"Goin Where Those Chilly Winds Don't Blow""Goin Where Those Chilly Winds Don't Blow"

I enjoy driving long distances. I probably should have driven trucks for a living. I have made two round trips across the US, countless road trips from the east coast to the midwest, and probably thirty trips between New York and Florida over the years. I have driven all over Spain, Italy, and Morocco. I’m happy to have a companion along for the ride this time, but that’s not necessary.

In this case, I rented a car (Nissan Rogue with 50k miles and some wear and tear) in order to drive some personal items down to a small house I have access to in Florida. This mission would also include setting up a little Nano 3S bitcoin miner in this house. I have some amorphous plans to set up a nice solar panel array down there for a larger mining operation eventually.

My oldest childhood friend heard about the trip and thought it sounded like fun, so he volunteered to accompany me and maybe share some of the driving. We don’t have many opportunities to catch up nowadays. Maybe we will relive our crazy young days again. Speaking of age, I was a little nervous, since it had been about ten years since I had taken a drive of this length. Maybe I had gotten too old for this.

I will refer to my friend as R. He is a committed no-coiner. I had no big orange pilling expectations. He also is a career local government lawyer. He refers to his job as “welfare for lawyers.” We met about a month and a half before the “Miracle Mets” won the 1969 world series. Rooting for that team was all we needed to begin our friendship. We attended the same elementary school and high school. He was an eyewitness to the events described in two of my recent posts:

#1405826

#1409767

Within a half hour of our journey, while I navigated early morning New York City rush hour traffic in the dark, R confided in me that he regretted agreeing to the trip, as the reality of the long, monotonous hours ahead sunk in. I confided in him my doubts about my physical and mental stamina, even though I enjoy the long hours behind the wheel that others see as tedious. I focus on the lane markers and think about things without getting interrupted by all the bullshit that distracts me from myself during every other waking moment of my life. It is different when I travel with a companion, but it can be just as rewarding - uninterrupted conversation about anything and everything.

He asked me if I knew where we would stop for the night, since driving straight through at our age was out of the question. I told him Jekyll Island, Georgia. He had never heard of it. I told him it was supposed to be really nice, and if we made it that far, our second day’s drive would be only around six hours or so. I curbed my desire to try to make this a bitcoin road trip. I did scour BTCmap and the Club Orange app before I left, but I knew it wouldn’t be fair to drag him a few hundred miles out of the way to patronize a bar or restaurant that accepts bitcoin. Full confession, I am that kind of crazy. If I was alone I would have zigzagged south, checking BTCmap places off the list. The trip would have taken forever. I was going to indulge my desire to see the new Washington D.C. PubKey and treat R to a lunch paid with bitcoin, but we made such good time at the beginning of our journey that we passed through the city long before it opened for lunch.

We agreed that as co-pilot R would control the spotify music choices. Our tastes are similar; we will rarely listen to music released after, say, 1985. We saw some fantastic concerts in high school. Off the top of my head I recall Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Yes, Jethro Tull, and Lynard Skynard.

Time passed quickly as we reminisced. We hit very little traffic between Brooklyn New York and northern Virginia. Our route took us from the Belt Parkway, across the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island, and across the Outerbridge Crossing to New Jersey. I have been traveling on the Belt Parkway since I was a very young child. It is known for its traffic and lack of shoulders. My father hated the road. When we visited my grandparents he would scream and argue with my mother for the entire ride. I learned most of my best obscenities on the Belt Parkway.

“The Belt”“The Belt”

Today was different. It was actually a peaceful pre-dawn ride on “the belt” from Aqueduct Raceway in the east all the way to the Verrazzano Bridge.

We passed all my personal landmarks: Kennedy Airport, the Mill Basin Bridge (no longer the draw bridge that I loved and my father despised), and Coney Island. As you approach the old Parachute Jump, which is on your left when travelling west, you first see Trump Village, built by The Donald’s father Fred. To the right is what used to be called The Gil Hodges Little League Stadium. Gil Hodges was one of my childhood heroes.

Some of my earliest memories are of the beach at Coney Island. On hot summer days my father would drop my mother and I off at the beach before he would make his rounds in that neighborhood as a pharmaceutical salesman. I mostly remember how cold it was when you walked under the boardwalk. I told R all my childhood stories about these places. He had heard them many times before. He yawned and turned up the music.

We passed what is now Shirley Chisholm State Park. The site used to be a notorious, gigantic garbage dump with an indescribable stink, especially during the summer. We would roll up the car windows in those pre – air conditioning days despite the heat. I remember all the sea gulls eating lunch at the top of the pile.

A little before the Verrazzano Bridge, near the Bay Parkway exit, there is a little amusement park. My sister and I used to beg our parents to stop there on the way home from my grandparent’s house. It was called Nellie Bly back then. I never knew who Nellie Bly was then, but I do now. R didn’t care.

I always enjoy crossing the Verrazzano Bridge. When I was a very young child, my father and uncle piled all the kids into an old station wagon and took us across the bridge the day it opened. I think that was the only time you could cross it without paying a toll. As a nerdy kid I loved to research facts about the bridge. Back then I think it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

We drove across Staten Island on the West Shore Expressway. The only notable landmark for me on this road is the old Fresh Kills garbage dump. I didn’t start driving past it until I was a young adult, so my experience is limited, but it never seemed to stink as badly as the Brooklyn dump. This landfill figured prominently in Don DeLillo’s Masterpiece “Underworld”:

"The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not.... The biggest secrets are the ones spread before us."

