I wanna go where nobody's a fool

[austin_dern]

Our final big trip of the season was to be a week spent back in New Jersey, partly so we could easily get to the Knoebels park in northeast Pennsylvania, partly so we could get to Seaside Heights ahead of the anticipated sale of the Floyd Moreland Carousel and say our goodbyes to it. This would be both my and bunny_hugger's first trip east since my parents left their house, which among other things lost us cheap, centrally-located accommodations.

I would go on to spin it into a second week of hanging out in New Jersey, going into the office and trusting that they'll pick up the tab for my airfare and the rental car and hotel for the days I'd actually be going into the office, because the boss had been saying for months that I should come back east and ``touch base'' with people, without ever committing to any particular week when I might actually do this. So I proposed the week that'd fit our schedule best, and after a couple tries where he wouldn't agree (or disagree) to anything particular left a voice mail message saying, this is my plan, if that doesn't work for you call me and let me know. He didn't call, so, I guess it worked for him.

We flew from Detroit into Newark airport because the flights into Trenton were too expensive and after Flightmare we're feeling burned by Frontier. While I'd made reservations for renting a car for some reason going through the whole procedure took roughly forever to do, and then it had to be done over when we foolishly suggested that bunny_hugger be added as a potential driver of the car. Adding your wife as a primary car driver shouldn't be hard, but somehow, this required three hours of fiddling on the computer and it promised to raise the cost of the car by a couple hundred dollars, so we said forget it. Apparently there's no way for Hertz to just ``forget it'' on adding a driver, and the whole transaction required calling in the shift manager and re-doing the entire process from scratch. It's quite possible we spent more time just doing the paperwork on the rental car which I had already reserved online than we spent flying Detroit to Newark.

Finally we started driving south, to an aunt's place (and for a wonder, an actual biological relative, the first aunt of mine bunny_hugger had met who was actually a sibling of one of my parents). She'd been glad to put us up for two nights so we would be fairly close to two of the things we wanted to visit. What I failed to internalize for some reason is that her house was just about in the backyard of Atlantic City's airport. Possibly there'd be nothing decent flying from Detroit to Atlantic City, but given that it was two hours of night driving to get from Newark to Mays Landing, perhaps we should have checked at least.

Trivia: By 1920 New York City's subways and elevated trains, if used to full capacity, for a 24 hour period, could accommodate 35 million people. Source: 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, Clifton Hood.

Currently Reading: A Nation Of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters, Scott Reynolds Nelson.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Presumably the train wasn't much of an option? My impression is that the East Coast at least has a reasonably functional network, versus most of the US, where a patchwork of freight-oriented lines and scarce funding's left the continent with a fairly feeble set of routes, run at speeds more in line with the aforementioned freight than modern passenger rail.

Still, good to hear it was all resolved, even if with Gilliam level bureaucracy. (Do you know her shoe size?)

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

No way is there a train to Knoebels. There's barely a road to Knoebels. >:)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

There's that too. It's a very remote place, far from passenger railroads, able to conceal enormities behind mountains and empty space. This time around we discovered a whole college town we had no reason to believe existed.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately the functional part runs along the eastern seaboard and really doesn't cross the Appalachian mountains. bunny_hugger is the expert on the train between Lansing and (say) New York City, but I think it's something like there's one train daily, and it requires a layover in Pittsburgh at like 4 am, and you might even have to take a bus from Lansing to Toledo for the last legs of it. I may be exaggerating but not by much.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, you're not exaggerating at all. All of those things are literally true. You have to lay over in Pittsburgh from about 4-7 a.m.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd hoped I had been overstating matters. Bleah.