Wednesday, November 26, 2008

International Efficiency Day

Today has been all about the time crunch. We have long planned to stop for thanksgiving dinner in Philip's hometown of Gresham, Nebraska and now that people other than ourselves are counting on our schedule, it was imperative that we follow through with efficiency and celerity. We got our usual late start, which didn't help, but our real problem today came as a result of a missed turn in Illinois, quite possibly our first of the the whole trip. A simple missed turn is usually not a problem, but in this case the next exit wasn't for another...18 miles. I honestly don't know if I've ever seen a longer gap between exits. And of course we didn't actually notice the missed turn until the brink of that exit, forcing us to turn around one stop further down the road. It would be another 9 miles. So, in order to get back to where we started we had to drive a total of 54 extra miles (remember, that's two exits), with an accompanying time penalty that was and is almost impossible to make up. After all, we can't really drive any faster, and it's not like we can sprint those miles. As such, we've adopted a temporal austerity plan, meticulously going through every step of our process and shaving our time down minute by minute. We had one particularly impressive gas stop this morning that would have looked to an outside observer like a NASCAR pit crew on vacation. It still looks questionable as to whether we will get to Nebraska at a traditional Thanksgiving dinner hour, but we're doing our best. 

3 comments:

PK said...

These are your best pics yet! I think you're getting better and better...

PK said...

...But if this trip goes international, then you'll really have taken a wrong turn.

Brian said...

I love that picture in the field. Wish I could be there to see it in person... hope you are all well.