(no subject)

[dchenes]

I got up really bloody early on Friday morning and went off to South Station, where I caught a bus to the Providence airport. There were shockingly few people there for a Friday morning during summer vacation season, so I zipped right through security and got to the gate about an hour and a half early. Thank goodness, there's a Dunkin Donuts in the terminal, so I had breakfast and then hung around and got on the plane to Chicago.

Chicago Midway is a pretty nice airport, except for the moving sidewalks. Which in themselves are a good thing, but every time anybody steps off them, a saccharine voice says "Caution. The moving walkway is ending." Try listening to that every two minutes or so for a couple of hours, and you'll understand why I had my headphones on for most of that time. Then we all got on the plane for Detroit.

Detroit's airport is not nice. It looks like it's stuck in the early 1980s architecture-wise, the carpets are all wearing out and look uncleaned, and the hike from the gate to baggage claim made me almost wish I'd had a wheelchair myself. However, my sister managed to find me within about five minutes of my arrival, so that was good. We went back to the garage, got in the car, and proceeded on our merry way off to Kent.

(Side note here: Mapquest absolutely sucks for most urban directions, but it got us from Detroit to Kent with no problems at all.)

We encountered a five-minute blinding rain shower outside Detroit, and there's heavy construction outside Toledo (involving closing down to two lanes and running a maze of S-curves enclosed in Jersey barriers), but other than that, the drive was rather nice. We got to the hotel in Brimfield at about 7:00 and went on a minor expedition in search of dinner and exact location in regards to the university. Dinner wound up being strip-mall Chinese food, which (sadly) had more flavor than anything else I had eaten all day. We drove around a little and figured out more or less how to get where we were going, and then went back to the hotel and I hauled out the phone book and looked at the maps therein.

Our hotel room had one double bed in it and loud neighbors beside and above it. Neither of us got much sleep Friday night.



We had set an alarm for 8:30, but I woke up at 6:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. I eventually got up and showered, and then we went in search of breakfast. We located food at Kate's Koffee and Kake (cringe), which was actually quite good and seems to be one of those places where everybody knows everybody else.

After breakfast, we drove around some, and then went off to Dartmouth Place to see an apartment. I looked at a studio, which I wouldn't be able to fit my bed in, and a 1BR I liked very much. The only trick is, the 1BR isn't available until September 1, so I get to live in a hotel for two weeks. My sister and a truck will come down again and help me move stuff out of the storage locker I'm going to have to rent. Sigh.

We spent largeish parts of the rest of the day driving around randomly. Get to an intersection, pick a direction, drive in it, figure out where things are, etc. That was fun, and it looks like everywhere I need to go for the first two weeks is reachable by bicycle or by bus. I got out the phone book again when we got back and called a couple of hotels, and got a number for a storage facility.

We decided to try out an Italian restaurant in Brimfield for dinner. It doesn't look like much, but I had the best Italian meal I've ever had in a restaurant, bar none. This place doesn't serve any vegetables it doesn't grow itself. I had gnocchi with pesto, and ye gods, it was marvelous! I slept better on Saturday night, thank goodness. The loud upstairs neighbors had gone.



Got up on Sunday morning at about 7:30, packed everything up again, went to the hotel's continental breakfast, and hit the road. Since we had time to kill, and since I had jokingly mentioned having lunch in Oberlin, we did that. I took some pictures just so I could prove that I had been there. Fortunately, the coffee shop that sells my favorite sandwiches is still there and still selling that sandwich. We got back to Detroit and had more time to kill, so we went to Ann Arbor and I reacquainted myself with my sister's cat and hung around in her apartment for about half an hour before driving back to the airport.

If I didn't like the Detroit airport on the way in, I despised it on the way out. The security line was incredible. There were at least 200 people in it. Fortunately it was moving fairly well, but it still took long enough to make me nervous about running for the terminal. I got on the plane and off we went to Chicago again.

This time through Chicago, I found actual food, and sat there with my headphones on again to block out the moving sidewalk announcement. The plane to Chicago was about half full, and the plane to Providence was about 3/4 full. We took off from Chicago at 6:45 their time and landed in Providence at 9:45 our time. Not bad. Liz and Matt picked me up at the airport, and here I am again.


It is now time for coffee and phone calls to Ohio. Whee. I wonder what happened to my moving karma