Tuesday, August 10 - the alarm went off at 4:30 AM. Becky plaintively asked for 5 more minutes of sleep but I was already awake and so I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower. After cleaning up and shoving our toiletries and electronics into their respective bags we bid farewell to the Guinea Pig and the Lizard and set about walking to Porter through the early morning twilight and empty streets. I’ve always been amused at how there’s still a low-level hum of activity even at 2 AM, but at 5 AM everything’s totally asleep in Boston. We could have saved some time and slept in if we’d driven through the lack of traffic to Logan but then we’d have had to paid an arm and a leg for parking and we’d rather not do that, thanks.

The Red Line grinded to a stop in front of us right at 5:40 AM and we headed down to Park, crossed over to Government Center and from there made it to the Airport T stop about a half an hour after we’d left Porter. We got onto the inter-terminal shuttle and checked in without any difficulties at the Delta desk. We didn’t have any bags to check but I was surely pushing the limit on how much I could carry on (for this I have no sympathy for the airlines at all as they should only expect folks to do just that as we are now forced to pay $25 for a service that was previously free) and so getting through security with all of my things was a bit of a to-do, but we made it through alright. Fortunately, though the airport was busy with the early morning rush, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been the Saturday morning I’d gone to Seattle 5 weeks earlier and so I didn’t feel too pressured to gather my various things in a rush.

We got to our gate with about an hour to spare before the boarding at 7:30 and so I set about getting an iced coffee from the nearest Dunkie’s while Becky sat down to read Jorge el Curioso:

While the caffeine slowly coursed its way into my system time passed quickly and we boarded our 8 AM flight to Atlanta. The flight itself was so smooth as to almost be boring and so, before we knew it, it was about 10:40 and we’d landed. From there we exited the plane and looked for our connecting flight to Savannah – the only time for either Becky or for me that either of us can recall flying within the same state, aside from a connecting flight once between LAX and SFO that, really, I feel shouldn’t even count. The first set of screens we saw didn’t have it listed but, on the hunch that it was probably in the “puddlejumper” section of the airport – whereas we had deplaned into one of the main terminals – I decided to look for a more centrally-located set of screens and, sure enough, it showed up in a terminal several stops on the tramway from where we were:

When we arrived in that terminal I noted the departing gate and suspected it was at the ass-end of the entire airport. Oh, how right I was. We found it at the very end of the hallway:

That blue tarp-thing was what passed for our jetway. Conveniently located near the parking lot for the baggage carts. It took us a solid 15 minutes to get there from where our flight from Boston had put in. There is such a thing as an airport that is too big and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is just that. Remember that: it’s a fun fact that comes back to visit us again on the way back. Apparently it’s now officially the world’s busiest airport, having served nearly one million flights in 2009. That’s a number so ridiculous I don’t even know how to approach it.

We got some decent Sbarro for lunch in our time waiting for the smaller flight to Savannah to begin boarding a bit after noon. We hopped onto that plane and it got up and down on its 40-minute long course in very little time, giving us just a bit of shakes on its way down. This put us into Savannah a bit on the early side and so we had several minutes to collect ourselves and look around. I spotted this ad from a distance:

I thought it was some ad for a plastic surgeon advertising the skills of that Mark Ruffalo-looking surgeon to make all the ladies in the Lowcountry feel all pretty, but then I read the print at the top. Do yourself a favor and NEVER EVER Google “pelvic prolapse” if you desire to continue sleeping at night. That this man apparently has to advertise his business – in the airport – just sets off a string of questions that digs deeper and deeper into some sort of urogynecological hell.

The rest of the Savannah Airport – actually now re-dubbed the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport since I was last there – is quite nice these days, though. They’ve expanded it to at least twice the size I remember it as being as they’re pushing to make it a regional airport, and the renovation makes it look nice and bright inside, too. The wide hallways and lack of crushing throngs of humanity remind me of what airlines must have envisioned air travel to optimally be like in the 50s before the whole industry started its slow and steady circling down the shitter that continues to this day. So I have hopes for Savannah’s airport, I suppose.

We met with my dad just outside security and, after a bit of trouble getting us back to I-95 North, we got going over to Hilton Head, arriving at our rental house in Palmetto Dunes plantation around 2:30.

