Guns and Power Tools -- The MLK Hearse at Silver Dollar Pawn in Alexandria Louisiana

As many of you have seen from my weekly Facebook posts, I am in Dry Prong, Louisiana. Actually, that's not true; I'm in Pineville LA. But Pineville simply isn't as funny as Dry Prong. So, first, let's get the geography right. I'm here for four to eight weeks to participate in a survey for unexploded ordnance at the former Breezy Hill Artillery Range in the Kisatchie National Forest. Dry Prong is the little town smack dab in the middle of the Kisatchie. Alexandria LA is the nearby city of about 50,000 where we fly into. It's about 20 miles south of Dry Prong. Pineville is just across the Red River from Alexandria, a bit closer to the survey site and easier to find a decent hotel at Per Diem rates.

When I'm on the road for work like this, I'm generally content to work, 10-12 hours a day in the field, 2-3 hours a night processing data in the hotel, 7 days a week, until it's done -- it's not like there's a lot else to do -- but, as per my previous Facebook post, it's hunting season in the Kisatchie, and they just switched from bows to rifles, so we ain't out there this weekend.

So I did what I find oddly relaxing to do when I'm on the road -- hit pawn shops. I picked up the pawn shop habit when I lived in Austin TX in the early 80s, and bought a boatload of high-end stereo equipment, band gear, specialty tools, and musical instruments. Now that everyone has an Internet connection, though, it's next to impossible to get a deal on anything in a pawn shop; one google search and even a proprietor in a remote corner of American can learn that a Mossman guitar is worth money. But old habits are hard to break, and hope springs eternal.

So this morning I loaded up the GPS with locations of five pawn shops in Alexandria and I made the rounds. I found myself at the Silver Dollar Pawn & Jewelry, which, unknown to doesn't-watch-reality-television-me is the home of the cable show Cajun Pawn Stars. This is a large, very impressive store, more than just your usual dirty shelves of guns and power tools. They have a number of collections of photo and print memorabilia, some of which are civil rights era-related. There's a case for Rosa Parks-related items, there's one for Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and of course one for MLK.

When I was done wending my way through the large store, I began to leave, but noticed some signs referring to the "MLK Hearse." Sure enough, in an offshoot of the ground floor, behind a velvet rope, is the restored 1966 Cadillac Superior hearse used to transport the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr's body from the hospital to the funeral home after that horrible day in Memphis in 1968. (Note that this is different from the mule-drawn wooden farm wagon used to transport King's body during the funeral.)

One never knows quite what to make of these sort of macabre physical curiosities, particularly when an object was a player in the true historical drama of civil rights. I'm a person to whom context is crucially important. A lawn jockey is offensive, whereas a collection of lawn jockeys as part of a museum display on the history of racism in America, now that has proper context. But this is not a museum; it is a pawn shop / antique / memorabilia store. So what is the intent of the display of the MLK hearse? 

Along with the display of the hearse was a storyboard explaining that the store owner's son bought it to add to their civil rights memorabilia collection, then was killed in a plane crash. The restoration of the hearse was thus something of a tribute from the father fulfilling the vision of the son. The vehicle was displayed quite respectfully, in a separate section of the building, behind a velvet rope, with other King-related memorabilia, but it still seemed more than a little bit out of place, like a dead body quietly watching a raucous dinner party.

I found the physical presence of the hearse quite jarring. I may have been only five when JFK was shot so it's hard to discern the actual root memory from the endless replays seen over the last 49 years, but I was ten when the twin tsunamis of the MLK and RFK assassinations roiled America, so they're smacked in there with a leather punch. The events are forever linked by the speech Bobby Kennedy gave in Indianapolis to the largely black crowd who did not yet know that King had been assassinated:

"For those of you who are black and are tempted to ... be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."

Two months later, RFK was dead.

44 years later, I'm face to face with the hearse. In a pawn shop.

The wooden funeral farm wagon is apparently on display at the King Center in Atlanta (you couldn't ask for more appropriate context than that), but this ain't the King Center; it's a bustling pawn shop featured on a cable show. The hearse is here as a tourist attraction. While the hearse was respectfully displayed, and while there was some mitigating context to its presence, that context was myopic by historical standards.

