I just drove through Maryland a few weeks ago, and now I'm back, this time on business. One of my on-again, off-again clients has a bit of work that I'm suited for, so I flew out here for a meeting.

Yeah, that's right. I flew. For the first time in about 11 years.

My lack of flying had nothing to do with 9/11. I've always disliked flying -- getting through the airport traffic, all the walking around, all the standing in lines, the tedium of security -- it grates at me. I can remember back in the late '90's or maybe 2000, I had flown out to D.C. for some meeting, and I was standing around waiting for something at Dulles, and I realized that I probably had another 30 years of waiting around in airports ahead of me. As it turned out, that was one of the last flights I ever took. I stopped working full time in 2001 and never had a reason to fly again.

Until now.

Air travel was pretty much how I remembered it, except that I arranged the whole trip myself online instead of having the company's travel agent do it. And, of course, security was even slower. I didn't have to go through the nudie-pic X-ray machine, but maybe that will change on the return trip. The truth is that it doesn't bother me as much as you might think from reading this blog. (Besides, the punishment for taking nudie pictures of me is that you have to look at nudie pictures of me.)

Don't get me wrong, I still hate the TSA. It's kind of like when a clerk at a store swears in front of me. The swearing itself doesn't bother me at all. However, he doesn't know that. For all he knows, I might be easily offended by swearing, yet he goes ahead and swears anyway. He doesn't respect me enough to care that I might be offended. And that offends me.

It's the same with the TSA. I don't mind so much that they intrude on my privacy, but I hate them for not giving a damn about my privacy. Someday, when the worm turns, I want them all to lose their jobs. Every smiling, friendly, blue-costumed asshole TSA agent in the country.

The weirdest part of security, though, was having to take off my shoes. I'd read about the TSA making people take off their shoes, of course, and knew intellectually that it was coming, but until I actually did it, I couldn't quite believe something that stupid was for real.

When I got to Baltimore, I had a little trouble finding the offices where we were meeting. The rental car GPS had never heard of those streets. I used my phone's Maps app to find a nearby intersection, and the GPS knew about it, but it tried to take me there via Fort Meade, home of the NSA. I managed to turn around before running into checkpoints full of armed guards.

Anyway, the meeting went well, and then a few of us went out to dinner. One of the guys had heard about a resturant called Maiwand Kabob in Columbia, and we decided to try it. The GPS got us there safely, and it turned out to be a tiny little store-front middle eastern restaurant in a mall. I decided to order the beef-and-chicken kabob, and when one of the other guys ordered that, I said, "I'll have the same thing."

I'd misheard, however. He'd actually ordered the lamb-and-chicken kabob. I don't generally like lamb, but I went ahead with it anyway, which turned out to be a good idea. Apparently, I don't like lamb because I've never had it prepared properly. If you ever find yourself in the area with a taste for middle eastern food, you could do a lot worse than Maiwand Kabob.

Anyway, I'm just about to pack up and head for the airport. My flight isn't for 4 hours, but I'd rather get there early. The only thing worse than waiting around in an airports is rushing through airports.

So, after I drove to Avalon, I had to drive back to Chicago. My wife had gone to Avalon ahead of me with her friends, and I was going to meet her there and bring her home. We were planning to swing south into Kentucky to visit family on the way.

Step one was getting out of New Jersey, which proved a little tricky. There are several bridges across the Delaware from south Jersey, and our GPS system wanted to take the southern-most bridge, the Delaware Memorial, presumably because it was closest to our starting point in Avalon. But we were reliably informed that traffic on the small roads between Avalon and the bridge would be very congested, and that we should take one of the northern bridges, possibly even the Ben Franklin into Philadelphia. Even though we'd have to travel in the wrong direction, it was supposed to be much quicker.

So I decided to ignore Jill (the GPS) for a little while and cruise north along the Garden State Parkway until Jill stopped advising me to turn around, at which point I could assume that it had chosen a more northern route. This took us close to Atlantic City, at which point we switched to the Atlantic City Expressway heading west toward the Ben Franklin bridge.

It all went wrong when I followed Jill's instructions to take an exit onto some small roads. I should have balked, but I needed gas anyway, so I decide to see where Jill would take us. After maybe 15 minutes of driving on silly little streets -- definitely not a major route for driving to D.C., although I did get gas -- we got on the southbound New Jersey Turnpike -- and promptly proceeded down to the Delaware Memorial bridge anyway. By the time I figured out what Jill had done, it was a little too late to change directions. Except for the silly little streets, it may have been faster than the more direct route -- there was very little traffic -- but it was not what I had been planning.

