Youngstown, OH

There are some trucking companies that try to attract drivers with the line "No NYC! No New England!"
There is a good reason for this. Of the places in America to drive a 70+ foot vehicle, the older parts,
the parts that, when built, could not have seen the need for streets and intersections open enough
for semis are, generally, not places where driving a semi is "easy." There is also a lot of traffic.

I picked up this load of Armored Cable in New Bedford, MA. which, down in the southeast corner of the state
along with Fall River, is sort of a forgotten niche of the state. It isn't boston, it isn't the cape, it isn't even Rhode Island
for god's sake. I trucked it just into Rhode Island and bedded down at a truck stop outside of West Warwick (or just outside
of Providence as everything in Rhode Island is) This truck stop billed itself as, yea indeed was called, "Rhode
Island's only 24 hour Auto and Truck Plaza" which seems a lot wordier than, say, "Pilot."
One of the real bitches about east coast and more urban truckstops is that they often charge for parking.
This is some real crap. It wouldn't be, I suppose, if every truck stop charged money, but well over 90% of them do not
and so, those that do really seem like they are ripping you off. Especially if they are in crappy little rhode island.

Across Connecticut the next morning traffic surged and slowed as it was pumped through the congested arteries
in New Have, Bridgeport and Stamford then into New York, across Westchester County, things opening up, down into New Jersey and through the Delaware Water Gap into Pennsylvania and woosh, to Ohio.

As you leave the east coast the traffic opens up ,the landscape opens up, everything seems to start to take deeper breaths
and you too take deeper breaths and life is good again because you are not on the east coast anymore.
Continuing on this breathing gets deeper and wider all the way to the rockies and then again opens up
and then over the cascades or sierra nevada before your breath comes back tight in your chest in seattle or san francisco
or los angeles, but in the spaces between, its not so bad.

The snow here is letting up, and I ought to get on the road and over to chicago before too long.