New seats

6:00PM CDT | N41°5'40" W96°15'21"

Hi blogophiles, or blogospheroids, or whatever --- Jacob here. I'm now riding in the passenger's seat and my charming, good-natured and helpful companion Mike (about whom I am far too kind to say anything ill, since I'm sure he'd never say anything ill of me) is driving. We switched when we stopped at a gas station just after the last blog post, some desolate station in the middle of nowhere that had cheap gas and, Mike assured me, "lots of porn" as he discovered when he went inside to "get a Coke." That gas station was also the last stop for a hitchhiker we picked up somewhere along the way: a tiny dragonfly that somehow managed to get into the car. Goodbye, dragonfly! I hope you find new friends in your new home.

Nothing particularly eventful happened on this stretch, so I figure I should say a few words about why we're making this road trip in the first place, for the benefit of Mike's friends, who might not know. The short version is: my girlfriend Molly and I have the terrible misfortune to both want PhDs, and that compulsion occasionally demands that you do things like this. The longer story is that we've been dating since shortly after we met, both as undergraduates at Rice University in Houston about 7 years ago. She's two years younger than I, so I graduated two years before she did, and after a year of working as a consultant in Houston I decided to go to graduate school at University of Chicago. Why? I dunno, seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, I went there, and a couple years later Molly graduated and followed me. Well, almost: she went the right direction, but stopped at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (about 120 miles south of Chicago) to become a grad student in bioengineering. That was less than ideal, but a heck of a lot better than nothing, and we dealt.

But then her lab moved to Irvine, California. Her options were to stay at UIUC and do different work that didn't interest her, or go out to Irvine and have a good lab and a more prestigious name on the degree. So she went, and a year later I'm following. Thus, the road trip.

This will probably be the last blog post for today; our goal for day 1 was Lincoln, Nebraska and we're nearly there. Tomorrow: Denver.