/Monday morning, so I slept in Sunday and it was delicious.
I thought about going into Montreal to explore/sightsee, but couldn’t figure out what I wanted to see, and figured with my luck with the GPS lately, I’d spend most of the day lost, and I was still pretty beat, so I just hung out at the hotel for the day, watching the only thing on TV that wasn’t the Olympics or in French (or the Olympics in French) – which turned out to be “Say Yes to the Dress” and then “Toddlers in Tiaras”… so, not terribly interesting, but addictive in a train-wreck sort of way – and tweeting and reading and generally relaxing!
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