On Saturday I got to use my Christmas gift from Rich.  We went into the city to see Strawberry Fields at B.B.Kings.

They were a really funny band and it was a great morning.  The picture above is Fjohn who clearly believed in the Paul McCartney conspiracy theory.  I don’t know if I do or not it’s kind of a toss up.  It would just be so great if it was real, definitely one of the biggest tricks played on mankind. That and the Mayan’s 2012 “let’s scare everyone in the future, why not” plan.  Oh those Mayans.

Then we went to visit Columbia’s Teacher’s College for Rich.  Walking through the bad area of Harlem I thought I was going to get shot, but this area was really, really nice.

We walked around Riverside Park for a while before grabbing drinks with his parents.

Now we went down to Long Beach Island and are going to bike into town to get breakfast.

After the weather stopped raining on my parade Melis and I were able to make our journey back Friday morning.  Note though, that on Wednesday night we got 3 hours of sleep, Thursday night we got 3 hours of sleep, and Friday we had a 15 hour drive back to Connecticut.  Exactly not as we planned.

We started going around 6-7 am Friday morning and our route took us through Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and finally Connecticut.  I hope I didn’t leave any out, while we were on the drive I completely forgot about West Virginia until I went through the border.

The drive was really beautiful.  We passed mostly farmland and it’s so refreshing to see so much open space.  Coming from the Northeast it’s kind of a rarity.

 I started to go insane midway through Virginia.  It’s just such a long drive through there (plus we were on no sleep) and I was dying.  I renamed the state Clarence and then started picturing if the states had a party which ones would be friends and whatnot.  Clarence was pretty good to us.  We saw where the tornadoes definitely hit through though.

Trees were broken apart and debris was everywhere, houses were destroyed, and cars were just thrown about.  You can see a broken eighteen wheeler in the middle picture above.

It was a long drive but it was fun.  We went over all the state capitals, found a Panera, stopped at Starbucks three times, and other than that it was just miles and miles of road.

We succeeded.