Hoboken, NJ to Macedonia, OH
441 miles
9 out of 10 transients agree: moving is one of life’s most stressful experiences. Between the trauma of actually finding a new place to live, hiring a rental truck and/or halfway-decent movers, lugging boxes home (no small feat when you live in NYC and don’t have a car), packing everything in a relatively organized fashion, and hoping nothing breaks, almost nothing inspires as much horror. This was a particularly frenzied move, too – we had to have everything packed and ready to go in a little more than two weeks. So even though we weren’t actually loading up the truck, we still expended pretty much the same amount of psychic stress.
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mike waits for the movers to finish |
In true Hoboken fashion, we couldn’t find a parking space. We double-parked the truck and waited for our movers to arrive. They showed up in a taxicab right on time, but took hours to actually load everything up. Now I know we had a lot of heavy books, records and CDs to carry, but perhaps they could have sped things up if they didn’t take breaks every 15-30 minutes. I even made a couple of trips to the local bodega to buy them Gatorade. It didn’t help speed the process.
"Seattle, huh?" one of the movers asked me. "I hope you ain’t goin’ up no steep hills. I don’t think this van could handle them." I didn’t pass this advice along to Callie until well after we had finished the trip.
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| callie prepares to drive |
What I remember most was how emotionless I was. I sat on my front steps all too aware that I wouldn’t see Hoboken again for awhile, trying to remember everything. Almost impartially, I ticked down the various things I’d miss: my friends, Maxwell’s, Other Music, huge slices at Benny Tudino’s, Yaohan supermarket, parties at my friends Skippy and Kardyhm’s house (and the late-night Metro-North train home afterwards), the great Thai takeout place in Hoboken, the Angelika, WFMU. I had spent the past seven years living in the NYC metro area; I had lived virtually my entire life in various Pennsylvania and New Jersey locales. You’d think, reminiscing about all this, that I’d have been a little more emotional. But my overriding concern was to just get everything in the damn truck.
We hit the road at about 3 pm, already a few hours behind schedule. Callie drove, and the cats were stacked in two small carriers between our seats. They were not happy at all about their sudden captivity. For the first hour they meowed and scratched loudly, but they eventually accepted their fate and fell asleep. Off we sped past Newark and Jersey City onto I-80, where things got very rural very quickly. New Jersey has an unfortunate public image for pollution and chemical plants, but that’s really only a small area near the New Jersey Turnpike. There are also vast swathes of farmland and wilderness. My mom’s Mercer County apartment is next to a cornfield. "The Garden State" isn’t an entirely ironic nickname.
I-80 through central Pennsylvania was long and empty, punctuated mostly by gas station/convenience store/rest stop complexes. One rest stop featured an entire mini-mall, complete with a shoe repair shop. There are some cool town names, though, such as "What Cheer" and "Snow Shoe." It was a relief to cross into Ohio. Around midnight, we found our evening’s lodging: a Motel 6 in Macedonia, OH, which is equidistant from Akron and Cleveland. The cats hid under the bed, and we passed out exhausted…
