Road Trip Rochester Full.wmv
Channel: J.W. Ocker
Date: 25/03/2012

(Re-Uploaded to Fix Audio Synching)

At some point even on the best road trips, the phrase "road trip" becomes a curse word. For me, a few weeks ago, it was somewhere around hour 12 or 13 of a single-day, solo, 18-hour road trip. It was snowing, dark, I had already exhausted my entire itinerary, and I still had miles to go before I slept.

The road trip was to visit sites for my upcoming book, The New York Grimpendium, and basically extended, bed to bed, from Buffalo, NY, to my home in central New England. All told, I saw about a dozen or so sites, from the abandoned Rolling Hills Asylum to the suicide note of George Eastman to the Boyd-Parker Torture Tree. Of course, only about nine of the 17 hours was dedicated to seeing oddities due to the short amount of daylight and the fact that most of the sites were concentrated in the Rochester area. Which is why by hour 12, life was pretty bad for me.

I filmed throughout the 650-mile trip, to both give myself something to do and to ensure that nobody would ever want to go on a road trip with me, I guess. I was somehow able to edit all the footage down to about 15 minutes while still covering all the sites. I realize that's too long to expect you to watch all the way through, but a partial YouTube view by any other name still smells sweet. Or like keyboard crumbs, ozone, and hard drive dust.