Day 1: Katonah, NY to Cleveland, OH

It's always good to get an early start on the first day of your big adventure. Unfortunately, we decided to leave for our destination around the time we wanted to arrive. This was due in part to our having finished packing up our New York City apartment at 12:30am the night before and then spending a number of hours organizing our things at Abe's parents house before starting to load the car with all the things that will make the three-week journey to Los Angeles with us. Three suitcases, five duffel bags, and a number of other items later, we set out around 5:30pm for a drive that would take us over seven hours. We got gas in Westchester, hit the road, and crossed into Pennsylvania about an hour later. We had planned to be doing only daytime driving, but the sun did set with more than four hours left to our destination. Fortunately, that meant we got some amazing sunset pictures!

We picked a spot to fill up the gas tank again, opting to go a bit further than we might have otherwise to try a place we had heard a lot about: Sheetz. We're very familiar with Wawa, the gas station convenience store that populates most of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but hadn't yet sampled its main rival. The smoothie and milkshake options seemed equally appealing, but Abe's selection of a banana smoothie turned out to be immensely disappointing, thanks primarily to the frozen nature of the banana. The employees were nice enough to allow him to switch it for a far superior mint cookies and cream milkshake, which was just as delicious as Arielle's orange creamsicle milkshake. Arielle had a nice chat with the local man getting gas at the next pump, who said he liked New York City aside from the fact that he couldn't shoot his guns there. We got back into the car around 10pm for the final three or so hours of our drive.

We finally pulled in to the La Quinta Cleveland Airport North, recommended to us by our friend Ezra, at around 1:35am. The receptionist greeted us and asked if we had a pet, noting that it was a pet-friendly hotel, something that Abe might actually consider a demerit, though there was no barking or any else problematic to disrupt the short sleep we would get that night, since naturally we had to get up by 9am to catch the last few minutes of the free breakfast! More on Day 2 coming next!

Approximate number of miles covered: 501