07.23.02 - 7:38 p.m.

I am eating very poorly lately. Tonight was turkey hot dogs and wine, because I just can't be bothered to cook in this heat. We have the lamest food between the two of us - I could make myself a nice meal of popcorn, couscous, crackers and Fudge Stripe cookies. But somehow that's not appealing to me at the moment.

Sunday, the last leg of the trip, consisted of a hotel breakfast with Matt and a 13-hour drive. It was more or less uneventful through Indiana and Ohio, with only rest stops and...hm, rest stops to punctuate the trip, but things started cooking when we reached good old Pennsylvania. Ah, PA. Why do you try to imprison me with your twisty roads and scampering wildlife?

The first PA roadblock we encountered was a random police car driving the wrong way on the berm with its lights flashing right after Exit 7. Not a moment later did all traffic come to a standstill. I paused. Said "uh oh," or "hmmm," but definitely not "oopsy daisy." Dan got out the map, and after some deliberation, we decided to make the illegal u-turn in the Emergency Vehicles Only crossing, head back to the exit and try our luck on 322 for a while.

This was a good move, as we saw some trucks on the two-lane road with us. When the big guys start using back PA roads instead of I-80, you know something's up. We followed them to Exit 11 and got back the highway.

La la la, we went past Clarion and Clearfield and the Trucker's Delite Motel, and the fateful spot past Exit 26 where Brak met his untimely end, and were sooooooo close to Bucknell, where we had the major and exciting plans of stopping for BREAD at OIPs (possibly the best bread on the planet, cross your heart and kiss your elbow) when damn if that construction they'd been promising on those blinking orange signs twenty miles back didn't appear.

With a vengeance. But Dan and I were feeling brave after the last off-highway attempt, and were oh-so-close to the Exit 29 ramp, that we decided to forge our own path once again. And forge we did. Down a backwoods gravel road, as scary as only PA can be, finally onto pavement and lo and behold, we ended up right at 15 South. Yeah. That atlas, man, it don't lie. Though we'd been going only 20 miles an hour for most of the detour, we were still smoking those asses stuck back on 80. We could see them through the trees the whole time.

So we got fabulous ghetto Italian dinners and bread galore at OIPs, and since we didn't want to go back to the traffic snarl-up and I knew the back way to Exit 33, we got to drive through downtown Lewisburg and see all the old Bucknell sites. Sniff. I'd been feeling all nostalgic for it ever since Dan got to show me Notre Dame, and even though we didn't go down Seventh Street or set one foot on actual campus, seeing the bar and Bison Beverage and Sassy Roda's place were good enough. Enough to make me want to go back for Homecoming, even.

I remembered the back way like a champ and PA let us pass without any further incident.

We walked in the door around 11:30 and I managed to unpack half my suitcase before collapsing. And that, my friend, is the end of our First Road Trip.