11 Hours Alone In A Car & An Earthquake.

So much has happened!  I'm just gonna dive right in.

Right, so after I finally finished writing my last blog, it was 1am, and my alarm was set for 6am.  5 hours of sleep.  What was I thinking?  I had a (nearly) 700 mile drive the next day, the longest drive on the entire trip, and I was planning on doing it on 5 hours of sleep.  Apparently I thought I was still in high school, because my body did not agree with me the next morning at 6am when my phone woke me up.  I had talked to my Aunt Karla the day before and told her that I was going to try to leave by 7am from Nashville to drive to her house just outside of Washington, D.C.   She joked with me that, according to this blog, I wasn't so great at leaving on time, (and she's very right!) but I was determined to leave when I intended to!  So I get out of bed at 6:30am (ut oh, strike one) and I check my email to find that my credit card has been declined for my gym payment!  (strike two) My gym payment?  I haven't been to the gym in 6 months!  And then I remember something... I signed a year long gym contract exactly 11 months ago.  When did my credit card expire? Before my last payment.  Curses!  So that ate up another chunk of time in the morning trying to sort that nonsense out, and I was on the road by 7:30.  Not bad, all things considered.

Getting out of Nashville wasn't bad.  I had planned on making 2 stops in the 700 miles, but right from the get go, I knew that this was going to be a LONG day.  11 hours in a car is bad enough on a full night of sleep, but on half of one it's a challenge.  I figured I'd get some caffeine and I'd be good to go, but there didn't seem to be many (or any!) Starbucks on the way.  But I didn't want to pull off and look for one, so on I went.

And on... and on.... and on.....  This was turning out to be a tremendously boring drive.  With no caffeine, and a breakfast of nuts and a Cliff bar, I was doing little else but paying attention to the road.  I sang a little bit along with my iPod (I must look like an idiot on this trip because I'm proper rocking out to my music while I'm driving), and that seemed to wake me up, but even that got boring after a while.  So I started listening to my Harry Potter book on tape (I'm half way thru Chamber of Secrets.)

To make matters worse, the scenery wasn't all that impressive.  Eastern Tennessee isn't too dissimilar to the rest of Tennessee (sans Starbucks), but by lunch time I had made it to Bristol which is right on the border of Tennessee and Virginia.  So here I decided to make my first stop.  I was lured off of the highway by a sign for Chick-fil-A.  I thought that sounded far more appetizing than McDonald's or something like that.  So I turn into this town, and I get a little deeper into town and I don't seen any Chick-fil-A, or really anything to eat!  Well this is upsetting, so here I am driving thru some town, and I start to get lost.  Lame sauce.  Meantime Matilda is constantly telling me, "Recalculating!  Recalculating!" because I've veered off of the highway.  So I finally decide to follow her incessant (and rather loud) directions back to the highway thinking that surely between here and there I will find both a gas station and a food source.  Bingo: Subway and a Gas-N-Go.  I think to myself that here's as good as any, and about 15 minutes later both me and my car are full.

Back to the highway it is, and I realize within minutes that I forgot to buy something with caffeine in it.  So I determined that the next time I see a sign for a Starbucks I'm gonna turn off and treat myself to something with 4 lovely shots of espresso in it.  100 miles later, there's my sign.  But it doesn't tell me where to exit! So I pick the 2nd one (because the first looked like it was going to lead me into the woods and leave me there), and like the phantom Chick-fil-A, I see no Starbucks.  Well now I'm just frustrated.  So I pull off into a parking lot of a church & ask Matilda where the Starbucks is.  It's 3 miles BEHIND ME.  What? Why?! How did I pass it?  But I don't care anymore.  I don't even want caffeine!  I just want to get to Virginia!  And yet again, I find myself back on the highway.

The next stop was for gas.  I stopped in some town, I couldn't even tell you where, to fill up one more time.  I determined that if I were to get stuck in traffic in the D.C. area, I would do it with at least half a tank of gas.  So as I'm filling up, this middle aged guy looks over at me and asks me where my license plate is from.  He says he's never seen that one before.  I say New Mexico, and he asks me what on earth I'm doing out this far.  I tell him I'm road tripping.  He finds this very interesting, and as he's driving away he gives me a friendly wave.  It was kinda cute.  He reminded me of all of my friends' dads rolled into one.  So after that, I walk into the gas station determined now to get something to keep me awake.  I settle on a 5 Hour Energy shot.  Now THAT did the trick.