A word on “plantation” here. Hilton Head’s history of Western colonization is a relatively long one, starting with discovery by the Spanish in 1521 and continuing with its incorporation by one William Hilton in 1663, hence the name. For most of its life, though, it was plantation land held by Southern land-owners. The majority of the island – probably around 80-85% of the usable dry land – was separated out into only a small handful of these plantations, the largest of which were Sea Pines, occupying the entirety of the southern end of the island, and Hilton Head Plantation, taking up much of the northern end. In the middle were some smaller ones, among which Palmetto Dunes is on the larger end (though still barely a third the size of the dominant two). After the Civil War the parcels of land between the cracks in the plantations and in the unused land on the northern end of the island were settled by freed slaves who remained in the Lowcountry and eventually formed the Gullah people, who continued farming, agriculture and, later, landscaping. While many do still live on Hilton Head today, increasingly the work on the island is being performed by Central American migrant workers instead.

Hilton Head remained an under-developed swatch of sandy, humid land for nearly a century after the Civil War, finally coming under the radar of developers after it became a favorite weekend leave spot for servicemen stationed at nearby Parris Island in the 1950s, among whom was my maternal grandfather who was serving as a naval Captain Doctor during the Korean War. A slow property development process began, kicked into high gear in the late 1960s by one Charles Fraser, who sought to put Hilton Head on the holiday getaway map by attracting golfers, finally wooing the PGA to hold the Heritage Golf Tournament there in 1969. One such amateur golfer drawn to the island as a vacation spot for his family was Dr. Robert K. Fankhauser, my maternal grandfather. After being stationed there nearly 2 decades previously he started returning regularly with his wife and family for vacations in the 70s. It became a sort of family tradition to go down there for Thanksgiving, as the weather in late November is not quite as unforgivingly hot and humid as it is in the summer. As I was born in 1982 I have no memory of before when we went to Hilton Head for Thanksgiving; to me, as a child, it always just was.

The vast majority of those early years throughout the 80s are filled with memories of a row-house in the southern end of Palmetto Dunes. Why my family chose there of all the plantations is beyond me, but there we stayed, in the same house almost every time. There was a balcony on the second floor opening out to the living room off of which my sister and I used to waste hours tossing off army men with flimsy plastic parachutes and, when they broke, hand-made parachutes constructed out of tissues and Scotch tape added ad libitum that invariably didn’t work as well. It was with a bit of nostalgic glee, then, that I saw this house had a similar balcony:

Unfortunately, though, I didn’t have the foresight to bring any paratroopers with me.

On the plus side, the place did have a pool out back:

Sometime in the early 90s my maternal grandmother decided she’d had about enough of Palmetto Dunes’ sky-high condo fees (due to the abundance of rental houses such as the one we were in, of course) and elected to purchase her own place up the road in Hilton Head Plantation, where properties were only rented out on a minimum-12-month contract basis instead of weekly. And so my memories of Hilton Head as a pre-teen and an early teenager are of that place up until her death in 1997. My uncle, who lived on the island, advised at that time that we sell her house, which my mother’s family did, getting a rather substantial profit from it in the process. And so my family’s permanent presence in Hilton Head came to an end. We went there a couple more times: once in 2001, I recall, as they were finishing the Cross-Island Parkway, one of the final pieces of Hilton Head’s development; and once in 2005 at which time we stayed in a time-share in a different location than where we’d normally stayed. This visit, in 2010, would be the first (official) one I’d have made since meeting Becky, and the first time my maternal extended family had gotten together down there in nearly a decade.

We got to our room and relaxed for a while to take in the humid atmosphere and get the lay of the ridiculously huge house. It was definitely bordering on McMansion in its size: probably 5,000 square feet or so, maybe more. There would be 12 of us staying there at a time until Thursday – everyone except my Uncle Bill, the same one who had lived on the island for some time – and so we were making use of it. Becky and I got one of the numerous bedrooms upstairs. After unloading our stuff we changed into lighter clothing and elected to take a pair of the rental bikes that came with the house out for a bit to get the lay of the land and to collect a couple of pennies for Becky at the Disney Resort in Shelter Cove just across the highway not 2 miles from our place. After getting on the house’s wireless to confirm directions and slathering ourselves with sunblock we braved the mid-day sun for the short ride on the simple, mixte-frame, fixed-gear bikes barely capable of going 10 mph.

