I thought yesterday’s decision to take a Ram Rebel as my rental car (and by car, I mean wide-body off-road pickup truck) would haunt me once I got to touring Washington, D.C., but boy, was I wrong. It started haunting me even before I left Virginia.

I recently made it my goal to visit as many states as possible in the United States, so whenever I go to a new cluster of states on the map, I like to drive around and visit the neighboring states so I can check them off my list. In today’s case, I wanted to visit West Virginia and Maryland, so I set my GPS to Charles Town, WV and started driving.

The GPS told me to keep going straight on Virginia State Route 7, but a little past halfway to my destination, there was a section where I had to tem­po­rar­i­ly exit State Route 7 and go to State Route 15 before re-entering State Route 7. I missed that part and kept going straight, landing me on East Mar­ket Street in Leesburg, Virginia.

It was fine at first, and I realized that if I keep going straight, I would eventually reconnect with State Route 7 and be on my way. What I didn’t realize is that East Market Street had a Y-shaped intersection with Loudoun Street. I’m sure you’ve guessed it by now—I accidentally turned onto Loudoun Street.

Long story short, I squeezed a Ram Rebel down a road that seemed like it was designed to be wide enough to support nothing more than horse carriages. How I managed to get out of this situation without scraping every single oncoming and street-parked vehicle, I’m not sure.

Eventually, I made it back onto State Route 7 and kept going until I needed to turn onto State Routes 751 and 719. At first, I was confused that they would make a one-way road like this… but then I realized that it wasn’t actually a one-way road. It was a bi-directional road narrow enough to be a one-lane road, but they didn’t paint the center of the road, so it just looks like a random strip of pavement in quite literally the middle of nowhere.

After a quick meal break in Charles Town, I drove over to Harpers Ferry to do some sightseeing. Needless to say at this point, the roads were incredibly narrow, and driving up northwestbound on High Street, I felt like my right side-view mirror would knock out pedestrians because I had to drive so close to the sidewalk as to not ram into oncoming traffic head-on.

Harpers Ferry looked interesting, though, so I decided I would park and walk around a bit. Miraculously, I actually found a parking spot in a lot that fit the truck, so I backed in and got out. But of course, this kind of good luck can’t happen to me. I saw a parking attendant walking towards me. Parking cost $20, and they only accepted cash. I don’t carry cash. I pulled out of the parking spot and went on my merry way.

After being thoroughly outplayed by the Virginias, I drove a bit northeast to Maryland to check that state off my travel map as well. After crossing the state line via U.S. Route 340, I exited onto Keep Tryst Road. While driving eastbound, I noticed a sign that said “scenic byway” and had an arrow pointing south. That was precisely what I was looking for, so I turned right onto Sandy Hook Road.

From here ensued basically a repeat of my experience of the Virginias. For two and a half miles, I drove on roads so narrow that if I was driving a TRX already instead of a Rebel, I would’ve guaranteed scraped things to the vehicle’s right. The worst part about this was that it was actually literally func­tion­al­ly impossible for me to turn around, even if I wanted to—the length of the truck would’ve made it impossible to fit sideways across both lanes during the turn-around process.

To give you a better idea of what I was working with, here is a screenshot from Google Maps where you can see a compact sedan approaching from head on:

Ram Rebels are approximately a foot wider than compact sedans.

I was committed to this road until there was a turn. For about two and a half miles, I drove on a road designed for vehicles literally half my weight. When I was about to lose all hope, I saw a turn coming up on my GPS—Sandy Hook Road, which had at this point renamed itself to Harpers Ferry Road, had a turn onto Hoffmaster Road. From there, I could do a big one-and-a-half-mile loop around onto Morgan Pine Road and then drive back onto Harpers Ferry Road… to then proceed to do the two-and-a-half-mile drive down Sandy Hook Road again, but this time in the other direction.

And of course, throughout this whole time, I saw occasional signs warning me of falling rocks.

 
I’m still here, though. Everything is fine, and I survived.

…

I never want to visit the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area ever again.

Lately, I’ve been sleeping fairly late—usually around 3 AM—because I’ve been going to my condo’s gym past midnight in order to exercise when nobody is around to minimize contact and avoid COVID-19 exposure. Consequently, this means that my schedule is completely broken when I have to do some­thing early in the morning. Unfortunately, today, one of the things I had to do early in the morning was catch a 6 AM flight.

I don’t work well with sleep deprivation, but I had no choice at this point, because I didn’t have enough time to reset my sleep schedule in preparation for travel. I considered staying up all night as to not miss my flight, but every time I try to stay up late, I suffer from an overwhelming wave of drow­si­ness, so I ended up taking two two-hour naps, then slept on the plane.

Once in a while, I woke up from my naps on the plane to look out the window. One of the times, we were flying over what appeared to be the Michigan area, when I saw… a massive blanket of snow covering everything. I took a photograph.

Shortly afterwards, the snow cleared up, and the view turned into this:

Very confused as to how this section of the country had literally no snow, I looked back to the photograph that I had just taken prior to this. I then dis­covered that I was suffering from severe sleep deprivation and/or stupidity, and that it wasn’t actually a blanket of snow that we were flying over, but rather, a blanket of clouds.

This should serve as proof that you should never interrupt me while I’m sleeping, otherwise I will forget the difference between snow and clouds, among doing other incredibly brain-dead things.

After just shy of five hours of travel time across two flights (with a layover), I finally made it to Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia.

Upon landing, I hopped on the rental car shuttle and got a ride to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, my preferred car rental company. As the shuttle was turning into the rental lot, my face literally turned into the heart eyes emoji. I spotted a Ram Rebel.

