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A few months ago I matched to UCSF for residency. Like many people with the same opportunity, there was a debate over whether to move our cheap Ikea stuff or simply replace everything in San Francisco. Life is truly a slippery slope - first, I thought, what better opportunity to drive across the country and see the sights? Then, given that we're going to drive 3700 miles, maybe we should take some of our stuff along, and get some bang for our buck. But if we're going to drive a car and move some of our stuff, why not drive a truck and move all of it?
This is how we ended up driving a 14 ft U-HAUL truck across the country in the first weeks of May.
Everybody we proposed this plan to (except for Dunia's sister) thought we were totally crazy. A few minutes after we started driving, we accidentally went down Memorial Drive in Cambridge and realized that the underpasses have a 9 ft clearance (the truck has 11' 0" clearance). This necessitated backing out of a tunnel in the mid-day traffic, which was extraordinarily stressful.
Other than those first few minutes, the remaining couple thousand miles were a breeze. One gets used to having no acceleration, being unable to see behind the truck, and being paranoid about underpass clearance. And the whole thing is built over a Ford Econoline van chassis, which is the basis for just about every shared ride van / shuttle / mini truck on the road, so I get all nostalgic whenever we get in such a vehicle.
Anyway, first big photo stop was Niagara Falls. From bitter experience we knew that the winter of 2014 was a bad one, but didn't realize that much of the area around the Falls were still frozen. In fact, there was still ice going over the falls, so essentially every tourist attraction on the U.S. side was closed.
An opportunity, I guess - can't reach the usual tourist photo spots, so can't get the usual tourist photos. Instead, we started shooting the compacted snow at the base of the falls. Over each winter, the mist from the falls freezes and accumulates. It's weirdly layered - perhaps there are slight changes in weather over the winter months that makes the appearance of the snow different. With the mist swirling about, it looks quite mysterious.