We sweated it out as Becky got her biking legs back for the first time since she was a teenager and made it out to the location of the penny machine near the Disney Resort’s gym:

The Disney Resort isn’t as fabulous as it sounds. I mean, it’s nice for families who want to be on Hilton Head and have a “Disney experience” – whatever that means – I’m sure, but they got there a bit late to the game in terms of Hilton Head’s development and so only secured a swatch of land on the cove side of the island facing inland through a nearly endless landscape of salty marshland:

Not exactly a beach, if that’s what visitors were expecting, but I suppose if you like wildlife that lives in marshes then it would be great.

As for us, we tarried in the general store next door to the gym for a while so as to enjoy their luxurious air conditioning and to get me a new pair of sunglasses before hitting the road back to Palmetto Dunes. We’d left our bikes unlocked since everyone was leaving their bikes unlocked and, sure enough, they were there when we went back to get them. I suppose there’s not much place to go with them, for one, and they were fantastically cheap to boot, so they weren’t exactly hot ticket items. On our way back out of Shelter Cove we went to pay a friend a visit:

You may recall that Becky first met King Neptune on our brief foray onto Hilton Head during our Southeastern Road Trip this past May:

2 1/2 months later, it was my turn to be seated with him:

I don’t know what it was like for Becky in May, but I will note that the ground on which I was sitting was roughly 8000 degrees. For what it’s worth.

While I was engaged in broiling my own ass, Becky was busy talking with the local wildlife:

They must not have been very good conversationalists, though, as Becky said they came off as kind of wooden.

And so we headed back across the highway and to Palmetto Dunes. We stopped at the general store there before turning down the road back to the house to pick up Becky some cough drops to fend off symptoms of her oncoming cold. While there I noted that they sold beer and wine, what with it being not Massachusetts, and so we elected to pick up Becky some Smirnoff Ice as I got a six of Fat Tire’s summer offering – by far the best thing the small corner store had in-stock. Becky carefully balanced the twelve bottles in her bike’s basket and carried them back to the house without incident. Not bad for someone who hasn’t ridden in nearly two decades.

When we returned, soaked in sweat from being outside only that little bit, we met with much of the rest of my family, many of whom were out when we had arrived. After cleaning up I talked for a good while with a couple of my uncles and my mother’s cousin Dave (whom I’d never met until then) as my “cousin” (that is, my Uncle Mike’s son from a previous marriage before my Aunt Patty) Sean – all around a good guy and not at all like someone who’s lived in Southern California his whole life – made us some flank steak on the grill out back near the pool as my mother made some peach cobbler for desert. I stuffed myself with as much of this as I could manage but Becky had filled herself up with cheese and crackers laid out ahead of time and, as she hit the wall after having been up since 4:30 AM, retired up to bed to nap for a while and rest her stomach. My family ate a bit on the late side of things and then most folks stayed up for a while longer to talk and discuss memories of my Aunt Patty for the memorial service the next day:

L-R: Uncle Mike, Dad, Uncle Bill, Uncle Jim, Mom’s Cousin Dave

After the sun had gone down Becky returned downstairs to help me try out the hot tub for a bit:

It was still insultingly hot and humid out, though, and so we quickly thought better of it and instead retreated to our air conditioned room to hit the sack early and get a good, solid rest before our first of two full days there the next day.

Wednesday, August 11 - after a good, long night’s sleep we finally stirred out of bed around 8. We were still feeling stuffed from the previous night and so we forewent breakfast and instead decided to head out on bike out to get some more flattened pennies and maybe see some more wildlife along the way. Our first stop was to be a place called Black Market Minerals in Coligny Plaza, about a 5 1/2-mile ride down the island from our house:

We set out as early as we could before the sun got too high in the sky. As we were going along in the oft-shaded bike path we didn’t feel too terribly over-exerted at all. When we made our first stop at a small, new-to-me park at the corner of the Hilton Parkway and Pope Ave, though, we started just pouring out buckets of sweat. Clearly the key is to keep moving.

The sweat-inducing humidity covered everything not adjusted to the ambient temperature. I spotted a green anole sunning itself on a tree branch and, before I could line up a shot, my camera’s lens was already fogging up:

Clearly she’s in some sort of lizard soap opera there.

