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What a long strange trip it’s been – part 3

American reader Andy Kopral bought a 2007 997 Turbo unseen on the Internet and drove it across the USA. In this and other posts, he describes his adventures.

Sunday was probably my toughest day of driving, about 14 hours in total,
through long, boring stretches of highway. I left Jim’s house about 10:00
a.m. and headed northwest towards Indiana, across Indiana (where I got my
first chip in the front windshield from a rock thrown up by a big
semi-truck) to Illinois, and then across the Mississippi river into
Hannibal, Missouri, where I decided to take a short break and get a photo of
the Mississippi river. Hannibal is the boyhood town of Mark Twain. I stopped
in a small soda shop and got a chocolate milkshake – there must have been 5
scoops of ice cream in that shake, and I found the cup holders in the
Porsche also work well for milkshakes! In fact, the cup holders are
infinitely adjustable and can accommodate any size of cup – how cool is
that! After my short stop in Hannibal, I crossed the state of Missouri. I
had gotten tired of listening to the CDs I brought along, and decided to try
listening to the radio for a while. That worked out great because I happened
to catch an excellent station that played nothing but bluegrass music, which
seemed very appropriate while driving across Missouri. At night I was
fiddling around (get it?!) with the GPS navigation system in the car and for
a moment took my eyes off the road (after hours and hours of boring highway
driving) and ran smack into the middle of a skunk. I could feel my right
front wheel squishing over the skunk and then all of a sudden the entire car
was engulfed in skunk smell. So I tried to make the best of it and imagined
one of the options my Porsche Turbo came with was a fine cocoa leather
interior with a hint of skunk. That made me laugh, and eventually I got used
to the skunk smell, and now I don’t even notice it anymore (one week later).

After crossing Missouri, I briefly touched into Iowa before finally arriving
in Nebraska. From that point, I knew I only had about one hour left to drive
before getting to my hotel in Lincoln. I finally got to the hotel around
midnight. I had planned to spend the night at this particular hotel (Embassy
Suites) because I stayed here when I was in Lincoln on business in July.
They have the best breakfast buffet you can imagine, and right down the
street is a fantastic coffee shop where I planned to get a mocha before
hitting the road the next morning. On Monday morning I awoke early because I
couldn’t wait to hit the breakfast buffet, then drove around town to buy
some sunglasses (I had lost my sunglasses at the San Francisco airport) and
driving west into the afternoon/evening sun was getting painful, since my
eyes are very sensitive to light. I also took a photo of the capital
building (great architecture) and the University of Nebraska football
stadium. Lincoln is one of my favorite small cities – very clean, friendly,
a great university, football history, and a really nicely redeveloped
downtown (especially the Haymarket district with all its cool restaurants
and bars). I’m sure the winters are very tough in Lincoln, but the fall is
beautiful.

The drive across Nebraska is also incredibly boring – nothing but flat and
straight, with cornfield after cornfield. But even in the middle of nowhere,
I was able to find a really cool little coffee shop for my third mocha of
the day. Hi, my name is Andy, and I’m addicted to mochas.I was looking
forward to arriving in Laramie, Wyoming at the end of the day, since I had
planned a relatively short driving day (about 8 hours) and would arrive
early enough to relax and have a few beers.

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