"Commencing countdown, engines on..."

October 15, 2020

Day 1

Short Hills, NJ to State College, PA (226 miles)

All summer long, I'd been lobbying for a quarantine vacation. "Let's rent a house down the Shore," I suggested. "You've never been to Fire Island, let's look into arranging a week," I pled. Anything to distract from the Covid doldrums that had plagued 2020.

But June turned into July turned into August...and back to the City I moved, certain that the only adventure I was to have would be my sojourn to the suburbs of New Jersey. Any trip required planning and forethought, particularly in a year such as this. The window had passed, it was surely too late.

So when the idea of a road trip was floated, I considered it fanciful - exciting in theory, impossible to execute any time soon. You can imagine my surprise when, on October 1st, he informed me that the RV was reserved and it was "leaving on the 15th, one way or the other."

Fourteen days to plan a six-week, 7,000-mile cross-country itinerary in the middle of a pandemic. Just the kind of low-stress challenge I thrive upon.

And yet, on Thursday, October 15th, we prepared to pull out of Short Hills, NJ in a 25 foot Sunseeker to embark upon our twelve-state adventure. Just a Mann and his anxiety-riddled girl.

It became clear early in the day that our scheduled noon "launch" was not to be and that our different organizational styles would make things even more interesting than they already did in "real life."

Case in point, this was the state of Jon's stuff to be loaded into the rig on Thursday morning versus my pile, which is clearly the work of a sociopath.

We also had slightly different priorities when it came to what needed to be packed. Concerned about our travels through parts of the midwest and Deep South, Jon came prepared with dashboard MAGA hats and a Dancing Jesus I'd gotten him for Hanukkah last year.