Day 1: Annapolis

“I hate this road trip already,” sighed Kelly behind the wheel, though I cannot remember why. I must have done one of the many things that have begun to annoy her, such as giggling over the words “Juju Chewbacca”, pensively whispering “sooo desu ne” under my breath, quibbling about the definitions of tangentially mentioned terms, or creatively mishearing things she says. It was day 1 of our long-awaited road trip from Wilmington, Delaware, to San Francisco. Kelly has just finished her second master’s degree at the Winterthur Programme in Delaware, and she is about to begin her history PhD at Stanford – and, perhaps most crucially, she needs to get her car from one coast to the other.

My day began in New York, where I ate breakfast with my friend Meg. I had not seen her ever since graduating and though we have been able to catch up periodically, it was lovely to see her again in the flesh. Some thirty minutes before my train ride to Wilmington, she walked me to Penn Station, where we parted.

Having fresh memories of taking the train from JFK via Jamaica Station to Penn Station, and the subway to get from the World Trade Centre to Penn Station, I was pleasantly surprised by the cleanliness of Moynihan Hall and the train itself. I took the Acela, which traverses the route between Boston and Washington D.C. The journey passed by with a shocking smoothness.

Kelly arrived shortly after I did. The first stop on our road trip was the Bank of America office in Wilmington, where I had decided to put an end to a years-long saga of bureaucratic struggles. Several months ago, I received a cheque from the IRS for almost 400 dollars – a reimbursement for money I paid to the IRS after it wrongly claimed I filed my taxes incorrectly. I did not want the required sum to keep growing, so I paid, but sent an explanatory letter along with the cheque. After three years of correspondence across three continents, a reimbursement finally arrived at my home address in the Czech Republic.

My task for the bank visit, therefore, was to deposit the cheque (which had a concerningly early expiry date) and while I was at it, to have a new debit card sent to Kelly’s California address, as my old one expired back in 2019. I was able to do the former with ease, but the assistant worked on the latter for half an hour before telling me that because I had only changed my address that day, he would not be able to send the card after all. Somehow, I think he ought to have known that.

After eating lunch in Wilmington, Kelly drove us down to Annapolis, which we had both visited before and agreed would be a better place to leave in the morning than Washington. We arrived in the quaint seaside town (and the unlikely capital of Maryland), at around four o’clock, and managed to walk around it multiple times before we had eaten dinner. For the meal, we met up with my former suitemate Kevin over a seafood feast at McGarvey’s. Although I am for all intents and purposes a vegetarian, my one exception are animals who I have good reason to believe do not feel pain. Kelly and I, therefore, shared two whole plates of oysters.

We drove a total of 95 miles.