The park was one dedicated to the aforementioned Charles Fraser after his death. It featured a cast statue re-creating what is apparently a famous photograph of him walking along a golf course next to an aligator:

Becky decided to see where he was walking. She found he was walking toward God:

Or perhaps it was just the gator who was walking toward God and Charles was just following him. Who knows? As for me, I knew what I had to do:

As you can see, I am wearing my gator wrasslin’ shirt and everything:

While I tried (and failed) to take a better picture of the anole after wiping off my camera lens a dozen times with the tiny swatch of fabric on my shirt that wasn’t already soaked in sweat, Becky found a stone water compass sculpture and decided to see which way we should go:

It said we should continue on down the road. And so we did. In a short while we came upon some rather promising and/or foreboding signs:

No alimente los lagartos? That must mean there are los lagartos somewhere! And so every time we crossed over such a small bridge spanning a bit of swampy water, we stopped to search for gators. In one I spotted something emerging from the water and whipped out my camera:

Aww, it was just a boring ol’ turtle. As he swam toward us Becky and I both caught the same thing out of the corner of our eyes: a rather enormous osprey with something (Becky guessed a pigeon, I guessed a mole or vole) in its talons just across the way on the banks of the small pond. It had seen us a second before we saw it and so it took off into the air – passing not 20 feet away from Becky – before we could aim our cameras. That was easily the closest I’ve ever been to a wild raptor, and he was a big one, too, with what was easily a 5-foot wingspan, maybe even 6.

We continued on and reached Coligny Plaza, riding around a bit before finally locating Black Market Minerals. Unfortunately the sign on the door said it opened at 10 and it was then only about 9:20. So, we elected to continue on to our next penny-destination, the Harbor Town Lighthouse. We were a bit flummoxed, though, when our progress was halted by a gate to Sea Pines about halfway in:

It was encrusted in all sorts of signs about having proper access and how cars must pay $5 but I figured, hey, it we just tell the guard we’re headed to the lighthouse, he’ll probably just send us through or, at worst, tell us which way to go if we aren’t allowed to get through that way. And so I told him we’d like to bike to the lighthouse. To which he flatly replied we couldn’t. I was a bit taken back as I immediately sensed BS – why would they let cars through but not bikes? – but didn’t press further as we were hot, sweaty, and beginning to get in a foul mood. Later, when we returned and told our story to everyone else, they said it smacked of just that: BS. We’d later find that, had we gone to the main gate of Sea Pines (as if continuing straight from the Hilton Parkway instead of turning left on Pope Ave as we had) instead of the south gate, we would have been able to go through unadulterated. So nuts to you, grumpy gate man. We’d drive there in an air-conditioned car the next day instead. And you’re a big meanie.

We decided the best thing to do right then was to just head back to Coligny, though. Along the way we spotted a fountain nearby and Becky decided to frolic a bit to cool off:

Seriously, I cannot stress how hot and humid it was at all times.

When we got back to the plaza and parked our bikes it was just a couple of minutes before 10 and Black Market Minerals had opened for business for the day. The place was just cram-packed with all sorts of cheap junk! For example, they had Magickal Sodium Ion Crystals!

The power stone is supposed to heal by emitting sodium ions, it says. If this were true, it would mean it was also releasing chlorine gas, so we decided not to play with it for too long. Toward the back near the penny machine I found a fortune telling… pirate?

I asked Zultan the Fortune-Telling Pirate if I could be Big. He just said “ARRRR!” Maybe he’s heard that one before.

Becky got her pennies as well as a small handful of fossils and a wooden tiki-mug, all of which cost less than $20 combined. From there we reluctantly left the luxurious air conditioning and went back out to brave the sticky air. We were getting quite hungry but didn’t feel like breakfast food yet. We took a short walk around the plaza but found that all the restaurants didn’t start serving lunch until 11. Though, for what it’s worth, when we saw a faux-Irish pub with its door opened a hostess informed us we could get drinks until the kitchen opened. Deciding that 10:30 AM and after we’d already sweated out several gallons wasn’t the best time to tie a few on, we elected to return to the bikes and head on in the general direction of from whence we came.

As we made it back closer to Palmetto Dunes and it was still not quite 11 I informed Becky that there was a mall just up the road from Shelter Cove that I’d gone to many times and I recalled that it had a food court and several out-lying restaurants. She agreed that it was our best bet and so we pressed on past the turnoff back to our place and headed to the wooden bridge that went underneath the highway to the other side, where the mall was. This bridge was right near a culvert that separated out the sea water from the “fresh” water stream that runs down the center of the island (the tap water there is so salty as to be practically brackish and so one can’t really drink it, so “fresh” water’s a bit of a misnomer). It seemed to be a tiny little haven for wildlife. On our way across that time I spotted a green heron trying to swallow a sizable minnow:

Becky scurried over the fence with my camera to get a closer shot of him:

I noticed a pair of great white egrets nearby watching on to snatch up the fish in case he dropped it:

On the other side of the fence, though, Becky spotted more wildlife, this time a rather gigantic golden silk orb weaver spider:

I was having nothing to do with her but Becky put her hand up next to her for a size comparison:

You might be able to see another, smaller spider to the left. Becky thinks that must be the male, waiting patiently to mate and then get eaten. Because that’s how spiders roll.

