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We are a rolling leisure world. At first,
our slow-motion travel reminded
me of Dunbar,
the character in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22"
who cultivated boredom to stretch out time,
hoping to make his life last longer. We discovered there is a special pleasure in our slow pace, a chance to look around and an opportunity to imagine what the original trip must have been like. Wake has tried to duplicate the original route and is constantly looking at old farmhouses and |
buildings, wondering whether his
great-grandfather
might have passed them. "This is the kind
of road
I imagine
him going down, only not paved," Wake
said as we traveled a narrow country lane about
40 miles from Buffalo. There are, of course, downsides to our pace. One is olfactory. Not all smells are good smells, and when your maximum speed is 20 mph and your actual speed may be half that, some smeIls last a long time. For example, fresh manure is the gift that keep on giving. The same goes for road kill. Not only are there |
smells, but we are buffeted by
the wind and occasionally struck by flying insects,
although the standard joke is that we are going so
slow the insects
are only dazed. "It is full-contact driving," observed Holcombe. Hair-o-dynamics Before leaving, I had my hair cut particularly close, an attempt to improve our aerodynamics and therefore our speed. But the wind is still a problem, and it noticeably affects our progress. The Wind was also a problem faced by Winton and Shanks on to their first-day run Buffalo. "Every mile of the distance |
was worked against an ugly
head, wind, which would,have torn to shreds the strongest
American flag ever put together," Shanks wrote in an
article published May 23,1899. While Winton and Shanks made it 218 miles to Buffalo i n 14 hours and 15 minutes, our plan was to take it easier and stop at Erie the first night, about 100 miles from Public Square. We arrived at 6:19 P.M., having left Public Square at 8:07 a.m., although we made stops at Lake View |