As for Delaware, all I know is that we were in a traffic jam. Then we left Delaware and everything got better. I realize this is probably not a representative sample of life in Delaware.

We crossed Maryland without incident -- not even in Baltimore -- entered Virginia, and headed for the western burbs of D.C., where we met up Mirriam Seddiq. I've known her for years through her blog, where I followed her job-hunting and the birth of her children and the re-launch of her legal career, so I wasn't about to pass this close without taking the opportunity to meet her in person.

My wife and I didn't want to intrude, so our plan had been to call her when we got close and meet her for late lunch or early dinner somewhere in her neighborhood. Mirriam, however, insisted on inviting us over, so we got to meet her whole lovely family.

Afterwards, we got out of D.C. and dashed southwest a few hours to get a headstart on the next day's travels. I had been hoping to take Skyline Drive for the view, but we were running a bit late and the sun was almost down, so we just drove down Interstate 81 to Lexington. It went pretty fast, and I had ripped about 80 more of my CDs before leaving home, so we had some music. At one point we were listening to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and I couldn't help reinacting the headbanging scene from Wayne's World, which probably wasn't the smartest thing to do while driving 70 miles per hour down a unfamiliar two-lane undulating mountain road at night, surrounded by trucks, in the rain, and fog.

The next morning, I decided to add some scenic driving to our trip -- unaware that Jill would later add some scenery of her own -- by taking Virginia-39 northwest to Warm Springs. I had noticed that there weren't a lot of photos along the route on Google Earth, so I thought I might be able to contribute a few, but the road was narrow and had no shoulders for stopping. I would have had to either stop right on the road or find a place to park and walk back. I didn't want to risk the first, and we didn't have time for the latter. I did get pictures from a lookout, but since everyone does that, Google Earth doesn't need another one.

As we were leaving, another guy was also leaving, and he was driving what looked like some kind of Mazda coupe (Miata maybe?). I figured that having my comparatively ungainly RAV4 in front of him would ruin his fun drive through the hills, so I let him go ahead of me. This turned out to be a mistake. He proceeded to amble along comfortably below the speed limit for the next 3 or 4 miles. Then he slowed down even more to look for the right turnoff.

People, please: If you want a slow, relaxed drive, buy a big sedan. If you're going to buy a nimble little coup, learn to drive it like the sports car that it is. If I can keep up on a mountain road in my SUV, you're not doing it right.

Anyway, once we reached Warm Springs I decided to get off the scenic route. I wanted Jill to find a route back to the main road, but the GPS system didn't really have a routing mode for that, so I improvised by asking it to find all the nearest fast food places, and I picked a McDonald's in cluster of them to the southwest of us, which pretty much had to be on the highway.

That worked, but Jill found some hilariously tiny and windy roads for the trip. I guess that even though they are built like a roller coaster ride, with steep banking and sharp blind turns, they're rural roads, and therefore the default speed limit is 55mph. I guess that looks pretty attractive to the GPS system's routing algorithms.

When we reached Beckley, West Virginia, the GPS system took us northwest along the West Virgina Turnpike, and then southeast toward our destination in Prestonsburg. It should have been simple -- there were state roads all over the place -- but when the GPS system took us off the Turnpike, it once again took us on a tour of twisty little roads that had ridulously high speed limits.

The lesson, I think, is that GPS routing doesn't replace good old map reading. In the future, I'll use a good road map to plan the basic route, then I'll plug a series of waypoints into the GPS system to let it handle the finer details and deal with problems like finding my way back to the highway after a stop for gas.

We eventually got to our hotel, checked in, and drove the 25 miles or so to Pikeville. We had been hoping to stay in Pikeville itself, but Pikeville is no longer the tiny little town I remember visiting as a child. It's turned into a sort-of Eastern Kentucky Enterprise Zone, with chain restaurants, a Walmart, and outposts for large corporations. We found out that all their hotels were filled up for weeks in advance.

We were in Pikeville to take my Uncle Hagan out to dinner. He was my father's younger brother, and out of a total of ten brothers and sisters, he's the only one still alive. That pretty much makes him the Draughn family patriarch. Which is probably why he ended up taking us out to dinner.

Hagan's kind of an amazing and inspirational guy. His wonderful wife, Mary Lou, passed away about ten years ago, and despite having gone blind, he still lives by himself in a beautiful home on a hillside just a few miles outside Pikeville proper. He worked hard to learn the skills that allow him to take care of himself, and he keeps himself fit with a daily exercise regimen. He had no trouble giving me driving directions to the restaurant.