As a Car Guy, I have mixed feelings about these macabre vehicles. On the one hand, people should follow their passions and collect whatever blows their skirt up, but on the other, I thought "this is just weird. People don't collect things like this. If they did, the JFK hearse would be out there attracting attention, and it's not." Then I did a quick google search and found I was wrong: In early 2012, the JFK hearse sold for $160k to a collector. Further, the ambulance that took JFK to Parkview Hospital sold the year before for $132k. I thought, what kind of collector buys these things? What is the mechanism for enjoyment of this sort of vehicle? How much does the excuse "it's a piece of history" let you get away with? What is the endpoint? A private museum of hearses used to carry famous people, displayed along with strands of hair found during restoration? Imagine, Marilyn Monroe's lifeless body was right here. Next hearse. Imagine, Kurt Cobain's lifeless body was right here. I don't think so. Would I pay money to see the hearse that carried John Lennon's body? Hell, I'd pay money not to see the hearse that carried John Lennon's body, and it's difficult to imagine any context where the display of such a thing is historical as opposed to exploitative. Is the MLK hearse the exception because it's part of the 60's political assassination holy trinity? I don't know.

The guns that shot JFK, RFK and MLK are evidence in crimes; they should be preserved, in the custody of appropriate agencies. Whether the vehicles that carried their bodies have true historical significance is questionable.

A part of me would feel better had these vehicles been allowed to pursue their normal life cycle, which is for Neil Young to party in them, then for them to return to dust. Instead they're being kept alive, as if on life support, as mute reminders, like stroke victims who have seen horror but cannot speak.

And then I looked up and saw... guns and power tools.

So much for context.

Bentley Publishers Has Officially Announced My Book

Bentley Publishers has put out an official press release announcing my book. Click on my name to drill into the "author blurb" page, and on the title to see a book blurb. There's a "keep me notified" button where you can sign up for release

 info, and a link to my October "Roundel" article where I told the story of how the book deal was 18 years in the making.

I have a long history of being uncomfortable with self-promotion, but I must admit that I can't stop smiling about this.

https://wiki.bentleypublishers.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=117866673

Book Getting Closer

I received another advance check yesterday from Bentley Publishers for my book "Car Nut: Why Men Love Cars, and How Fixing BMWs Saved My Sanity (a memoir with actual useful stuff)." Bentley says that, very soon, they'll have an author's page up on their web site. More news as I know it.

Notes From The Road (labor day version)

It's Labor Day and, again, I find myself driving the work truck. This time, unlike the last post, I'm not towing a boat -- I'm hauling a 32' trailer filled with geophysical survey equipment. I'm halfway to Camp Lejeune NC, having stopped in Dover, Delaware for the night.

In my last post, I enumerated the terrors of towing the boat over the George Washington Bridge (replete with my trailer disintegrating at the most inopportune of moments) and swore I'd never do it again. True to my word, this time I took the Tappan Zee Bridge. Problem is, if you're driving a commercial vehicle (much less a commercial vehicle towing a 32' trailer) and you need to head south of NYC, you can't take the Garden State Parkway or the Palisades Parkway, or any parkway; those are for passenger cars only. But this time I took the Tappan Zee to I287 to route 17, which was a very manageable roughly 20 miles of two and three lane road that gets you to I80 to the Jersey Turnpike. I'd highly recommend this route to anyone looking to bypass not only the GWB but also the terrible roads the GWB feeds north of NYC. 

The only downside was that I left at 7AM and kept waiting to see a service plaza with a big Starbucks sign on it. I didn't remember which plazas on the Mass Pike or on the NY roads have Starbucks in them, but I can now report that if you take I80 to I84 to I684 to I287 over the Tappan Zee, there aren't any. Finally I saw the sign for the Sloatsburg Service Plaza with a Starbucks logo (yay!), then realized it was just after the exit for route 17 (boo!). I toughed it out, got on 17, took it to the Jersey Turnpike, and had to pass the Vince Lombardi, Alexander Hamilton, and Grover Cleveland service areas before good old Thomas Edison flashed the familiar green and white goddess-of-coffee logo, thereby further cementing ol' Tom Edison's place in my heart. When you're towing a trailer, you have to be careful not to overdrive the speed rating of the tires; 55mph is a good goal. But, as this is less than the speed limit, you see the projected arrival time on the GPS recede like Tantalus bending to cup his hand in the water. It was five hours before I had a break for  my traditional two doppios.

