Traveling from Columbus the afternoon of the Sunday I responsible for all those kids I took the shortest drive I have taken on my trip. I headed to Gambier, my old collegiate stomping grounds, and met up and crashed with a friend. It was cool to see her again and we spent a good deal of time both walking around and catching up on what the other was doing. She seems to be doing pretty well and is enjoying working for the admissions department as she has since our graduation.
Gambier has and hasn’t changed much with the exception of some trees missing and a few new buildings here and there. Though as I expressed in a letter to a collegiate friend I wrote while there, it was a vacant place. I don’t mean just that the students were missing because they were, more that my time has passed from the place and I am an oddity, a remnant from some bygone time. My friends and experiences are what made the place and them being gone helps me move on as they have.
Having spent the night in Gambier at one of my friends numerous houses I headed out about mid-morning but I was slow to get started and didn’t do as much driving as I would have liked. I got past Pittsburgh quite a ways and ended up staying in a motel since there did not seem to be much in the way of state parks along I-80 in Pennsylvania. I was surprised about how much I liked the scenery, there are numerous rolling hills in Western Pennsylvania which was a refreshing changed from the flatness I had been experiencing across the Midwest. Granted the hills were nothing in size to anything in the Rockies, but the very green watered fed scene was a stark difference when compared to the parched West and Northwest I visited.
The next morning realizing I only had about 8 hours of driving to do, I figured I had some time to see a few things. Having now seen Groundhog Day, the movie, about a million times at this point, I thought I should check out Punxsutawney PA where the movie is set. It was cool to see the town and its weird devotion to the Groundhog, something most farmers truly dislike and classify as vermin. “Phil” the mascot and groundhog who either does or does not see his shadow has fiberglass statues all over the town. You could pretty easily tell that Groundhog Day, Feb 2 is the biggest day of the year in the sleepy little town. I surprised about how the whole place doesn’t look anything like the movie and it left me wondering where they actually filmed the movie.
Having now put off the drive off until noon I started to head back to MA. It was an entirely uneventful journey except for me finishing my book on tape, David McCullough’s John Adams and having to find another. I ended up starting Twilight by Stephanie Meyer about a girl who falls in love with a vampire. Unfortunately I didn’t finish its 13 hour run before I got home, so I have been trying to decide to finish it or drop it. The last installment of this book series is supposedly coming out this week, but it is definitely teenage girl fiction if there ever was any. This is due to the constant description of the love interest’s superiority, lips, and “muscular body.” I’m not one to finish something I haven’t started but this one is trying my patience and I might just have to wait until the movie comes out to find out the ending.
So now I’m back in Massachusetts for now going on two days and it’s a refreshing change to be back in familiar surroundings and scenery. I spent yesterday cleaning out my car and doing nothing in particular which was a refreshing change from driving too much. Looking at the odometer I put just a little under 10,000 miles on my car in all the time I was gone and the machine didn’t let me down. It’s official I love Volvos.
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