(Hagan's son Jim and his wife Peggy were away at the time, but they have a home on another part of the hill, so Hagan's not without family support. Hagan visits them all the time, finding his own way along the path through the woods.)

The next day, we loaded up the RAV and set out for Louisville.

I should mention that my wife and I had a ridiculous amount of luggage for two people on a short driving trip. We had initially traveled separately, so we each brought along a suitcase full of clothing, a computer, and a utility bag. In addition, I had my camera gear, and we brought along a small cooler filled with Diet Coke. We needed to use a luggage cart at every hotel.

The trip to Louisville was uneventful, until we checked into the hotel and found out the wi-fi service sucked. This was a problem because my wife had to give a training webinar of some kind. She ended up having to use her phone's tethering capability, which was a little slow for screen sharing, and she had to use my phone to call in.

On the other hand, when we were on the road, my wife was able to get an amazing amount of work done while I was driving. It got a bit spotty in the hills -- email would come in bursts as we passed through islands of 3G service -- but we were pretty much always in touch with the world.

That evening, we took my cousin Betty out to dinner. She had a lot of great stories. She'd known my father long ago, and she'd spent a lot of time with my Aunt Mary Elizabeth, who passed away last year. Mary had always gone to great lengths to appear prim and proper -- because she was prim and proper -- whereas Betty was a bit more willing to speak her mind and tell people off.

Mary Elizabeth enjoyed playing Bridge, and she apparently played a lot with a fairly elite group. Toward the end, her mind was letting go a bit, and she'd get confused. One day, someone from the group called Betty to complain that Mary's mental difficulties were making the game less fun for the rest of them or something. I don't know what she wanted Betty to do about it, and neither does Betty, because she hung up before they finished their whining. I'm proud to have Betty as family.

The next day, we GTFO of Louisville. Really, our hotel was almost on the Ohio river, about three miles from the nearest bridge. We were gone in minutes. And thus we started the last and most boring leg of our journey: Driving across Indiana.

Indiana's not a bad place, but compared to the states I had been driving across, it was really, really flat. And I've been up and down I-65 a bunch of times, so there wasn't a lot to see. We got home on Wednesday, and I've been recovering ever since.

Normally, I would have more photos for a trip like this, but (1) it was hard to find a good place to stop for some of the photos, (2) we were in a bit of a hurry, and (3) I seemed to have lost the ability to get a properly exposed photograph. First the photo would be too dark, then I'd adjust something and the highlights would be all blown out. After a while, I got discouraged and stopped taking pictures.

Embarassingly, the problem turned out to be that I had done a few high-dynamic-range photos earlier and had left the camera in bracket mode, so it was alternately under- and overexposing my shots. It wasn't until several days later that I noticed the bracket indicator on the LCD display, and suddenly I was able to take decent photos again.

So I just drove from Chicago to the Jersey Shore, and boy are my arms tired... Knees. I meant to say, boy are my knees tired. They got really stiff from sitting in one position for 20 hours of drive time over 2 days.

I wanted to leave on Thursday morning, but a couple of things came up, so I didn't hit the road until around 1 pm, a bit later than I had planned. As most eastbound trips must, this one began with killer Chicago traffic, followed by a stop at the Gas-A-Roo in Hammond, Indiana to fill up with that cheap, cheap non-Chicago fuel.

Then, eastward.

Indiana is pretty normal. I've been there before and it's no big deal. I was just going to see more of it this time. I've got an Illinois I-Pass transponder for tolls, and it also works in Indiana. At some point, I took a break and used my iPhone to find the tollway website, to see if it would work in any of the other states. As it turns out, Illinois I-Pass is the same as E-ZPass, so it works in a few other states, including all the ones I'd be passing through in the outbound leg of my trip.

Ohio was next, and boy is it a boring state. Actually, for all I know, it's an interesting place, but I was driving the Ohio Turnpike, so I didn't see any of it. Just mile after mile of boring highway. The Ohio Turnpike is a depressing thing. It's a limited access tollway, so the only places you can stop at along the way are the tollway rest stops, which are pretty dreary and all the same. Actually, they're not quite the same. The rest stops are being upgraded, so there are two types: Obviously old and dreary, or brand new and less obviously dreary.

This dreariness has a well-known economic cause: Monopoly power.The restaurants, stores, and gas stations in the rest stops are the only places you can get to without the annoyance of leaving and reentering, so they have a bit of monopoly pricing power. As is usually the case, not only do they raise prices, they also reduce the quality and variety of goods and services.

For example, I've always mapped out my driving routes before taking them, but on this part of the trip, I hadn't bothered. For the first time ever, I was relying solely on Jill for navigation. ("Jill" is what we call our GPS, because the English language speech files for our Nuvi are named Jack and Jill.)