The problem with driving to anyplace on the mid-Atlantic coast south of the mouth of the Chesapeake is that there are two ways to get there, and they both suck. There's the inner route, where you take Rt 95 or one of its beltway variants and go around DC. I've done this several times, and have sworn a blood oath that I will never, ever do it again unless it is on a weekend and very early in the morning. And there's the outer route down the Delmarva (Delaware Maryland Virginia) Peninsula which forms the outer side of the Chesapeake. When you get off the Jersey Turnpike and cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge, you immediately have to choose which of these routes you're going to take. The Peninsula route is 200 miles down route 13. At the end you're rewarded with the Chesapeake Bridge Tunnel, which is 20 miles of post bridges across the mouth of the Chesapeake with occasional submerged sections (if it were all bridge, the big ships couldn't get through) and is absolutely spectacular. But to reach it you have to run the gauntlet of route 13, which at times is a limited access 2 or 3 lane highway surrounded by bucolic farmland but for long stretches is like Route 9 just outside of Boston -- a blur of stop lights and strip malls. Among the more, ah, pleasant attractions slaps you in the face when you cross from Maryland into Virginia. There's a souvenir store with a big sign that says "THE SOUTH BEGINS HERE" and a big Confederate flag. Really? Really? The warm welcome of the Confederate flag notwithstanding, towing a trailer and getting up to speed to have to slam on the brakes for a light every mile is no fun. I've taken this route too, and swore that -- you guessed it -- I'll never do it again. Plus, this being Labor Day weekend, I didn't know what would await me for beach traffic.

But, like Captain Lucky Jack in Master and Commander, I was forced to choose the lesser of two weevils, so the Peninsula it was. Fortunately, the beaches are at the south end of the Peninsula, and I stopped for the night in Dover which is closer to the north end, so I hit absolutely no traffic, but not so lucky were those coming home from Labor Day and headed north -- I passed a 50 mile long backup.

So far the only surprise has been the restaurant. When I'm towing, I try to stay in hotels with a restaurant either inside or directly across the street so I can park the rig at the hotel and leave it there. Unfortunately the hotel restaurant has a "closed for the evening sign." I assume that Labor Day evening is the official start of the slow season. Fortunately, this is what takeout and delivery is for.

Here's hoping tomorrow's trek to Camp Lejeune is equally as uneventful.

Book Deal with Bentley Publishers

On Saturday 7/14/2012 I announced the following:

It is with joy bordering on the profane that I announce that Bentley Publishers, publishers of the best damn automotive repair manuals in the world, has signed me to publish my 350 page book, tentatively titled "Car Nut: Why men love cars, and how fixing BMWs saved my sanity (a memoir with actual useful stuff)." It's my life, viewed through the lens of cars, in a way that other car guys and the women who love them will instantly relate to. It's that miserable Triumph GT6+ I owned in college. It's rebuilding the engine of Maire Anne's VW bus in the kitchen of the apartment in Austin. It's the 25 BMW 2002s. It's the 3.0CSi I've owned for 25 years. It's loving how my 911SC gurgles. It's teaching my kids to drive in the Suburban on the beach late at night on Nantucket. It's a defense of men as intimate caring creatures, even though we often appear to have the emotional intelligence of algae. It's an explanation of why, in a world in which we have so little control, I thoroughly enjoy working on cars and get such a charge out of identifying, diagnosing, and completely fixing a problem. 

Can you tell I've been practicing the elevator speech? How does it sound? I think it's pretty good considering Maire Anne (the best wife a car guy could ever ask for) and I celebrated last night and I was drinking Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway's favorite cocktail -- champagne and absinthe).

@!#$%ing MassDOT

The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (formerly called the RMV -- now re-branded as the snappy-sounding MassDOT) has had, since the Dukakis administration, a policy where you pay sales tax on a car not on the basis of what you actually paid, but on the book value of the car. While I understand and appreciate that this was triggered by years of rampant under-reporting ("No! Really! I paid a hundred bucks for it!"), it is still manifestly unfair.