We continued going, took a brief look across the outside of the mall to see what was there, and finally settled in on the out-lying Fuddrucker’s for lunch:

We were the first ones there that day but a few other folks came in shortly after us. Becky got a buffalo chicken sandwich and I got a burger with pepperjack, bacon and BBQ sauce along with some onion rings that was all most definitely crazy delicious. I struggled to finish it all but it was so worth it. 15 miles of biking in the baking sun says we earned it.

As we sauntered our bikes back toward the house we decided to take a brief diversion to the beach since we had yet to go and the closest access point was only a block away from our place:

I stopped at the entry point there to remove my shoes since the pair of shoes I wore to the Cape weeks earlier still has trace pieces of sand that dislodge on a daily basis and get between my toes. So I scampered across the searing hot sand as best I could while carrying a half-pound of cow on my stomach. Not my best moment.

The beach itself was nothing if not idyllic:

Because Hilton Head is so flat the tide lines are stupidly enormous. At high tide the water reaches all the way to where that blue umbrella is on the left. At low tide it retracts another 50 or 60 yards from where it was then, leaving a series of tide-pools in its wake. The only larger beach I’ve seen was at the Great Salt Lake, and this one was far more hospitable.

Becky flirted with the water a bit but was afraid to go in much further for fear of getting bitten/stung by any sea life that she figured must be as proportionately abundant in the warm, almost bath-like waters along the coast there as the plant and animal life so clearly was on land. I assured her that stingrays were out of season and that if there was one jellyfish in the water we’d see a thousand washed up on shore (if you’ve never witnessed this before you’re missing out on one of nature’s weirdest sights) but she still said she’d prefer to come back later. She did find a sand-50 cent piece, though:

We skittered back across the hot sand and walked our bikes back to the house, whereupon I washed my legs off with the hose outside, jumped in the shower, and then immediately laid down for a nice nap. Long morning for sure.

I woke up around 3, went downstairs to iron my shirt and pants, changed and got myself decent-looking and, around an hour later, we all convened to carpool down to the Lutheran church just a short way down the Hilton Parkway from Palmetto Dunes for my Aunt Patty’s memorial service:

Pretty much all the churches on the island look like that. I don’t know if it’s due to a local ordinance (perhaps nothing’s allowed to be taller than the lighthouse?) or if it’s just because taller buildings would require more of a foundation that would slowly sink into the sandy soil, but the cityscape of Hilton Head is remarkably flat either way.

My mother had chosen this church for the memorial service because it was where my grandmother had elected to have her ashes interred and her marker placed for her final resting place:

As we all came out the bugs started to get to Becky something fierce, but, as we stood on the other side closer to the sun they seemed to abate and the service got under way as the pastor said a few brief words:

After that my sister played “Amazing Grace” on her saxophone:

And a few folks read select Bible passages chosen for the occasion:

After that most everyone spoke freely, sharing a few stories of remembrance of Patty:

Some were sad, many were happy, some were funny, and in the end I think we all felt like we’d had a good celebration of sharing what she had meant to us all. Certainly she meant a lot to me and to Becky as well in the all-too-brief time she got to know her.

From there we all gathered back into our cars and headed up the island to a seafood restaurant called Hudson’s that’s a favorite of my family’s. I wonder if that’s it:

Oh, okay, that is it.

Outside Becky found a positively bitchin’ dune buggy that was certainly not road legal, at least not by Massachusetts standards:

For example, doors are generally required here. Must be fun to ride, though. Ah, rednecks.