I booked a mid-size crossover because I plan on touring Washington, D.C., and I imagined that it will be much more convenient to have a smaller vehicle to find street parking more easily, as opposed to having a full-size pickup truck like I usually get, which basically takes up one and a half street parking spots.

But when you see a Ram Rebel on the lot and Enterprise offers it to you, you cannot say no.

So I have a Ram Rebel now.

I already know I am going to regret this decision.

My main takeaways (big-picture ones, that weren’t already covered in previous blog posts):

• Seattle is surprisingly dynamically terraneous. It has a very diverse mixture of water, hills, vegetation, and man-made structures. Most cities have a “theme” to them, but Seattle feels like its theme is just having a little bit of everything.
• Cities near the ocean are usually unbearably humid for me, but for some reason, Seattle didn’t actually really seem that humid.
• It’s nice going places with a travel companion. If I hadn’t brought my assistant Monica along with me, I probably wouldn’t have had the motivation to explore the city as much as I did, and the trip definitely wouldn’t have been as fun.
• Even though I’ve seen all the hate towards law enforcement associated with the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests on the news, it was still ex­treme­ly unsettling to see all the anti-police vandalism in-person in downtown Seattle at the former site of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
• As an extension of my previous point, walking around Capitol Hill made me realize that maybe politics does actually matter, and that the proper political balance of a city might be something that is important to consider when picking a home. It was perplexing to me that, even two months after the reclamation of CHAZ, the city government still hasn’t properly cleaned it up.

I also have a handful of food photos that didn’t fit in other blog posts. Funny enough, I’m going to start off the “food photos” section with a photo of the Gum Wall (does the gum count as food?), which ended up being just as repulsive in-person as I assumed it was from others’ photos.

One of my first meals of Seattle was a chashu rice bowl from Menya Musashi Tsukemen & Ramen in the Pike/Pine corridor. It was actually cooked shock­ing­ly well—the meat had a deep, rich flavor; the egg was just the perfect amount of runny; and the vegetables added a subtle crisp to balance out the texture of the overall dish

The first meal we had together with the “full crew” after everyone flew in was at the Dreamland Bar & Diner in Fremont. When I go to a new restaurant, I like trying their “specialty” dish. One way to determine their signature dish is to see what’s named after the restaurant. I used this strategy for Dream­land and got the Dreamland burger. It wasn’t stellar, but it wasn’t bad, either.

The most expensive dish I had was some baked Alaskan halibut from Anthony’s Pier 66 & Bell Street Diner in Belltown. The fish was nice, but the por­tion size was disappointingly small, and at right around US$50 with tax and tip included, I definitely don’t think it was worth it.

And finally, I feel like this wouldn’t be a proper end-of-travel blog post anymore without a rental car review.

I usually book a pickup truck, but because I was the designated driver for our production crew, I got an SUV instead so we could transport all their gear in safety, as rental pickup trucks generally do not come with tonneau covers. I requested an American SUV, but unfortunately, they didn’t have any avail­able, so I ended up driving away with a 2019 Hyundai Tucson.

The Tucson ended up having the same issue that I tend to have with most other Asian-manufactured vehicles with low-end engines, which is that the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal are completely off-parallel. What I mean by that is that you literally have to floor the accelerator in order to get the vehicle to show any semblance of movement, but even a slight tap on the brakes will make you feel like you’re a teenager learning how to drive with Brembos.

Even with me regularly flooring the accelerator, though, the crossover still managed to average 30 miles per gal­lon throughout my whole trip, which I found to be impressive (I imagine that if I drove my personal pickup truck like I did this SUV, I would prob­a­bly be looking at something close to 14 MPG). I guess the high fuel economy is reasonable and expected, though—this is a relatively small vehicle that seemed to be designed for efficiency.

If you’re a patient individual who drives for utility rather than fun, and you’re looking for an affordable small crossover, then I think the Hyundai Tucson wouldn’t be bad, especially considering how reliable Hyundai’s vehicles have gotten lately. But if you’re looking for something capable, or are already used to the power and torque of a pickup truck … hard pass.

And with that trip, I add two additional states—Washington and Oregon—to my list of visited states, bringing my total up to 23 out of 50.

After our production crew wrapped up filming with our game development crew for a documentary for The Bazaar for the past few days, we spent today, our last day in Seattle, grabbing some final b-roll footage of Seattle. Our director’s site of choice was Gas Works Park, a public park on the site of the former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant.

Once we got everything we needed, we stopped by a Mexican restaurant called Pablo y Pablo in the Northlake neighborhood of Seattle for our final lunch of the trip.

I got chilaquiles, labeled on the menu as the “best hangover cure ever” (no, I did not have a hangover). I’d say it was passable at best.

Setting the record for what I believe is the most I’ve ever driven in a single day, Monica and I set off this morning for Portland, Oregon, a three-hour drive down south from where we’re staying in Seattle. Unfortunately, our Seattle trip isn’t long enough for us to be able to spend more time in Portland, so we were only able to allocate a single day for the cause, and did the reverse three-hour drive straight back to Seattle upon nightfall.

Our former PUBG Coach and Manager, and current Acquisitions Assistant, lives out in the Portland suburbs, so we stopped by to visit him while we were in the Pacific Northwest. We grabbed some dinner together with him at a Korean barbecue restaurant, during which we proceeded to literally somehow start a grease fire at our table. After that gem of an experience, we grabbed some boba tea and went sightseeing around Portland.

Portland was nowhere near as interesting as I thought it would be, but at the very least, I can now check off Oregon in my list of states that I’ve visited.