On the Road to New York :: Personal Narrative Traveling Essays

On the Road to New York There is a funny thing that happens when you travel. The people are all the same. Sure they may talk with a slightly different accent, and they may dress just slightly differently, and may think just slightly differently. In the end they are basically the same thing, a human being. I recently took a trip. I was going to a conference in Ithaca NY. Round trip is approximately 3000 miles. Driving time is 20 hours one way. I drove it all by myself in as little time as possible. I ended up taking 24 hours to do it. It is quite a rigorous challenge to do it all in one shot. I can classify the terrain into basically three things that you see: plains, woods, and hills. Sometimes you would see an area that combined woods and hills, but that was usually in a mountainous area. Along the whole route you would switch back and forth between these three characteristics. ND and eastern MN are plains. Central and Western MN and Wisconsin are mostly heavy woods with some lakes. On the plains the highway was pretty straight. Once you got to the woody areas, curves like no ones business. In Wisconsin the trees were son think that they had to cut a swath out just for the interstate crossovers that the HP use to change directions. This patch that was cut out was about fifty meter long. There was a patch of asphalt that was thrown down between the two highways which were about 30 meters apart. The green tops of the evergreens contrasted with the light brown tree trunks which extended up at least 60 feet. There were some small patches of green grass that filled in betwee n the trees and the concrete of the highway. Every fifth exchange a brown Highway Patrol car with a pale yellow stripe down the middle and a low profile light bar would be sitting waiting for the next speeder. Maybe this helps them to blend in? Oddly enough my radar detector never went off. Were they just there to present the threat of being stopped? When I got out of Wisconsin Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania pretty much look like ND. When you get to Chicago however things take a very different turn. Everything turns into an industrial style. Concrete everywhere, toll booths every 25 miles or so, no seemingly familiar sites other than a slightly wider patch of concrete called the interstate.