Days 2-3, Mostly driving
Monday, 23 May 2005 — Day 2
Monday morning, we got an early start, leaving the St. Louis area just after 8am. Since my conference presentations were due early this morning, I had stayed up all night last night. I uploaded three of the presentations before breakfast, then called the conference co-ordinator to tell her that I was almost done with the fourth one and would upload it by lunchtime and I hoped she’d wait for it before sending the materials off to the printer. We ate a quick breakfast and then got on the road. I let myself take a short nap — about an hour — and then got to work on the presentation. By 11am, I had finished it (well as much as I could under the circumstances and the time constraints) and uploaded it to the Conference site.
We stopped at a Wendy’s restaurant at lunch time so that I could call in for the team meeting my manager had scheduled. He thought our small team should spend a little time each month telling each other what is going on; projects we’re working on, important customers we’re working with, etc. After lunch, I grabbed my book and spent the afternoon reading and dozing.
By mid-day, the weather was beginning to deteriorate. We stopped for supper at Bob Evan’s in Columbus and it had gotten positively cold! Between the weather, highway construction, and traffic, we decided to stop on the eastern side of Youngstown, Ohio, just barely west of the border with Pennsylvania.
Tuesday, 24 May 2005 — Day 3
Giving in to the cooler weather, Steven put on his long pants and a long-sleeved shirt instead of the shorts he’d been wearing up until this time. We didn’t have far to drive today — just all the way across Pennsylvania and most of the way across New Jersey. Weather was awful; it rained almost all day. Construction was awful; many times we were pushed down to one lane in each direction, even though this was the Interstate. Although Steven had originally thought we’d take I-70 across, we changed our minds yesterday and moved up to I-80 as we passed through Columbus. The thought was that it would be a much more scenic route through Pennsylvania and also keep us out of Pittsburgh and its traffic. The scenic part was definitely true. I don’t know that the traffic was much better, considering all the trucks we had to deal with along with the roads under construction.
By 3:30pm, we had arrived at our hotel and checked in. I spent some time trying to get connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi system and finally gave up. The laptop kept telling me that there wasn’t a Wi-Fi signal, even after I had configured settings matching the instructions given to me by the girls at the front desk. I called down and they sent a guy up with a "bridge" which was a CICSCO wireless receiver with a cross-over cable to connect to my laptop’s Ethernet port. Miraculously, this worked just fine, even though my laptop kept insisting that there was no Wi-Fi signal at all. And, unlike the situation the past two nights, my VPN connection worked just fine through the hotel’s network.
