Day 1 - Wednesday April 8, 2009 from Lindsey

This is what I typed up in the car yesterday.

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4.8.09 Wednesday

I hate New Jersey. Just getting that out there. Those who have traveled out of state with me before know this already. I really hate driving in New Jersey. There are no signs, but if there are signs they aren’t correct, or updated or anything normal. We, thankfully, haven’t hit any tolls yet but if we do there won’t be any lines on the ground and everything will be all willy-nilly.

To further explain, it was around 7 and we were getting pretty hungry. I don’t know about Matt, but I hadn’t really eaten anything since around 1:30. My head was starting to hurt and I knew it was time to find food. So, first of all – Wilma has the ability to tell us what is in the area, but decided at this point to not work properly. So I do it the old fashioned way and look at signs, except there are no signs. Or all the signs say are gas stations.

I finally see a sign that says “Wendy’s” and so I take it…… ….. we ended up in some kind of national forest with nothing but trees. No lights, no houses, no Wendy’s. We had turned off Wilma so that she wouldn’t freak out that we were off route, but eventually I gave up on all hope of food and we turned her back on. She took us on a roundabout journey back to 80. At least she got us back there I guess. And it isn’t entirely her fault that we never found that Wendy’s. Or anything else for that matter.

After being off route for so long I was hesitant to try another exit with a food sign, but this time Wilma confirmed that the Wendy’s was just two turns off the exit. Still in New Jersey, I keep calm knowing it won’t precisely be that way. Follow the signs to Wendy’s and find… a McDonalds. Decide to say screw Wendy’s and just get that instead. Good plan cause I didn’t see any lights further down the road.

We don’t really want to be eating a lot of fast food on this trip, but considering we left about 2 hours late and had a pretty rough day to start I wasn’t about to go to a diner or other type of sit down restaurant. So McDonald’s it was.

We just crossed the border into PA, which is good. Although we still have a while to go. But our spirits are still up and I’m really excited that I’m finally on this trip after all the planning that we’ve done over the past few months. I’m starting to get a little tired, switched off so Matt can drive the rest of the way to my aunt’s house. Or at least give me a little rest. We’ll see how it goes.

Signing off for now, even though I could probably write another two pages.