Hello, city!

Aug 01, 2010 10:16


I made it to Madison! After phone interview, flying in for a live interview, waiting for the job offer, waffling for a week, and then waiting for two months, I'm here. Oh, yeah, and the 1400mi four-day drive. It's actually a two-day 900mi drive, but we wandered around a little.

Tuesday
On the way out here, I started out by fetching Amanda, who is my co-pilot, my friend, and originally my comp sci lab partner from school. She's from Lower Slower Delaware and is great at chit-chatting and handling the GPS on my Droid (whom we named Lady du Carte). She's also working as a graphic designer at a print shop, so we made sure to check out all the print media at every stop: pamphlets, brochures, promo cards, etc.


Going down below the canal meant the start of a recurring theme: highways surrounded by farms. There were farms en route to D.C., where I missed a turn and ended up driving past the Smithsonian before stopping for lunch with @cathbot. There were farms a bit after D.C., when we hoofed it up to Akron, OH (former industrialized rubber capital of the world).

Akron was a funny little town. Most of the streets are still paved with bricks and they like it that way. It forces people to slow down without those pesky speed bumps. Wherever the road is concrete, it's just paved on top of the bricks. This makes plowing snow a bit difficult, so I imagine they appreciate their snow days. We stayed with some couchsurf-host hippies, all very nice (and well-decorated) people who assured us that we could use whatever soap was in the shower and it was all hippie-safe (yay Dr Bronner's!). Since I declined their midnight invitation to go out to the bars (since Amanda and I were dead tired from being on the road since 10:30am and 7:30am respectively), Amanda passed out on the couch and the rest of us (including a French couchsurfer who was cruising the USA checking out rock bands) watched some classic '70s SNL. Also, their kitties and black lab puppy were very cute and nuzzly and the dog licked my feet and tried to eat my sandals.

Wednesday

The next day, instead of driving for thirteen hours and some many hundred miles, we grooved out to some good tunes and bumped along the highway to Cleveland and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What a place! It should be required visits for any future museum curators. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed inside due to the plethora of copyright issues which plague the music industry. The whole waterfront area there looked pretty sweet (and touristy), with the science museum and a steamboat museum (on a boat - I mean, it was the boat) also available. My personal highlights: the Michael Jackson Thriller jacket, all of the Led Zeppelin and Grateful Dead print media, and the Ziggy Stardust costumes. The special exhibit right now is Bruce Springsteen, so his motorcycle was on the fourth floor and his jeans on the sixth - yannow, the the pair he wore for the album cover where all you see is his ass and a trucker hat tucked in the back pocket. (They had the trucker hat, too, just for posterity -- you see what I did there?)

Slightly outside of Cleveland, we meant to take the hippies' recommendation and eat at Melt Bar and Grilled [sic], which has the best grilled cheese in Cleveland. However, it was a 45min wait, so we took Yelp's recommendation to eat around the corner at Aladdin's, which was still pretty good despite the fact that their menu, which should have been three pages, was a seventeen-page spiral-bound book. We also did a 3-point turn in front of Dennis Kucinich's office. I didn't get the message from butternut04 until then instructing us to visit Heggy's chocolaterie in Canton - sorry, Nicki! I'm sure it would've been delicious.

Just outside of Cleveland was a storm. Seriously, it was a half hour of heavy rain on the highway and I thought that my speedometer was giving me the speed of my wheels hydroplaning over the water. The GPS said we were still moving forward, but nobody coulda told you where we were going, much less where the lane lines were. Scary stuff, but we made it out from under the clouds before getting too freaked out and pulling over to wait it out. After that, it was smooth sailing to Ann Arbor, where Amanda's friend (and old CISC TA) Aaron and his wife Karen lived. We went into town for pub food on the UMichigan campus, sampled some mighty nice Michigander beers (did you know that stuff from Michigan is called "Michiana?"), and came back to pass out. My, Karen has plenty to say! She's a school psychologist in the public schools and we learned all about the requirements of being a school psychologist, special ed programs, teachers' unions, and so on and so forth. As it was, we didn't leave the next morning until 1pm, after an extended breakfast chit-chat, which was just as well -- it got me over my hangover.

Thursday

Next stop: Chicago! We went straight west till we hit the water, then followed I-94 around the coastline and up into Chicago. With only enough time for one tourist destination, we went straight up the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower, since they're the biggest tenants). Quite a view, quite a view. Well, we couldn't spend too long out there, since we didn't get into town until rush hour and everyone else was hoofing it out. So, up to Arlington Heights, a suburb town, to visit another of Amanda's friends from school. We were his first houseguests, which was fun. He's definitely living in a bachelor pad that's barely been moved into, with boxes still on the counter and no towels in the bathroom. Pub food around the corner, The Daily Show, and a floor to sleep on were good enough for me.

Friday


Onward and northward to Madison! It's the last stretch of the journey and the most placid. For the last 100 mi left of 1,400 total, we sailed across gently rolling hills of corn and grain through the back highways of Wisconsin (and past Genoa City, home to The Young and the Restless), until we reached The City. My, it's a city, with a fun little downtown and a decent-sized capitol building. We dropped by my landlady's office at Mango Boutique to sign my lease on State St, just a block down from Capitol Square, then went a few blocks down to Bill and Ali's place to crash there. I'll be here for two more weeks until my lease starts on Aug 15. Saturday saw me dropping off Amanda at Milwaukee Airport so she could fly home to Baltimore/Maryland.

I'm certainly eager to move into my apartment (but not for two weeks) and go find some furniture (although I'll probably mooch a lot from students moving out in a week). Aaaaand tomorrow, I start training at Epic Healthcare Software as a software developer. It's growed-up time and it's very entertaining!
Previous post
Up