Greetings from Athens

I made it.

It was a 700 miles Odyssey which I'm very glad I started at 11pm Wednesday night. With the help of my trusty British accented GPS device I was able to make it through the New Jersey Turnpike "Fruit Loop" with only one brief visit to Bayonne. After that it was a pleasant jaunt down the Penn Turnpike until Carlisle PA. There, I pulled off at at Flying J truck stop for fuel and a nap. The refueling was a bit complicated because of an issue with my credit card and a pump that didn't want to release its product. The nap went well, until the leaf blower men surrounded my van in an attempt to free a plastic bag that had lodged itself to my undercarriage. They dueled with the bag for five minutes of choking two-stroke fumes before I hopped out with my light-blocking eye-shades on top of my head and bellied under the van to seize the rouge bag for them. They accepted the bag from me and then tossed it on the ground so that they could chase it off the property with their three horsepower noisemakers.

The trip from Carlisle to Athens took another six hours along the Mason Dixon line. I remained alert and entertained by the sequence of 2100 plus foot high eastern continental divides and the antics of couple of over-sized cement trucks playing chicken with a nuclear waste hauler and a gasoline tanker on the down slopes of the Cumberland Gap. Ah, another metaphor for life.

I pulled into Athens round 4pm and was loaded into my apartment by 4:30. I proceeded directly to bed for what I thought would be a nice three hour nap but was woken a half-hour later by an OU grounds keeper who was fighting a head wind with an underpowered, un-muffled leaf blower outside my window.

We are doomed.