The fine folks at away.com have come up with a list of 30 Things Every Traveler Must Do Before They’re 30. Of those 30, I’ve managed to accomplish 12 of them, or roughly 40% of them, some of which was even before I turned 30. Today we look at #12 on their list, take one Ultimate Road Trip. In the year 2003, the Chicago Cubs were scheduled to open their season on Monday, March 31 in Queens against the New York Mets. What better way to celebrate than with a road trip to New York to take in the festivities?
The trip sort of started out Friday afternoon with a quick jaunt out to the Budget rental facility near O’Hare airport. They were the one rental agency that didn’t seem to mind that we were taking the car out of state. It for real started the next morning at 2 AM as we headed out on I-80 heading east. Very little of interest happened throughout Indiana and Ohio. Eventually, we stopped for lunch at an Arbys in Pennsylvania. This particular Arbys happened to have a breakfast buffet, which was weird. The customers of this Arbys seemed to be more at home in the hills of Appalachia then in Pennsylvania. One in particular was wearing overalls with no shirt underneath (at least that’s how I remember it) and was waiting patiently for a new batch of bacon to be brought out to the buffet. Once it was, this hill person got up, emptied the whole tray onto his plate, and returned to his seat to chow down.
After finishing our processed meat sandwiches, we continued on to our final destination: a Howard Johnson hotel in Newark, New Jersey. From my recollection, the whole trip lasted a little more than 12 hours. After a brief nap and a few episodes of the Chappelle Show, our plans for the evening required a train ride to Manhattan, which should have been a piece of cake. There was a train at the airport and an airport shuttle should have come to the hotel every 15-20 minutes. After waiting for an hour, the shuttle finally showed up, taking us to the Newark airport where we were finally able to take the train into New York City!