1st NY Post! Finally...

The Drive

We awoke at 5:15 a.m. at my parents’ house to shower, load up the last of our essentials, and say goodbye. Niles was kept in the bathroom and did remarkably well, considering the house has three giant golden retrievers – but we also shoved a Valium down his throat so of course he had calmed down quite a bit. (By the way, seeing a cat on Valium is probably the most entertaining thing…)

But for the first three hours of the drive, he didn’t calm down at all. Even after we gave him another pill. He howled and meowed pitifully. I even let him out of his carrier, which he hates, and still he meowed! Although I do believe His Royal Fatness found the sight to be curious.


"Meow! What is going on?! Let me be annoying to everybody. If I have to be miserable, so does everybody else."

Not even sitting in Tyler’s lap could wipe the pissed-off look from Niles’ face.
"I hate you for subjecting me to this car ride. Feel my wrath. Don't make fun of my fat body and tiny head."


But we did see a field of wind turbines!


The drive went amazingly fast. 16 hours the first day, though Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio. Niles calmed down after a while and slept almost the entire time. He also crept back in to the familiar security of his cat carrier and hardly ever stepped out again.



Ohio has best rest stops. I wrote an essay for a Travel Writing class last year about the history of rest stops and how they differ from state to state, and it’s too bad I didn’t write about Ohio. They don’t have rest stops; they have “Service Plazas.” Complete with KFC, Sbarro, Subway, and/or Panera, they are more like mall food courts, with TVs and huge bathrooms, large parking lots where truckers sleep inside their trucks, and a gas station. They are probably so nice because they are the only things you can stop at on the toll roads without having to exit and pay the toll fee.

We paid an insane amount for a room in Niles, Ohio – 3 other hotels we’d tried were either full or didn’t allow pets, and when we finally found a Country Inn and Suites that did allow pets, there were only 2 rooms still available, so we got a handicapped room with a weird shower. Niles howled all night, and because of the Valium we’d given him, he could hardly walk. When he tried to jump onto the bed he fell over, and he attacked his tail for ten minutes. He wouldn’t stay on the bed with us when we picked him up, so we got about 4 hours of sleep.

Pennsylvania was beautiful. Amish communities, foggy marshes, just beautiful and GREEN. This is the fog early morning in a valley:



And then…after gross meals of fast food and pizza, GPS Samantha helps us find…

The City!


Except she gave us wonky directions that got us lost in Jersey City (which is like, the armpit of New York…it kind of looks like the industrial part of Omaha, like F to L streets, but way dirtier, and with no trees). Driving a U-Haul in the city was even more frustrating---actually, DRIVING in the city at ALL is frustrating! No one lets you in and people drive like, I don’t know, like crazy people—any rules that were ever written about lawful driving are totally disregarded. People create lanes, drive 40 mph for 4 seconds until they have to stop at another light, get all up in your biznis, honk at you for stalling at a green light for more than .28 seconds—generally just a frightening experience. And when you’re in a U-Haul it’s worse, because you can’t go very fast, can’t turn very sharply, nobody likes you because you’re a big slow truck—and if you have to go left, forget about any left turn lanes or arrows. You have to either gun it when the light turns green before the cars on the other side run you over, or you have to wait until the light turns red, or you can just, you know, hit the gas and go anyway and pray that cars on the other side stop for you.

I know I’m a bad driver. I’ll admit it. I shout at people (in my car, though, not road raging to their face), I loathe slow drivers, I might tailgate people a little bit but curse the people who tailgate me, and I’ve probably had a lot of people wish me ill because of my general impatient attitude on the road. Tyler is genuinely frightened whenever he gets in the car with me and usually sits back looking terrified, hardly breathing until we pull up to whatever destination I sped to. In fact, he usually just offers to drive to spare himself the blood pressure jolt. But people driving in NYC…I don’t think I could ever compare. I’m so glad Tyler drove the truck in the city. I got so frustrated on our way home from IKEA (the first time)--traveling 4.2 miles on the BQE that took us half an hour, almost sideswiping a stupid towncar that decided to make his own right turn lane next to us because we weren’t turning right quickly enough--I started to cry.

Oh yeah, and IKEA…a whole different story. Took forever to get there. Suffice it to say that IKEA is huge, overwhelming, and cheap, and the lure of cheap things that don’t look cheap is probably how they make their money. Walking through the “showroom,” where a bunch of living rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms are set up entirely with IKEA stuff that you can buy, one sees a lamp for only $4.99. “Only $4.99?!?” you exclaim as you pile two lamps into your cart. Oh, look! A magnetic knife strip! Only 8 bucks! 99 cents for a toilet brush?! $1.99 for a plastic wastebasket? Let’s get a couple. IKEA has a Swedish grocery store…it’s only a dollar for this bar of milk chocolate! Let’s get one. Hey, this rack for holding pot lids is only $3.99—what a great idea! Let’s get one. Etc. etc…you get the idea. After the first day, Tyler and I walked out of there with a sofa bed, a TV stand, two shelves, a magnetic knife strip, a spice rack, a big shelf for our bedroom, a broom, a toilet brush, two wastebaskets, two lamps, a rack for holding pot lids, another kitchen rack with S-hooks to hold the pots and a rack above to hold our other various kitchen items, another kitchen rod with more S-hooks, a bar of chocolate, window shades, and various other crap.

Then we went there AGAIN the NEXT day because we had yet to get a dresser, and turns out they were having a mega sale on a wardrobe—only $50! And I think it was retailed at like, $200 or something. So naturally, we bought one, and I’m so glad we did, even though I wasn’t very glad when we had to carry the heavy boxes a block to get to our apartment, and up the stairs, and THEN put it all together. And of course, we couldn’t just get one thing and walk out of IKEA, so we had to get Niles a kitty basket (it’s only two dollars!) and blanket (99 cents!), three curtain rods to hang our curtains, a green ceramic jar to hold his kitty food, and two more shelves to put up to store even more of our crap.

Now, four days later, our apartment is finally livable. We still have some shelves to hang, but overall it looks pretty cozy!

I do miss our old kitchen, though, and all of its cabinets and storage space. Here, we have 2 cabinets. Just two.

Oh well.

I’ll post more tomorrow about the 4th of July! Because I’m unemployed and can do whatever I want whenever I want to! Like yesterday, I wanted gelato and 4 in the afternoon, so I googled “gelato Williamsburg Brooklyn” on my phone and found a wonderful little gelato place called Fortunato Brothers, and I walked the 8 blocks, was helped by a very unfriendly girl, and gleefully ate my $2 canoli-flavored gelato cone on my walk home. Now today I will have to work on coding the 3,500 page manuscript for University of Nebraska Press. It’s due September 1st, I worked on it for 4 hours yesterday and only got through 31 pages.

I miss everyone in Omaha and I’m trying not to be homesick, but it’s hard when Brooklyn is so…ugly…and dirty. I miss Omaha’s clean sidewalks and tree-lined streets! And I miss people who pass you on the street and say hi, and friendly cashiers.

When I try to figure out how to post a video I'll do that.