After just one incredible weekend we have already engaged over 100 alumni, friends and students, gathered several stories, made wonderful friends, and in the mean time we only broke one tent and forgot the name tags for one city. One for one, so, I would say we are off to a great start!
Well, I’m here to give you the inside story, the part that makes the road trip… well a road trip. We started our journey down interstate 70, packed, happy and ready. We made our first pit stop in Zanesville, Ohio. An interesting fact about the crews is that we like to prepare ourselves for each city by knowing an interesting fact about the city… we actually have an entire folder called “fun facts”. Well, Ben’s first question to our waitress after she very enthusiastically said “How many?” was “Tell us an interesting fact about Zanesville”, she replied with that same mediocre enthusiasm “There isn’t anything.” We quickly learned after a quick Google search, that Zanesville has the only Y shaped bridge of its kind in the United States. Lesson one for the trip: Google appreciates every city, because it doesn’t live there; In Google we trust.
After the short four hour drive we arrived at the beautiful home of Paul and Cynthia Liefeld. Over 40 Pittsburgh alumni attended, we ate delicious food and had a wonderful time meeting and mingling with everyone. The people of Pittsburgh were extremely welcoming and entertaining! Later that evening, the crew decided to grab a midnight snack at one of the local pubs. As we sat there recapping the night our food arrived. Professor Scott Dooley ordered a veggie sandwich; most would have reason to believe that it would just be the size of a regular sandwich. Wrong. The sandwich was humorously larger than his head, they used an entire loaf of bread for this baby, Dooley made a comment that there was so much bread it could soak up the entire drink he had in his cup with no problem. Ben, (who we quickly discovered will probably never run out of hilarious comments) said with his eyes wide open and stunned reaction on his face “ShamWOWWW”. Lesson two: If someone makes a reference to your food by saying, Shamwow, don’t eat it.
Finally, following the footsteps of last year’s crew, we decided to leave Jill’s name as Jill. Jill, is the talking voice in our Garmin GPS. She talked to us all day on Saturday, guiding us to our successful destination, but later Jill wasn’t doing so hot in the construction zone in downtown Pittsburgh so we turned her down and reverted to map quest and our stealth-like intuition. We made it to Nadine’s Diner, where we met SpartaNation, the traveling crew for York College. We had brunch with the two roadies Jessie and Kristin and talked about their adventure so far and gave them veteran advice for their final stretch. We knew it was a great meeting when the string at Nadine’s Diner broke …not once but twice while we were there. (Nadine’s was featured on the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-in's and Dives… we learned from the show that it’s good luck when the string breaks). After we exchanged gear with SpartaNation and had our quick photo shoot, we were off again. As soon as we got in the van we turned on Jill…but there was no Jill! She wouldn’t talk to us…only silently guide us. We contemplated about what could’ve happened, but then we realized it was Dooley’s fault!!! In his advice to the other road crew he said “Jill is not always right”. Lesson three: Never make Jill mad, she makes mistakes, give her time to recalculate.
Stay tuned to see what other lessons we learn while on the road!
~Ashley
Click here to see the great video SpartaNation from York College put together about Witt Nation!