Now that I had slightly more energy, I began to notice a few things.  1.) Harry Potter is awesome.  Awesome, awesome, awesome.  2.) Virginia's scenery is actually very very beautiful.  The vegetation is varied a lot more than it is in Tennessee.  Where TN had just a massive wall of green, VA has hills, and grass, and trees, and other plants, and quite a bit more variety.  It's gorgeous. 3.) Cops. Are. Everywhere. (Still no speeding ticket for me though. Knock on wood.) 4.) People don't know how to drive on the highway.  The left lane is for PASSING, PEOPLE.  Not for sitting next to a semi truck with a line of cars sitting behind you while you go the SAME SPEED as said semi.  Seriously.  Who gave you a driver's licence? 5.) Adele's record "21" is awesome.  Girl can SING.  and 6.) 680 miles is the longest I ever want to be alone in a car again.

But! the awesome thing about driving 680 miles today is that I have hit 3000 miles on this trip!  Here are pictures of said event:

you can't really see it, but my odometer says  36975

this was my view at the 3000th mile

excitement? fatigue? both?

Note that my hair is going crazy.  For the last 50 or so miles, I realized that it was a balmy 80 degrees outside and that I simply had to drive with my windows down and my music blaring.  So I did.  It was awesome.

At 7:15pm Eastern Time, I pulled into my aunt & uncle's driveway.  Just shy of 11 hours.  I was so happy to have arrived! I hadn't seen my aunt, uncle, and cousin in years, and I have never been to their house before, so this whole bit of the trip is quite the treat!  They live in a gorgeous little bit of suburbia outside of D.C. Now my aunt is from New Mexico, and she had made green chile chicken enchiladas!  Hooray!  Apparently you can take the girl out of the southwest but you can't take the southwest out of the girl.  The enchiladas were delicious.  We had fun talking over dinner, but I was exhausted from the day and I fully intended to call it a night, until I got caught up talking on the phone with one of my friends from home!  Almost 2 hours later, I was in bed.  But I quite enjoyed my unexpected talk with home.

This morning I slept in.  I took a shower and strolled upstairs.  My aunt had just gotten home from work, and my uncle awesomely took my car to get an oil change for me!  (The first oil change.... scary.  I'm far from home!)  Now today, the agenda was to go see the Pentagon.  One of my friends from El Paso currently works at the Pentagon and I had completely spaced that she lived in DC!  She got in touch with me yesterday and she even offered to take me and my aunt on a tour of the Pentagon.  How awesome is that??  So my aunt and I drive into DC, got stuck in traffic, and (with the help of Matilda) found the parking structure, got on the metro, and arrived at the Pentagon.  2 forms of ID, a security check, and a visitor's badge later, we were in the Pentagon.  Inside it.  What??  Who does this??  Awesome.

Sam took us around and showed us a little bit of the building.  Turns out the side of the Pentagon that she works in was the one that got hit on 9/11.  (Incidentally, that was 10 years ago this September.  Doesn't seem like it's been that long, does it?)  She was just showing us the little memorial for 9/11 that's in that wing when it happened.  The walls started shaking.  And the ground. For about 5 or 10 seconds.  Nothing too terribly big, but certainly more than a door slamming or something.  We all looked at each other.  What was that?   Construction on the floor above us, maybe?  But then we started to notice that people were walking outside, through the emergency exits.  Then more people.  Then everyone.  But no one seemed in a panic.  So we ambled outside with everyone else to see what was going on when someone said, "There was an earthquake, 90 miles away.  5.9."  I thought they were joking.  But no.  Now I can say that I was evacuated from the Pentagon because of an earthquake!  After standing outside for about 10 minutes, we were let back in the building.  We got a bit of food in the food court and watched Fox News' coverage of the quake.  Apparently it was felt as far north as Canada, and as far south as Georgia.  Geez.  Who'd have thought?

After lunch, we said goodbye to Sam and headed back to the car.  We figured traffic would be nightmareish so we got out of DC as quickly as possible (again with Matilda's help!) and surprisingly we made it back to the house rather quickly!  While we were driving all around today, my aunt would explain the things we were driving around and past.  It was fascinating!  There's so much here that's different from the quaint little desert of New Mexico.  It is a very diverse country that we live in, and my eyes are being opened wider and wider with every stop on this trip.

Anyway, back at the house my aunt and I got to talk a bit, then my uncle & cousin came home, and we decided to head to dinner at the Dogfish Head Alehouse.  It's a microbrewery/pub that served us some delicious food and drink!  Pleasantly stuffed, we were back to the house where it was on to a game or two of pool with my cousin, Jack.  (Quite nice, although I'm a rubbish pool player.  Rubbish, I tell you!)

Thus, the D.C. part of my journey has so far been smashing!  Enchiladas, oil change, comfy bed, earthquake, pentagon, and craft beer, and pool.  Very, very good day!

But again, I must sleep.  For some reason I'm still staying up way later than I intend! But alas, I guess I'll sleep when I get home.

Tomorrow, we are to explore DC: Library of Congress, White House, Washington Monument, etc. Should have lots of pictures.  I'm quite looking forward to it!

TALLY:
miles driven: 3,000+
time spent in my car: 41 hours
cities visited: 17
cities slept in: 6
states driven through/in: 8