Grrrrrrrr Pennsylvania Turnpike, Grrrrrr McDonald's

I've spent the greater part of the last 3 days confined to very cramped quarters. Monica and I drove from Utah to Rhode Island so she could start her studies at URI. We left on Tuesday night and drove through Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa and into Illinois. We stayed at a KOA cabin for the night, and then drove through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island. It was a lot of time crammed into a car. It was made much easier by splitting the driving duties and watching The Simpsons and House while I wasn't driving.

There was one thing that I didn't want to do on the road trip. We tried to eat at the same time as we got gas. On some of the toll roads, they had gas stations/eateries that you didn't have to exit the toll road to go to. We were getting desperate for gas, and the restaurants at the travel center were McDonald's and Dairy Queen. I loathe McDonald's. We figured it was safe to eat at Dairy Queen, and we really needed the gas, so we stopped. It turned out that the Dairy Queen was pretty much desserts only. I had to buy a McDonald's burger, which ended up making me feel sick. I didn't think I could hate McDonald's any more than I already did, but they failed me when they were my only option. If I never eat another McDonald's burger it will be too soon.

There was one thing I absolutely wanted to do on this trip, get a cheesesteak in Philadelphia. The fastest route to Rhode Island didn't go through Philadelphia, but it only added an hour to our driving time, and we had plenty of time to get to Providence, so we decided to alter the route a bit so I could go to Philly and get a cheesesteak. I even called Geno's up and made sure they wouldn't be closed when we got there (guy on the phone sounded irritated that I would even ask, he was like "We're NEVER closed"). We started veering a bit south towards Philly as we got to eastern Ohio. The Indiana and Ohio toll roads cost us about 9 or 10 bucks a piece. We got to Pennsylvania on the 76, which takes you through Pittsburgh and Philly, and when we got our toll ticket, we saw that it was going to cost us 30 bucks to get there. Adding 30 bucks to the cost of the trip didn't seem like something we wanted to do. We checked the GPS for how long it would take to get there avoiding the toll road and it would have added 4 or 5 hours to the trip. So we got off the toll road, and drove through backwoods Pennsylvania on one lane roads to get back to the 80. By the time we got back to the normal route, the only restaurant open that we could eat at was Denny's. The drop off from an authentic philly cheesesteak to moons over my hammy makes me want to cry.

I don't want to drive anywhere for a very long time.