Impressive Take-off!

LA/XC-5 DAY ONE: POSTING FROM AUSTINTOWN, OH

Today’s mileage: 460.2

Total LA/XC-5 mileage: 460.2 (duh)

Road Music:  Sirius Cycle (one-time-only explanation:  I tend to start my road days with the news — especially during this freaky, weird, and scary, but enormously entertaining election season — on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News (for comic relief); then sports (ESPN, NFL Network); then music (today, The Highway [country] and Tom Petty Radio); next, the LA/XC “Live” playlist I put together specially for this road trip: 243 tunes from six acts I’ll be seeing live during LA/XC-5: Dierks Bentley (at Red Rocks near Denver); the Stones & Dylan (Night One of the Desert Trip

festival in Indio, CA); the Dixie Chicks (Hollywood Bowl in L.A.); Trish Murphy (Sam’s Burger Joint in San Antonio), and Janis Joplin in Port Arthur, TX.  Wait! you say — Janis Joplin’s dead!  Ah, yes — she’s a charter member, of course, of rock’s Tragic “27 Club” (along with fellow music legends Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse, who all died at that same age).  But I’m making a pilgrimage to Port Arthur, TX, where Janis grew up, and even though she may not be alive, I thought she’d round out my playlist nicely.

Weather leaving Westport: 69 degrees, brilliant sunshine

Weather arriving Austintown: 81, still sunny

Today’s state tally: 5 (Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio)

Gas money to date: $42.60

Well, tonight clinches it:  I’m officially the world’s worst multi-tasker.  Just back from dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings on my first night on LA/XC-5.  I got the two games I requested, Mets vs. Phillies and USC vs. Utah, on side-by-side screens right in front of my table (not all that hard to do at a B-Dubs in Austintown, Ohio — even on a Friday night) — and I couldn’t concentrate on either of them!  Music, baseball, football, what to eat, what to drink, how’s Kemba doing out in the car? . . .   In fairness, I had lots of bits and piecing running through my brain, this being the first day on the road.

And an auspicious first day it was!  I guess five’s the charm.  Four times previously I’ve set out to drive across the country, and on each and every one of those trips, I missed my target get-away time by at least three hours.  This morning I was gunning for 9AM . . . and I actually pulled out of my driveway at 9:19!!  My goal for leaving Winslow Park in WePo was between 10 and 11 AM . . . and I left at 10:20!!!

Now, this isn’t my first rodeo, and I’m well aware of the mood swings that come with these marathon drives.  Good days can be followed by awful days.  But there were lots of positive signs on Day One.  For today, at least, Kemba was the perfect dog for the trip.  He was in machine-mode during his fetching session at Winslow this

morning, which set him up for a relatively mellow interlude in the car from 10:20AM to 1:45PM.  Then, in a super-efficient 30-minute pit stop at a rest area near the Williamsport, PA exit on I-80 West, my boy ate his lunch, peed, retrieved vigorously in a conveniently enclosed grassy alley, drank a ton of water (it was 87 degrees), and happily jumped back in the car for the next leg.

After another almost-four-hours on the road, rather than heading to our Best Western Meander Inn in Austintown, we GPSed to the Austintown Dog Park, where Kemba played his heart out and charmed the locals.  So by check-in time, he’d used up still more of his over-abundant energy reserves, making the move-in a whole lot more manageable.  (Remember Ricky on these trips, trying to desperately to get to his food supply 24/7?  Remember Kemba as a 7-month-old puppy in April, 2015, going seriously bat-shit after riding in the car all day and then being cooped up in a motel all night?  Big, big improvement.)

A quick word about tonight’s dinner at B-Dubs and tonight’s stay at Best Western (which is not, as it turns out, the best Best Western.)  Yes, these have become two of my go-to’s on these road trips.  And yes, truth be told, I do have the Buffalo Wild Wings app (“Wings. Beer.  Sports.”), as well as the Applebee’s app (“eating good in the neighborhood”), on my iPhone.  Have my travel selections become too predictable?  Have I lost the spirit of adenture?  No.  It’s just that, as a veteran of four of these hauls, I’ve concluded there are an awful lot of grungy, grimy, not-so-charming places in this vast land of ours, and I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Confession:  I’d intended to do one last post from the comfort of home, but in my mad dash to get road-ready over the last few days, it didn’t happen.  So before this gets lost in the shuffle . . . we had some pretty big news earlier this week:  A new dog in the “family!”  You might have heard that Nena, Luz’s chihuahua, passed away earlier this summer.  So Carol, Robby, and I located for her Sophie Mae, a 5-pound, 4-year-old piece of work from Tennessee, who was up for adoption.  In the hours that Sophie the Chihuahua was under our wing, before presenting her to Luz as a surprise, we — Carol, especially — fell madly in love with the little spitfire.  I joked with her that if Luz didn’t want the dog, we’d keep her; that way Carol would have her dog, and I’d have mine.

But the surprise was a successful one, and now Sophie  is happily ensconced in her new home with St. Luz, Patron Saint of dogs.  As a matter of fact, Luz, Sophie, and Carol saw Kemba and me off this morning at Winslow Park, just before we hit the road.

One final note:  As I finish this post, it’s getting dangerously close to midnight, and undoubtedly, before I hit “publish,” it will be well into tomorrow.  If past trips are any indication, this will be the rule, not the exception.  So when I write about what happened “today,” Friday, September 23, I’m gonna keep referring to it as today, even if by the time I finish, it’s tomorrow, September 24.  Just so you know.

I PLAN TO POST AS CLOSE TO DAILY AS POSSIBLE WHILE KEMBA AND I ARE ON THE ROAD. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: MAN PLANS, GOD LAUGHS. 🙂 OH, AND BTW, YOU CAN ALSO FOLLOW ME ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM.