We woke up and pretty quickly got going on our way to the O’Riley’s auto parts store so we could get a replacement air pump. We’d lost or not gotten the receipt, so we were hoping they could look it up based on the loyalty account we used. When we got there, it took a bit of work to get it all sorted and we had to find the store location where we bought it and all that, but he was able to find it on file and get us a replacement, which so far seems to be working better.
Once that was all sorted, we went to a Denny’s in the next town over since they were having a “buy one get one for $1” deal on their breakfasts, which is great when a breakfast is like $12. While there, I worked on adding compression to the images I upload to my site, since I was initially uploading full size like 8MB images which isn’t good for me or the people viewing the site. Now, they compress down to only a few hundred kilobytes, which helps with data usage and loading speeds.
We got on the road towards Raleigh, North Carolina, and stopped in a small town along the way for gas. I saw a sign that I thought was the cheapest gas I’d seen for a long time, so I pulled into the station. The pumps there were super old, and didn’t have any kind of reader for a card, so I went inside to pay. When I went to pump the gas, it wasn’t working and I wasn’t too sure why, until I realized there were instructions on the side. Turns out you have to lift the flap that the pump handle sits on for it to activate, then you can start pumping. Once I did that, we were able to fill up no problem. It wasn’t until we drove further into town that I realized I was wrong, and the station we filled up at was actually the most expensive station by about 20 cents. Oops.
Not really bothered, we carried on to Raleigh and parked on the street downtown. We walked to the capitol building past the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, which had a massive globe outside, which was pretty cool. The capitol itself was pretty nice, but it was another one where it’s kind of hard to know which side is the front. We went inside first, walking up the really uneven stairs to the second floor to see the chambers and look up into the dome. When we were done, we went back outside, found the front, and got our photo. It wasn’t the best, since you couldn’t see the dome properly from the angle we were at, but it’ll do.
We got back on the road towards West Virginia, which had us cut through the western edge of Virginia along the way. It’s kind of funny crossing the border from North Carolina into Virginia because, at least where we crossed, it goes from being pretty much flat, to super steep incline into the mountains basically right away.
As we drove through the winding roads up into the Appalachian Mountains, I noticed an ominous cloud up ahead. I thought I saw flashes inside of it, so I asked Kyle to check the weather radar. Sure enough, it turned out to be a massive thunderstorm conveniently headed directly towards us, while we headed directly towards it.
A short bit later we stopped at “Travel Plaza” (like a rest area but fancier and I believe privately owned) to use the bathroom. This building was super, super nice, especially for a remote rest area. The ceilings were super tall, it was clean, warm, and there was a giant LED wall on the outside of the building. They also had internet! While we were, the rain started to fall outside, and we knew what was coming, but got back on the road to finish the last hour to the rest area we were going to sleep at for the night.
During that part of the drive, we experienced some of the worst rain I’ve ever experienced while driving. The speed limit is 70mph in that area, but given I couldn’t even see the lanes in front of me, I (along with almost everyone around us) was going about 30-40mph the whole way. Occasionally, lightning would light up the sky and we could see our surroundings, but then we were plunged into rainy darkness once more.
After much longer than the original drive time estimate, we arrived at our rest area and discovered it had internet! While not the best, it was better than nothing. We got there pretty early (relatively speaking, though it was still like 10pm) and so we stayed up for a bit while I worked on some writing on my laptop. We settled in for bed at around 11:30pm to the sound of rain falling outside.