The problem with using Jill for guidance, I discovered, is that once I got a few hundred miles from home, I was basically just the monkey that drove the car. I had no locational awareness. (At one point, I pulled up a tiny map on my iPhone and was surpised to see that I was skirting the southern shore of Lake Erie and I didn't even know it.) So I decided to stop and pick up one of those 50-state road atlases that I used to use to plan all my trips.

It turns out they don't sell those on the Turnpike. Monopoly power means they don't have to. I was thinking of driving over to the other side of the rest stop and asking the truckers if they know where I could find a proper truck stop. A good truckstop has an awesome variety of driving supplies -- everything you could need for living a life on the road.

Anyway, it was getting dark as I passed Cleveland, so I stopped at the Brady's Leap rest stop just before Youngstown to figure out where I was going to get a room for the night. I tend to stay up kind of late, and I didn't want to spend three or four hours staring at the hotel room walls when I could still have been driving.

I decided I could make it into Pennslvania. That's a turnpike too, so it looked like I had only a handful of places I could get off and look for a hotel. Between Kayak and advertising in the rest stops I found a few candidates, but and I couldn't make up my mind where I was going to stop, so I decided to postpone the decision.

The drive through Youngstown, Ohio was slightly interesting, because somehow Jill got me off the Turnpike. I swear I stayed to the side I was told to stay on, but somehow that got me onto I-680 through town. After that, it was just boring highway all the way to the border.

Pennsylvania was only a little different, mostly because of the mountains, which I couldn't see at night anyway. It was another boring turnpike. I stopped at the first reststop to figure out my plan for the night. (By the way, the rest stop had Wi-Fi, but they wanted you to pay to use it. Monopoly power again.) Based on the hotel ads, it looked like I could stop at either Irwin, New Stanton, or Somerset. I decided I could make it all the way to Somerset, which looked like it had a lot of hotels.

Unfortunately for me, it also had a lot of motorcyclists for Thunder in the Valley. When I got off the turnpike at 2am and started calling hotels, they were almost all booked up. The Days Inn had a smoking room for $70, and the Super 8 had a Jacuzzi room for $90. I went with the Jacuzzi, but when I got there, the guy offered to let me have the room for $50 if I didn't use it. I took the deal. I was only going to sleep.

On Friday morning I woke up, checked out, had breakfast, and drove through the mountains of Pennsylvania, which were more interesting in daylight. Also, there were tunnels through some of the mountains, which are an unusual experience for me, being from Illinois, where we don't really have geography.

(I wonder why they don't allow lane changes in the tunnels. I guess lane changes must be a cause of accidents, which would be an awful mess and block traffic for a really long time.)

The rest of the drive through Pennsylvania was weaving through mountain valley after mountain valley. I found it relaxing and pleasant, but there's not a lot to write about. And I never got that road atlas, so I still have no sense of where I've been

I had to meet some people at 4:30, and I was on track to be at least an hour early until I crossed the Delaware river into New Jersey. At which point the traffic began to suck. I reached my destination in Avalon at about 4:40, which was close enough that I still got to join everybody for dinner at Sylvesters. Later that night, I took camera and tripod to the beach for some long exposures as the sun went down, although I did something wrong because they came out too dark.

I started to blog all this last night, but I got too tired to finish. I'll stay here until Sunday morning, and then I'm headed to Pikeville, Kentucky by way of D.C. and whatever scenic routes I can find in Virginia.

Update: The return trip.

For almost a decade we have had heavy-handed rights abuses all in the name of keeping people safe from threats which kill far fewer people than traffic accidents do each year. We allow the files on your laptop to be perused with no cause. We take for granted that people can be detained indefinitely without being tried or even accused of a crime. The United States now condones tortuous acts, which we ourselves once prosecuted others for, as normal. We think it's OK to listen in on private conversations of anyone without any judicial review at all. The American public accepts all this, and more, in the name of safety.

Some friends of ours have rented a house up at Powers Lake in Wisconsin for a month and they invited us to spend some time with them.

Mostly, we sat around doing nothing, but I did get to take a few pictures of people on the lake, including this pair of photos taken 3 seconds apart:

All in all, it was a relaxing time.

The wife and I are off at the Bead and Button Show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If I get any good photos from the show, I'll eventually post them. Meanwhile, for those of you living outside the area, here are a few sights typical of a journey into Wisconsin:

John Ruberry, a.k.a. Marathon Pundit, has been posting pictures of his Nebraska roadtrip. Just follow the link and scroll up.