And the rising values of the kinds of classic BMWs I buy have not gone undocumented. Because of the number of cars I go through and my tendency to buy them beat up and with very high mileage, I have probably overpaid these taxes more than any twenty combined families. Several years ago, I bought a '73 BMW 2002 for about two grand. It barely ran, had dents in every body panel, a rust hole in the nose big enough to stick my hand through, and was missing most of its interior, but I was assessed taxes on its then book value of $8,000 (for old cars, they use the low retail value in the NADA Classic Car Guide). If you complain about it at the Registry, they'll hand you an abatement form. It was so ridiculous that I followed the process of application for abatement all the way down the rabbit hole. I wasn't surprised that the abatement request came back denied. What surprised me was the reason. And they don't tell you the reason in English; they list a code you have to look up in a table. When you find it, essentially what it says is that the abatement form is for many kinds of taxes, and they don't grant abatement for this kind of tax (motor vehicle sales tax). Well then why the hell do you have the registry hand out these forms? Grrrrrrrrr......

But there is one loophole. If you buy a car from a dealer as opposed to a private party, then and only then does the Registry use the value you actually paid, the rationale being that the dealer has to record each sale so it's verifiable, unlike your word, which is, of course, worth nothing to them. But buying from a dealership simply to get this benefit is like intentionally being homeless in order to get the great free health care, only in reverse. I of course wander willingly into used car dealerships the same way I walk willingly bare-breasted through batches of poison ivy, roll willingly in stagnant mosquito-infested water, etc.

Until today. I needed a truck for vacation and I saw, on Craigslist in southern New Hampshire, a high-mileage 2000 Chevy Suburban with 8-passenger seating, working 4wd, and working air conditioning, for $2995 -- substantially below market value. It was at a small used car dealer, but they had excellent BBB accreditation and I liked the honest way the seller presented the vehicle in the ad and on the phone. I dropped everything and drove up to Hampstead, checked out the truck, and bought it on the spot. 

AND -- I thought -- FINALLY, because it's bought from a dealership, I'll actually pay the sales tax on the three grand I paid, not on some fictitious book value.

I went to my insurance agent, who did the transaction with the registry via computer (as opposed to physically going to the registry) because I was transferring plates from another vehicle. I reminded her that the car was bought from a dealership. She said she'd see what the registry said.

When she handed me the paperwork, I was assessed $300 tax on a $2995 purchase. "That's not right," I said. "I bought this truck from a dealer."

My insurance agent explained that she asked the Registry, but their policy is that unless the dealer is A MASSACHUSETTS DEALER, you're still assessed tax on the book value.

10% motor vehicle sales tax.

Nothing pithy here. No Dave Barry-esque ending that wraps back to the beginning. Just simply very pissed off.

The Bridge to Nowhere -- Confronting my Fears on the GW

You have to understand that I recently bought a trailer for my hovercraft (which, you must admit, is one of the best opening lines EVER), and, while towing it home, at night, on the Mass Pike, had a guy pull up alongside me, honking and gesturing for me to pull over. When I did, and opened the door, I immediately smelled burned rubber. I then saw that I'd been leaving a cloud of acrid smoke in my wake, hence the honking and gesturing. It was coming from the trailer's right rear wheel, but I wasn't sure if the source was the tire, the wheel bearing, or the electric brakes. I waited for the smoke to dissipate, then realized it was the tire itself that was smoking. The inside edge of the tire was rubbed raw and sticky, down to the steel belts. It slowly dawned on me that I could see this because the fucking fender was missing. The sequence of events, apparently, was that the fender had loosened, leaned into the tire, shaved it like Parmesan, then flung itself off into the weeds, taking with it the right taillight just to keep it company. Fortunately I was only a few miles from home. I limped it the rest of the way. I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.

So you'll appreciate that I have a certain sensitivity about towing. But that mishap occurred with a $300 home-built trailer. You get what you pay for. Shame on me for not checking the security of the fenders before driving it home. It's nothing like the trailers I tow for work.

Which brings me to today's story. I'm en route from Newton MA to Emerald Isle NC for an unexploded ordnance survey in Bogue Sound. As per the previous post, I've been driving a lot. This is my third two-day drive in three weeks. The last two were the trips back and forth to Rockford IL, about 1100 miles each way, so two 550-ish mile days. This is a bit shorter -- 850 miles, so about 425 miles a day -- over two hours of driving time per day shorter than the last hauls. Cake.