Inside the restaurant all thirteen of us got seated at a large table:

Becky was enamored by the pretty-pretty mermaid logo they had:

…not to mention the poster illustrating the wide array of species of shrimp, prawns, crayfish and crawdads found in the North Atlantic and Gulf:

The food was quite good. They had some great hush-puppies and I ordered some conch fritters as a communal appetizer. They were spicy little puffs of cornbread and conch meat that were deep-fried and they were delicious. Check one more animal off the list that we’ve eaten. I ordered the best beer I could find on their menu (not difficult to discern since they seemed to believe Sam Adams to be a microbrewery) and got a Stone Arrogant Bastard ale. Which they brought out in a 22 oz bomber. Ah, now things were looking up! It went quite well with my stuffed haddock, but then, most anything’ll go well with 22 ounces of strong ale.

After a nice, long dinner we bade the pretty-pretty mermaid farewell:

Upon getting home we waited for everyone else to re-convene since Sean’s wife Dawn wanted to take pictures, but she didn’t return for some time after us. We finally gave up and changed into swimwear just as they came back. So we stood in the back of those particular pictures. Before we did that, though, Dave returned triumphantly with two cooler cases full of frozen steaks he’d had shipped to him there that arrived just in time to be defrosted for dinner the next night. They were packed in dry ice for the journey. This, of course, gave Becky and me a chance to do an experiment. FOR SCIENCE!

And with that we changed into our swim wear and walked on to the beach. We were losing daylight quickly and wanted to get to there as the stars came out at high tide. We played in the water for a while and were interrupted by a college-aged girl shouting “excuse me!” from the beach. I trudged out toward her and asked what was wrong, wondering if she was some sort of life guard and we’d misinterpreted the rules about when one could be on the beach. She wasn’t, but that didn’t stop her from explaining that we shouldn’t be swimming because that’s when the “sharks come out.” The sharks, huh? Now, given I’ve only been going to Hilton Head my entire life, but I’ve never heard of a shark attack there. Some Googling reveals that earlier this year a girl was attacked by a shark in South Carolina near – not on – Hilton Head and that the last documented shark attack on the island was in 1994. But thanks for putting a damper on our evening, really.

It’s what we people of the Internets call being a “concern troll,” which is to say one has a message and desires to spew it out to whomever will listen, regardless of the facts. People who have no capacity to fathom that the message might be lost in the delivery. For example, swimming in the ocean after dark? Not the safest thing to do. Dragging people out of the water to warn them of sharks because someone nearby was attacked by one in the Clinton administration? Not the best way to go about it.

Ugh. Still, it was getting dark and Becky didn’t know the shoreline very well so I was getting afraid she might go out too far and called her in after a while. We spent some time building an invisible castle since it was too dark to see and then laid back up on the dry sand to try to watch some of the Perseids meteor shower. The peak was the next day but since we could see so well from the beach we decided to give it a try that night as we saw more stars than we ever could in Boston. We each saw one meteor apiece quite clearly and, after about a half-hour, decided it was best to call it a night.

After we cleaned up a bit we went to hit the sack. I noticed we had a friend in the closet, though:

Ah yes, the American cockroach, or, as they’re called in the South when living in the wild and not subsisting on garbage, the “palmetto bug.” Sounds so much less-horrid, doesn’t it? Palmetto bugs are what we think of when we think of cockroaches and are mostly what we see on TV and in movies. For us folks who live up North, though, they aren’t what one would see hanging around dumpsters or in Allston. Those suckers are their smaller cousins, the German cockroach, who can fit into tinier cracks and so are better at avoiding the cold winter weather, extending their range further north. As for this big boy, we gathered him up into a toilet paper tube and let him scuttle out the window, hoping none of his friends had also made their way into our bedroom. We were too exhausted to do much of a search for them, anyway.

And so with that we ended our most important day in South Carolina. We’d have the next day to ourselves to explore the island some more before heading back on Friday.

Thursday, August 12 - after a big, full day the previous day we elected to sleep in just for a bit and stirred out of bed around 8:15 and said goodbye to my sister, who was leaving to head back home that day. From there we elected to head out on our bikes to the Hilton Head Diner across the highway and down the road a bit from Palmetto Dunes to get a full breakfast, since the previous day when we’d skipped breakfast we were starving by, like, 10:30. After a bit of trouble related to the bike path on the north side of the Hilton Parkway diverging from the road and not taking us where we wanted, we finally made it there and got seated to breakfast:

I had a pretty good omelet and some grits. The coffee kind of sucked, but then, in high school I was raised on Jersey diners, so I suppose I’m spoiled in that regard. After cooling off for a while and finishing eating we elected to go mini-golfing straight away. Now, the diner was next to the pirate-themed golfing place, but I informed Becky that it was a gambit, as we’d be perpetually waiting for families with 9 little kids at every single hole and we’d get quickly frustrated. I suggested we instead walk down a short distance to the other, non-pirate-themed mini-golf place a couple blocks away.

