Starting to read Gabriel Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook.

It's not easy driving a car nonstop across half the USA by yourself. I've done it a few times; even with one other person, it gets very wearisome about halfway across Pennsylvania (if you leave from Minneapolis), and you just about fall asleep in Connecticut. Imagine writing a long poem while doing that...

The longest such drive I took was in the summer of 1971. I was driving my grandfather's hand-me-down, an enormous old silver Buick. I drove from Mpls to Alabama to see a girlfriend, whom I had tried to break up with, & then changed my mind. Was hoping to set things right. But I hadn't been able to reach her on the phone. Finally, when I called her home from a pay phone outside a truck stop deep in Alabama (she was living with her mother on the southern end of that state), somebody there told me she wasn't home. She had gone to Texas to visit her brother.

I was about out of money & time. I went back to Minneapolis, nonstop. That's a long drive.

Think I'm going to enjoy this book...