But -- and it's a big but (hee. tee. hee.) -- Rockford was due West, straight out I90 for a 1100 miles, all farmland except for the short stretch between Gary and Chicago. This trip is down the Eastern Seaboard, probably the most congested roads in the country. To get south of Boston, you have to get through New York City. There are three ways to do it. I95 goes straight over the George Washington Bridge to the Jersey Turnpike. Or you can take 287 over the Tappan Zee and cut to the Turnpike via the Garden State Parkway, which is slightly longer but avoids the GW. Or you can continue west on 287 and go through Scranton -- substantially longer.

When I'm driving a car and heading south of the city, I generally take the Tappan Zee. Although I have an emotional attachment to the GW (I'm originally from Long Island; I love the view of the city from the GW; and I have a painting my grandfather did with the bridge in it), the roads leading up to it are ancient infrastructure, and a bit claustrophobic at that; they pass right up against buildings, no breakdown lane. (You don't actually even see the bridge until you emerge from between the buildings and are about to drive over it.) And the road surface both approaching and on the bridge is terrible; whenever I have to take the GW to head into the city, I can hear my wheels tensing up with anxiety, like your balls when you're about to wade into the ocean. It's not until you get halfway through Jersey that the turnpike surface smooths out.

You can take a truck and trailer over the Tappan Zee, but you can't drive any commercial vehicle down the Garden State Parkway or any other parkway; they're for passenger cars only. So unless you want to head further west and then south, which adds onto the length of the trip, the GW is in your plans. The thought of pulling the 32' trailer or the boat over the GW, or, for that matter, through any major metropolitan area with high traffic and no breakdown lane, where any breakdown including a simple flat tire will put you in a world of hurt gives me pause, but sometimes one must face one's fears. 

So, a few years ago, on a road trip to Aberdeen MD, I reminded myself that the work truck and trailer are both only a few years old and very low-mileage reliable vehicles, and I pulled the 32' trailer right over the GW without incident. Then, last year, I did the same with the boat for a survey on the Chesapeake. And again, despite my anxiety, nothing went wrong.

Nothing went wrong on last month's trip to and from Rockford IL either, aside from my FastLane pass expiring. However, I did notice, as I headed home from Rockford, that the trailer seemed to be getting a bit loud; regular bumps and jounces seemed to elicit more clanking than usual. I checked the hitch and the retractable jack, but they were both secure. When I got back to the office, though, Gary noticed that, in fact, many of the bolts connecting the trailer's aluminum structural members had loosened up. I was quite surprised. I think of this as a new boat trailer. We bought it and the boat about four years ago, and it has seen little use. Of course, once I thought about it, "little use" was the trip up from SC where we bought it, a bunch of day trips around Boston, the trip to and from the Chesapeake, and the recent haul to and from Rockford. That's probably 4000 miles -- not a lot for a car, but probably more than many boat trailers see going to and from the local recreational water body. Gary tightened every bolt on the trailer with an air impact wrench last week.

Last night while I was planning the route to Emerald Isle NC, I looked again at the GW issue. Upon closer examination, if you take the Tappan Zee, you don't have to wait 'till Scranton to turn south; you can take Route 17. It's neither a highway nor a "parkway." Google Maps estimates it's about 15 miles along Route 17 from 287 to where it joins the Jersey Turnpike, estimating it adds about 20 minutes to the trip as compared with going over the GW. I couldn't find anything about Route 17 on trucker's web sites, but I'm not exactly a trucker and the rig isn't exactly a "truck" -- just a pickup truck towing a trailer but classified as a commercial rig.

But I did read something interesting concerning the GW that I'd noticed but never thought about. There's no toll on the GW heading south, only north. So, if you're driving at low-traffic hours, the backup only occurs north. I read several truckers saying that they routinely head south over the GW as long as they're traveling at off hours, but always avoid it heading north.

Screw it, I thought. I shall face my fears, again. I will banish the image of the smoking right rear tire on my hovercraft trailer. I'll do what the truckers recommend. I'm driving on Saturday. Truck's new. Trailer's new. Tires are fine. Fenders are attached solidly. Nothing will go wrong. Go wrong. Go wrong.

