20 July 2007

Spent a somewhat unsettled night, don't know why. Pretty much did my usual morning routine; when they got up I gave Joe some of my coffee. Holly had an early appointment, Cheryl took her somewhat before 8, and I left right around 8.

It's fairly cool this morning, and as I head north it looks like I may finally get some rain--and I do, for maybe a total of an hour and a half, but it was never particularly heavy.

At my first stop for gas, I started the pump, and did my usual stuff, waiting for it to finish and shut off--but it didn't. Finally I looked at it, and it was barely dribbling. I tried squeezing and releasing, but nothing I did helped. So I went to the bathroom, did the paperwork, got dressed again, and decided I'd wait until I had at least 2.5 gallons, so I could go another hundred miles or so, and it would be time to stop again. It was my longest gas stop ever, at 16 minutes.

The rest of the day was fairly routine, until I got up around Washington, D.C., where traffic started getting pretty bad, with, I guess, folks getting a bit of an early start on the weekend. Finally it opened up again, until I started getting near Frederick, MD.

I needed gas, and wasn't sure what the start-and-stop had done to my range, so when I saw a sign, I took the exit. Well, right across the street from the gas station was a Comfort Inn. I was tired of the traffic, it was after 1600, so I pulled in there instead of the gas station. (I'll get it when I leave in the morning.) Got a AAA discount, and the clerk put me in perhaps the only room that the Wi-Fi would reach (it's a concrete block building); ($97). Walked down the street to a grocery store ($10).

States: North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland.
392 GPS miles (6781 total), 52.8 moving average, 72.1 max.
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