Annotated 33-20
Picking up from yesterday…
I only got two hours of sleep before the chill and Cardboard Box Man’s concerns woke me. I was on the road again from 2:30-5:30, then found a highway rest area and slept there another two hours and change.
In between those two sleep breaks, the phone charger socket in my car stopped working.
It had been persnickety for a while, often refusing to work unless positioned just so, but again, these were budget-conscious years for me. I couldn’t afford to replace merely eccentric hardware. But now it would not work at all. Which meant I had to ration my phone’s electricity. Which meant my moment-to-moment GPS, instructing me which way to go in its reassuring, GladOS-like voice, was no longer an option.
This turned out to be somewhat important when I arrived in Syracuse around 9 AM.
If you don’t know your New York state geography, here’s the quick version: the state looks like a shoe stomping on a tent peg that drags a little candy wrapper behind it. The bottom of that peg is New York City. Plattsburgh, my intended destination, is near the top and back of the shoe, the northeast tip of the state. And Syracuse is about where the shoelaces would go, midway on the state’s west-east axis.
Sometime in the more sleep-deprived part of my journey, I’d made a critical wrong turn. But there was yet hope! I’d planned to get in around the early morning, so I still had time to get to Diamond before it closed!
Would I make it? Find out tomorrow! Maybe!
Gee, Uncle T, did you get killed? :D
(Sorry… couldn’t resist the Fleischer Popeye cartoon reference.)
Now THAT takes me back…
I assumed Frigg meant “we need to talk” was the trait she didn’t have.
I lived in Plattsburgh @1987-2005. Cold as blazes and a bumper pothole crop every spring. Local economy was never great and really went to hell when the Air Base was closed.
Ohhh… that reminds me painfully of my move in 2012, where I ran into several similar issues regarding things taking longer than they should, compensating by skipping sleep and very tired, very late-night drives with a very full car.
That was roughly the time when I dawned on me that I could not just stay awake for 48 hours straight anymore, independent of whether I thought I could, or how important it was that I be done by X o’clock tomorrow …