My Life in a Car: The Last Day

I arrived in Nashville the night before with high expectations and left without any of them being satisfied. But so it goes when you're moving across country, not just traveling with all the time and money you could want at your fingertips. I wanted, for example, to see The Grand Ole Opry, the Loveless Cafe, and perhaps just some country-singing-looking folks. I saw Motel 6 and the local Wal-Mart, a place, ironically, that I had vowed 6 years ago never to step foot in again. But so it goes when the boy tells you that Wal-Mart will take any returns (even when it didn't come from their store...ssh) and you--correction, he has an overpriced, unopened pack of Nicorette you've been trying to return since California, and you really really want a new pair of headphones. And a Subway giftcard.

After that two hour long ordeal--because they'll let you return anything, but by god they'll make you wait in line to do it--we headed onto the road for what would become 23 straight hours of snow, ice, fog, and everything in between. This is what it looked like leaving Nashville

And this is what it looked like in Virginia, West Virginia, and the teeny part of Maryland we passed through as well

See the thing was, the going was so slow through these ungodly conditions that by mid-afternoon we knew we had two choices: stop for the night roughly two hours outside of New York and face possible blizzard-like conditions the next morning; or drive through the night and reach the city in time to unpack at the first sign of daylight. We chose, fueled on by hourly coffee breaks at gas stations like this

 to drive through the night.

And unpack at the first sign of daylight? Well, "daylight," slowly but surely, turned into 10 am. Unfamiliar with "turnpikes" and "tolls" and "parkways" as we were, we inadvertently got in a wrong lane on the New Jersey turnpike and ended up on a two-hour detour of New Jersey just four miles from entering the Holland Tunnel. We then got re-lost in TriBeCa, trying this time to make it onto the Manhattan Bridge, and by the time we parked in Brooklyn, vowed never to drive anywhere near New York City ever again. Luckily, we wouldn't have to. We were home.