Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Buffalo Route

S tarting at 8 a.m. this morning, I was behind the wheel of the Element, high-tailing it from St. Clair Shores to Syracuse, north along the construction-jacked I-94 in moon patrol gear, eastward over the Blue Water Bridge into Canadia and then across peninsular Ontario to the southernmost point of the Queen's Highway (QEW) to its termination at the Peace Bridge into Buffalo, N.Y. We'd never crossed at the Peace Bridge before. The lines entering the U.S. were remarkably short and the customs agents fairly friendly despite yet another round of "explain again how the four of you know each other." In the ten or twelve times we've crossed into the U.S., today's brief pause at the Peace Bridge was the shortest by considerable margin, which means we'll try it again next time rather than crossing on the 407 or the 420 at Niagara Falls.

Returning home includes the usual paces: picking up Y. from the boarder (where a toenail was shorn off in a tangle with a screen door...I empathize, of course, given my encounters with hazardous doors), unpacking and laundering, gathering the accumulated mail (electronic and paper), and fetching enough groceries to sustain us for a day or two. I also have a fair amount of time to make up in the online course I'm teaching because I was off grid for more than two days while staying in a room on one end of the Days Inn of Clare, Mich. The rate of data-transfer was deplorably slow, so slow, in fact, that I almost asked Ph. to retrieve a bucket of ice and while doing so check the hallway for any laggardly packets of data. I know the wifi is assumed to be invisible, but the packets move so slowly at the Days Inn that it wouldn't have surprised me one bit to see a few data loitering in the hallway, taking their sweet time. Decent hotel otherwise. Two days off grid plus a few days of driving dials my work pitch over to near crisis mode for Wednesday and Thursday. And then we'll move. So, yeah, that unloading of the luggage is short-lived.

Posted by dmueller at June 26, 2007 8:55 PM to Travelog