It took us two days to drive from Boston to St. Paul, and three to get back. The reasons for this vary depending on who you ask and how much time you have, but here are a few favorites:

--Labor Day. We happened to be on the road on Labor Day. In Massachusetts this is a day where people stay home from work, maybe to a little grilling, drink a little beer, watch a little television. In the Midwest, it is an event marked by people putting their families into their cars and getting on the highway, driving somewhere distant, and then turning around and driving home again. I'm guessing. We figured the roads would be less clogged on a day without work, not more.

--Our mortgage. Okay, this takes some explaining. Back in August, our mortgage company failed to withdraw the funds from our checking account electronically-- as we had authorized them to do-- for the monthly payment. This is because on the same day the payment was scheduled the company was seized by the federal government for possible fraud, and all of their assets were frozen. So the money sat in our account.

Then the mortgage was sold-- because it had to be-- to another company. Now this company did not take the August payment either, and in fact took over a mortgage in which that payment was considered received. They also put, in all of their literature, notes indicating no electronic transfer authorizations granted to the first company would be transferring to the new one. So for my first payment at the beginning of September I sent them a check.

The check cleared, and then one day later they withdrew the payment they said they couldn't withdraw electronically. This left us overdrawn by about $1,200 and stranded in Indiana without enough gas to get out of Indiana again. And there is apparently no way to get an electronic debit authorization reversed immediately. I tried.

In the end the bank was kind enough to block the debit for the day. "Go to an ATM right now and withdraw however much you need, because you'll be overdrawn again tomorrow" was the advice I received. It took quite a few hours to get this semi-resolved, (another week to deal with the consequences of an overdrawn account once we got back) during which time we did very little driving.

Incidentally, nobody's come for that August payment yet.

--general exhaustion. It turns out taking an eleven day trip wherein one drives a car at high speeds for roughly half of the trip can be somewhat exhausting for all concerned.

--the country is longer traveling West to East than it is traveling from East to West. I swear this is true.

--On Labor Day we passed by multiple construction sites on the highway-- because as I mentioned before, a lot of our nation's highways are under construction right now. Most of the giant construction cranes had equipment dangling from them, of the sort that might otherwise disappear over the weekend. Small tractors and trucks, that sort of thing. It was the rough equivalent of storing food in a tree to keep it away from bears.

--You would think that pets who had been abandoned into the care of others for eleven days would be more pissed off about it. But that's the great thing about pets: too stupid to bear grudges.

--Cigarettes are sometimes state-specific. For example, I attempted to purchase a box of Merit Ultra Lights in Wisconsin, and could not. They are not carried in Wisconsin. One clerk confessed he'd never even heard of them. As for why I was buying cigarettes at all: eleven days, five on the road. Don't judge me.