July 6th, 2001

Sorry.. no pictures today... didn't get around to it for some reason.

After our night on the town we end up leaving DC and heading for North Carolina down I-95. Getting out of DC is a pain... the roads there are just evil. Once I find Interstate 66 I'm able to loop around the beltway and get onto 95... which I take south to Richmond.

I guess part of the reason I don't take any pictures of this is because I've seen it all before... but the bigger reason is because it's really not a terribly interesting drive. It's kind of like Kansas again, but with trees in a continual wall on either side of you. Lots of forest.

Richmond is a mess. I hit 3 traffic jams trying to get through the city which delay me about an hour and a half total. Stupid traffic jams... mostly people's inability to merge and some people gawking at a car that was pulled over. Really sad.

Once I get out of Richmond it's pretty much smooth sailing. The traffic gets heavy in Fredericksburg but after that it's pretty much straight highway speed driving.

I roll into Wake Forest around 6pm and give Jon and Diana a ring. This is a cool little town. It's a little bigger than the town of Independence(I lived there for a year when I first moved up to Iowa) and is pretty much a suburb of Raleigh. It's got a large Sprint PCS center on the outskirts of town and a place called Research Triangle Park, the Silicon Valley of the East as people call it, is like 30 minutes away.

Turns out I'm pretty close in town to where they live... they give me directions to their place and I drive past the old Wake Forest University(before it moved) which they converted into a Baptist Seminary.

I find their place with relative ease and pull in. Alie is feeling bad, so I leave her in the car until I make sure this is the right place. Jon answers the door and it's good to see him again. He's cut his hair drastically from when I saw him last. He gives me shit about my hair and I go back outside and fetch Alie. I get her inside and she lays down in the other room and proceeds to sleep very peacefully.

So Jon, Diana and I sit around and catch up on everything. It's been a few years since I've really seen them... the last time was at two of my best friends' wedding (Hi Jason and Tara!). Since then they'd gotten married and moved up here and Jon had been working for Sprint. He then got a job at IBM. They love it here in Wake Forest.

Diana works at a local affiliate TV station doing some programming work and local announcement commercials. Sounds like a pretty cake job, but she's bored with it and wants to do something else and has been cruising the classifieds.

We hang out the rest of the evening... go grab some food at a local pizzeria come back and find Alie still asleep... so we spend the evening sitting around watching TV and talking about this and that. They head to bed early-ish, which is a good thing because I'm exhausted, and I sleep like a log the rest of the night.