It’s 3AM Central Time and I arrived at Riad’s place in Austin, TX somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes ago.
It being 3AM, I shall keep this brief and, perhaps, go into greater detail tomorrow.
There were a few notable things that occurred during the day:
There was a US Border Patrol inspection point on I-10E an hour or so East of El Paso, TX whereat I was first asked if I was a US citizen, then asked where I was from, where I was going, and what the purpose of my trip was. My car was visually inspected from the outside and sniffed by a dog. I was asked Baldr’s age and I was sent on my way. The line of cars waiting to be inspected, the time spent per car, and the interruption to my cruising speed probably cost me a half hour or so. I’m not sure whether this is an indication that the terrorists or the anti-immigration crack-pots have won.
Somewhere in the midst of Texas, among the scrubland and the mesas, in the mid-afternoon, I hit boredom for the first time; it was an odd, unpleasant feeling that I haven’t felt in a very long time but its exploration and coming through the other side are chief elements of this vacation. After hitting that point, I drove in my boredom with the music and audiobooks off for a time before the boredom passed and Moby Dick resumed. Speaking of Moby Dick; I am on the 18th or 18 discs, nearing the final chapters and absolutely riveted.
Sometime shortly after my boredom passed I encountered a rain of insects. Droplets, or what seemed to be droplets, began hitting my windshield at the rate of a mild shower but, some moments later, when I decided to use my wipers to remove the droplets, they merely smeared across the windshield. This horrid rain persisted for a good fifteen to thirty minutes, eventually leaving my windshield with substantially diminished clarity, in spite of many applications of windshield wipers with fluid.
Due to my own laziness and my cars extreme economy, those insects remained on my windshield through nightfall, on into the night, and only finally were extricated by an actual rainfall about a hundred miles out from Austin. I say a hundred miles out because that is where the rain began; it was not, however, very localized. For the last hundred miles of the drive, the weather vacillated wildly between mild mist and rains so torrential that I haven’t seen their likes since last I saw the outer fringes of hurricanes in New England. I have heard that there is a tropical storm off the coast now and this truly felt like its outer edges.
There were plenty of other sights and events during the day but, as I said before, the time is late and I must sleep.