The Wandering Weiszes

It’s almost certain we’ll be making a habit of this kind of trip. In the interest of educating our future selves, here is a list of points to remember. If it helps you out in planning your own road adventure, all the better.

Keep a good balance of planning and serendipity.
We are notorious over-planners, and this trip was no different. Fortunately, we were cognizant, as were planning, to give ourselves room to move. Next time I would do it even more. What I recommend is to chart out a route, research the hell out of interesting places on your route (lean heavily on Chowhound and Ask Metafilter), keep a list of them with you, and then here’s the key: use it as backup, not as an itinerary. There will be days when you’ll need that list, but you should fully expect to find new and even more interesting places as you travel.

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The fastest route from San Francsico to Augusta, Maine, according to Google Maps, takes forty-eight hours and traverses 3,256 miles. If you take that path and bend and contort it to fit around the greater Great Lakes area, you’ll have an good approximation of the distance and shape of our trip. Except ours took nine times as long.

Our final route, more or less

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A current of anticipation ran through our time at Cedar Point on Saturday, as it was our plan to book it from the park that evening and make it to a nearby drive-in in time to see The Dark Knight. The closest one we found that was also in the right direction was 50 miles away, in Oregon, Ohio. At around 6:15pm, we calculated that we had just enough time to ride Millennium Force and get out of there by 7:30, giving us an hour to make it to the drive-in, where we’d hopefully arrive just as the box office was opening, since surely the movie would sell out in minutes.

Thanks to the vagaries of approximating roller coaster waiting times and parking lot distances, it was closer to 8:15 by the time we got on the highway. I was pretty sure we were now on a futile mission, but we went for it anyway. If it was sold out, we’d have an opportunity to explore the Saturday night offerings in Oregon. To our surprise, the lot was barely half-full as we rolled in about 20 minutes to showtime, and we ended up finding a beautiful spot near the center, about four rows from the front, in which to park our car and get cozy.

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The last few days of the trip have seen a slight departure in approach. Somewhere in the middle we eased up our schedule and lost a day or so. Now we’re making it up on the highways, bypassing the small town serendipity for a more destination-based type of touring. I’m a little bummed to miss the chance to drive through the Pennsylvania countryside, which I’ve heard is beautiful. So it goes. We’re a little pooped, and ready to get home, so it’s a trade-off we’re willing to make. There’ll be plenty of time to explore small-town Pennsylvania on the next trip.

Fittingly, to accompany our transition into conventional touristing, our recent itinerary has focused on some conventional destinations. Friday morning, we woke up early in Altoona and drove the two hours to Mill Run for a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Neither of us would admit to being connoisseurs of architecture, but Fallingwater is in the pantheon of Americana, and we both know how to appreciate a fine cantilever when we see it. I had a few misgivings about touring the place; something feels odd to me about a home being turned into a museum only 30 years after it was built. It’s already been a museum for longer than that. But I got over it. The place is a marvel. When the tour guide asked who among us would like to have been invited by the Kaufmanns to party here, ours were the first hands up. Then she asked who’d want to own it, and we hesitated. From the stories we heard and the pictures we saw (or didn’t see — there was maybe one of the Kaufmanns shown actually living there), it probably works better as a piece of art than it ever did as an abode.

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