The Road Home

Quiz: You are in Iowa City, Iowa, a city in the Central Time Zone. Tomorrow you need to be at church in South Bend, Indiana, 301 miles away, at 12:30 local time—scratch that; you need to be there by 11 for lunch with an old friend. (Note: South Bend may or may not be in the Eastern Time Zone.) Assuming the speed limit is an average of 70 miles per hour the whole way and that it will take you 25 minutes to get up, dress, pack up your friend's station wagon, and say goodbye to the generous fellows who let you inhabit their living room free of charge for three days, for what time should you set your alarm? Oh yeah, and Daylight Savings Time ends tonight at 2 am. And you generally snooze once or twice.

Somehow Joey and I figured this one out before falling asleep Saturday night, and we got on the road a little after 5 local time in order to meet our friend K at her home on Notre Dame campus. Check that: we were going to see Joey's friend. As of yet she was only my blog-friend, which I'm not sure fully qualifies, or at least this guy I met at the conference didn't seem to think so. But now, I'm happy to say, K and I are full-fledged friends, after having spent an hour eating frozen pizza, talking about Asia, and kicking Koopa butt on Mario 3, perhaps the best game ever invented.

K, thanks for a lovely afternoon.

After leaving South Bend, we headed back to Athens by way of Toledo and Findlay (thank you Tom and Elisa for making these more than mere names to me) and Columbus. I drove and surfed the local radio stations in hope of hearing some Journey—no luck, but we did hear some good ones—Joey dozed. For the last hour or so of the trip Joey read aloud from his copy of Best American Travel Writing 2001, a great piece about Icelandic culture and the effect of the global ban on whaling on their national sensibilities. We rolled into my driveway at a little after 8, another road trip successfuly concluded.