Friday Oct 30 – to NJ

On our way to the Nature Printing Society conference in North Carolina.

We got a rental car from Hertz in Dedham this morning. We figured we’d rather pay for a rental than put two thousand miles on either of our old cars, and this gives me a chance to drive a new car (it’s a 2008 Mazda 5 with 45000 miles on it, but has cruise control, remote keyless entry, and a CD player that our cars don’t have) for a week. As I was driving it home I noticed something on the dashboard behind the rearview mirror, a box that said “slide open to use SpeedPass, keep closed to pay tolls by cash.” As soon as I got home I phoned the rental place to ask about it. Sure enough, you can use it for highway tolls, which will be billed to your credit card separately from your rental charge, but there’s an additional $2.50 per day charge to use it. We’ll only have tolls the first and last days of the trip, so it seemed silly to pay extra for all the days in the middle; but the guy at Hertz said, “just take it off the window, put it in the glove compartment, and put your own fast lane box up on the velcro.” So we’re doing that.

Cruising along I-84 ten miles east of Danbury CT around 11 PM I saw something light colored moving rightward straight ahead of me. I slowed way down and almost came to a stop with a deer moseying out of my lane to the breakdown lane next to us. I could have stopped in time if it had stayed in my lane, or if another one had been right behind it, but it was very unnerving and I resolved to back the speed down to 5 miles below the limit.

Another pair of red-orange eyes were on the left of the road just off NJ 15 near Millie’s house, and two more deer crossed the road in front of us two blocks from her house (but I was going less than 30 at that point so they weren’t a hazard).