Today's post will be less photographic than usual because there wasn't any sightseeing along the way - just a straight 550mi dash from Michigan to New York, going through Canada in the process. Those stops mentioned there were pretty much just for gas, so I didn't have to pay currency conversion charges to get gas in Canada.
We started the day with an 830am breakfast. At 9, the family and I parted ways - they had planes to catch from Grand Rapids, leaving me to do the rest of the drive solo. Got everything packed and hit the road around 930. The drive from Kentwood to the US-Canada border at Port Huron didn't have any particularly interesting scenery to report - not even any particularly annoying construction. The only thing that caught my attention was an exit services sign advertising a Tim Horton's - inside the USA. The Canadian invasion has begun.
As expected, there was a bit of delay at the border crossing, but after about 15 minutes I was on my way. The drive through Ontario, too, was pretty boring. The first part of the drive (before you get to London) goes through a very rural bit of land, so it's frustrating that even in the middle of nowhere, the speed limit is only 100 km/h (62 mph). Indeed, the limits never got higher than that (although once the highway hit urban regions, traffic was generally moving around 120 (75mph), posted limits be damned). Two annoying things manifested themselves here - one with the car, and one with myself. The former: the RX-8's cruise control lets you adjust your set speed in increments of 1mph, which is very convenient; however, this doesn't change when you switch to a km/h display, where the increments are still 1mph, or 1.6 km/h. Nitpicky, I know. The latter problem is that if traffic suddenly speeds up or slows down, I'm used to a quick glance at the speedometer telling me the best gear to select, but I'm not calibrated in metric.
On the way out of Canada, the border crossing was similarly smooth. Traffic on the other side of the border, though, was not. I entered the US around 430pm, on a Friday, which meant people were likely just getting out of work. But traffic wasn't at a standstill; rather, I-190 was the scene of some of the most insane driving I've seen in this country. Welcome to the USA (and New York) indeed.
This leads me to my final complaint of the day: the RX-8's nav system. It's functional, but it's just not very good. The UI is rather shoddy: it's not always clear where a motion of the joystick will take the cursor, it locks you (or a passenger!) out when the car is moving > 3mph, it's fairly low-resolution. But a much more irritating problem is that its routing is really, really weird. Yesterday, from Portage to Manitowoc, it offered a "Quick" route that was longer in both distance and estimated time than the "Shortest Distance" route. We took the latter, and it routed us along a ton of random county roads; fine, I did say "shortest distance", which doesn't usually mean interstates. Today, though, I did ask for "Quick", and rather than giving me a path along I-90 (which probably would have been faster), it routed me along more two-lane highways running through towns, with speed limits no higher than 55 and more usually 45. Not that I was annoyed at that or anything, at the end of a ten hour day of driving.
550 miles solo wasn't so bad - just took a while. After a long day's drive, I finally reached Ithaca, where I met up with the redoubtable Shaddin:
After quickly unloading my stuff at his place, we drove down to the Ithaca Commons to get dinner with some fellow Cornell grad students:
(I apologize for the terrible quality - I forgot my camera, so I used my phone instead.)
Tonight's Dinner Review
On a recommendation, I got the yellow fried rice at Taste of Thai restaurant - a fried rice dish made with yellow curry. It was quite good, and was served with a really good sweet-and-hot sauce. I ended up paying about 11 or 12 dollars, which is somewhat high for just fried rice, but not completely insane for a sit-down dinner. 4 stars.
Tomorrow: Ithaca, NY -> Canton, MA
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