We crossed into New Jersey via the Outerbridge Crossing. R finally chimed in with some trivia, saying “you know, it’s not named that because it’s past the Goethals Bridge. There was some guy named Outerbridge.” It was my turn to yawn and say, “yeah, I know.”

Counting The Cars On The New Jersey TurnpikeCounting The Cars On The New Jersey Turnpike

I have a tradition of playing two versions of the Simon and Garfunkel song “America” whenever I drive on the New Jersey Turnpike. First I play the lesser known cover by Yes:

Then I play the original:

They are both played at high volume. After this we began playing whole albums. R selected, in no particular order, the following full albums:

Terrapin Station – Grateful Dead
Blues For Allah – Grateful Dead
Thick As A Brick – Jethro Tull
Exile On Main Street – The Rolling Stones
Quadrophenia – The Who
Close To The Edge - Yes
Animals – Pink Floyd
The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys - Traffic
In The Court Of The Crimson King – King Crimson

We made our first stop for gas, coffee, and a bathroom at the Molly Pitcher Service Plaza. I always wondered who Molly Pitcher was, and wikipedia can’t seem to give me a straight answer. If she existed, I guess she fought in the Revolutionary War. At this point I should mention one quirky New Jersey law that I always forget – you’re not allowed to pump your own gas. I feel lazy sitting in the car while someone else does this menial task for me, but there is no way around it.

When we got back in the car R asked me if I intended to do the driving all the way to Jekyll Island. I told him I thought so, but I might get tired later. He then asked if I minded if he did a gummy. He had bought some for the trip, and had never done one before. I think his daughter helped him with the purchase. I said sure, but if he fell asleep I would wake him up to keep playing music.

When we reached Exit 3 south of Philadelphia, I told R the story of when my beat up 1976 Honda Civic CVCC’s engine caught fire and I spent a freezing January night with my cousin and her crying college roommate on a bench in a scary Camden inner city train station. He nodded, said yeah, returned his seat to horizontal, and turned up Close To The Edge really loud. I think it was around 8:30 am at this point.

Traffic was reasonable all the way to the Delaware Memorial Bridge. I-95 (John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway in Biden Land is less than 25 miles. You do get a nice look at Wilmington, which is slightly uglier than Baltimore.

Once in Maryland we crossed the Millard E Tydings Bridge over the Susquehanna River. I spotted signs for the Aberdeen Proving Grounds around Exit 77. That place gives me the creeps. I should say the sign gives me the creeps, because I never paid a visit to the Ordnance Museum, which has closed permanently.

Traffic flowed smoothly as we went through the Baltimore Fort McHenryTunnel. I remember that before this tunnel opened in the mid 1980s, the trip from New York to Washington D.C. took much longer, as you had to take the Harbor Tunnel. I have made this trip countless times, so once in a while GPS will route you through the old tunnel if traffic is bad on I-95.

The SwampThe Swamp

As we approach Washington D.C. I always look out for the Kensington, Maryland Mormon Temple off of I-495. The first time I saw it I did a double take. It looked like the castle from the Wizard Of Oz. I have gotten used to the sight of it over the years, but it still is an imposing structure. After that, Washington D.C. is underwhelming, since you can’t see much of it from I-95 South as it is configured now.

As I expected, we did get slowed down on the stretch of I-95 between Arlington and Manassas, Virginia. I have noticed that this stretch of the interstate has been in a state of perpetual rush hour for the past twenty years, which I have concluded, without evidence, is the result of the ever expanding sea of useless federal workers entering and leaving the centralized swamp that is our nation’s capital. Manassas was the site of the First Battle Of Bull Run, the first major battle of the Civil War.

It was at this point that we began talking about what we thought of as the border between the north and south. I think it is where you cross any of the Potomac bridges between Washington D.C. and Virginia. This isn’t historically accurate. There are many major civil war battlefields north of D.C. The Mason Dixon line is further north too. I use superficial criteria like accents, ubiquity of pickup trucks, and grit consumption. R looks for giant confederate flags.

I tend to forget that the US still has some remnants of federalism. There really are significant differences between states. I remember a story from years ago, when a friend of mine from Philadelphia was driving home from his apartment in Washington D.C. with his new girlfriend, who was from Virginia. There was a DWI road block near Philadelphia. She reached into her pocketbook and said, “maybe I should hide this?” while holding a two shot derringer pistol. My friend was in shock. He couldn’t believe she was carrying a gun. He had never seen anyone but a cop holding a gun. She said that her dad gave it to her as a teenager, and that she always carried it. She sometimes forgot it was even in there.

After college I was employed by a small chain of bookstores in the D.C. area. I worked a few days a week in Old Town, Alexandria. I remember the Appomattox Statue, which stood in the middle of the main intersection. The confederate soldier had his back turned on Washington, D.C., and facing south. The symbolism was a big deal. That statue has now been removed.