So I set off at 5:30 this morning. The truck and the boat trailer felt nice and tight -- the clanging was gone. Gary's bolt-tightening had done the trick. I passed the turnoff for 287 and the Tappan Zee and was committed to taking the GW. Mind you, after the hovercraft trailer incident, I was looking behind me to be certain I wasn't shredding any tires, but all was going well. In fact it was going so well I began thinking I was being too conservative stopping halfway in Laurel MD. Hell, the GPS puts me there at 1pm. I should push further. That way I'll have an easy day tomorrow. I'll get south of DC. Maybe Richmond. Yeah, I'm a real road dog, just like when I was 24. Rolling rolling rolling...

I started my approach to the GW. As a commercial vehicle, you need to keep left to take the upper deck. The road was just horrible. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! I thought, I'll be driving my BMW 3.0CSi down to The Vintage (an event for classic BMWs) in Winston-Salem in a few weeks. No way I'm driving over these rough roads in that. My gorgeous but soft Alpina open-lug wheels wouldn't last, uh, a New York minute.

And then I saw the last thing I wanted to see. A car pulled up on my left and started honking and gesturing for me to pull over.

Shit. Piss. FUCK!!

I saw a sign for an exit before the bridge perhaps two hundred feet ahead. I looked in my right mirror. Incredibly, I had room to change lanes. I took the exit. (The images below are from Google Maps. Once I was safe in my hotel room, I became obsessed with figuring out where I actually was.)

It dropped me in The Bronx, beneath an elevated train line, creating lanes that went between the pillars and a lane on either side (for those of you from Boston, it felt very much like driving under the old expressway before they took it down). The lane on my right was full of double-parked cars.

And I was towing this:

Gee, this is going to be fun.

I hung the first right turn I could and found myself in something resembling a residential neighborhood. Again, incredibly, on my left was an unbroken line of spaces along the curb. I pulled the truck and boat into them. Below is the actual location (Clifford Place).

I took a deep breath, got out of the truck, and walked around to the trailer.

Nothing was smoking. 

The trailer was still attached to the truck. 

The boat was still attached to the trailer. 

The gear (which looks like a small submarine) was still strapped to the deck of the boat.

Whatever it was that caused the good Samaritan to honk and gesture couldn't be that bad.

I relaxed.

Then I found it. The left rear light (which, on a trailer, is a combination turn signal, brake light, and parking lamp), and with it, the licence plate, were being dragged on the ground like that guy in Game of Thrones who tried to poison Daenerus Targaryan. The aluminum right-angle bracket holding the licence plate and the light assembly to the trailer had cracked in half. Two of the wires had already ripped out from the trailer's wiring harness. The only thing holding still it there was the ground wire.

Not so bad.

I pulled the license plate off and hung it from the back of the boat. I then cajoled the light assembly into hanging onto the trailer using zip ties and Gorilla tape. I stripped fresh insulation off the wires, spliced them, and tested the light. The parking light worked but the brake and directional did not. I certainly wanted to have a working left directional, but preferred not to be troubleshooting and repairing any more than necessary on the streets of The Bronx. I thought, good enough, I'll stay in the right lane, pull off at the first available rest area, and troubleshoot more completely there.

I asked a man pushing a bottle cart how to get back to the GW bridge, "Right, right, and right," he said. I walked around the corner up to 174th street and looked to get some recon on what I was about to be driving into, but it looked ok, and even if it didn't, it's not like I had a lot of choice.

I was up and over the GW in no time. I pulled into the Vince Lombardi service area, which I've passed dozens of times in my life but never stopped at, and trouble-shot the directional. Not surprisingly, when the wires sheared, one of them touched to ground and popped a fuse. This is a modern truck with about a hundred little tiny blade fuses, but those for the trailer coupling were labeled, and they had replacements at the store in the service plaza. 

The rest of the day's trip occurred without incident. I am safely ensconced in a Holiday Inn in Laurel MD. Tomorrow I simply need to skirt Washington DC before the highways and byways become more bucolic.

In conclusion, facing one's fears is overrated. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Just because you're worried about truck trouble in what's probably the most congested constricted choke point in the country doesn't mean it's not actually going to happen. I got out of it easy, but my love for the New York skyline notwithstanding, Route 17 and the Tappan Zee are calling my name.