Or… at least I thought it was a couple blocks away. We walked for the better part of a mile in the broiling sun before finally making it there. It seems that my idea of perspective on the island as traveled in my parents’ cars as a child are a bit skewed. Who knew?

The good news is, when we made it there it was practically empty and so we could play at our own, brisk pace, just as I’d intended. The bad news was, though, that instead of being pirate-themed, the mini-golf course had become, sometime since my last visit, Jesus-themed:

We tried to pray to Golf Jesus to help us out. It didn’t work:

Equally unfortunately, the Jesus-theme as limited to the signs. If there were, say, an animatronic Jesus blessing lepers around which one had to putt, or sand traps with Jesus meditating in them or water hazards with him walking on them and a bobbing Saint Peter popping out every now and then to spit back one’s ball if one was lucky – that is, repentant – enough, well, then that would be worth our $8.50. As it stood, the signs did little to help us. They did attract lizards, though!

As you can see, he had a chewy caterpillar in his mouth, too! Symbolizing the rebirth of the spirit and the circle of life or… whatever. Becky also spotted a brain-meltingly cute little baby anole along one hole, as well:

He was there to offer us a lower price on our car insurance, I think.

We wound up being able to go through all 18 holes while only having to play around one stupefyingly slow group of retirees putting away at a hole and then spending 10 minutes discussing it each time, so all in all, even though we were drenched in sweat, it left us with a smile:

From there we walked back to where we’d parked our bikes at the diner. I’d brought a couple of bottles with us of water I’d left in the freezer to turn completely to ice. When we returned they were totally melted, even tepid. And it wasn’t yet 11 in the morning. Did I mention it was hot there? It was hot.

After biking back to the house we cleaned up a bit and I changed into a fresh shirt, since the one I had been wearing was so soaked in sweat I no longer felt clean wearing it. I took the opportunity to throw everything we’d worn thus far into the house’s washer. Good thing, since I was down to my final shirt then and I believe that airlines like it when one is fully clothed when traveling these days.

My dad had offered Becky and me the previous day to borrow his Prius for a while to go see some sights that were a bit farther out on the island than we had ventured on bikes and we decided to take him up on it then. And so we departed again – this time in the comfort of an air conditioned car – down to Harbor Town to see that lighthouse and get those pennies we were denied. We went through the main gate and had to pay $5 to drive there, of course, but in the process I noticed that the main gate lacked the barrier preventing bike traffic that the south gate we’d seen yesterday had. The 8-mile journey in the blistering sun was hardly worth a $5 savings by that point, though, and so we meandered down Sea Pines’ roads out to Harbor Town and found ourselves a parking space, walking around a bit to try to find the deceptively-difficult-to-see lighthouse:

See? It’s hidden. Not very useful thing for a lighthouse to do, if you ask me.

Along the way there we spotted a Harbor Town branch of the Crazy Crab:

Ever return to your home town and note how much things have changed and then see some hole-in-the-wall place that was there when you were a child and proclaim, “I can’t believe that’s still here!” For me in Hilton Head it’s the Crazy Crab, a small seafood restaurant on the north end of the island we went to when I was a small child but stopped going to maybe 16 or 17 years ago as Hudson’s was better quality and my parents preferred it when my little sister and I became old enough to behave ourselves at restaurants. Apparently in the intervening time it has not only survived but flourished. Who knew?

From there it was a brief walk out to the now-visible lighthouse:

We paid our $3 admission and slowly climbed up the stuffy staircase, stopping along the way to collect flattened pennies:

10 feet!

34 feet!

50 feet!

Hooray! The top of the lighthouse!

And that was about it, maybe all of 70 feet up. But, as I’ve said before, Hilton Head is remarkably flat and there are precious few buildings above 3 stories, and so the view from even that height was pretty good. This is saying nothing about the fantastic cooling breeze up there, too:

Becky tried to pick out the interpretation of the naval flags lining the pier but she suspected they were just gibberish put there to look pretty. A shame, really.

Having secured our bounty of flattened pennies, we headed down the lighthouse stairs and back to the car to drive up near Hudson’s where Becky had spotted an old cemetery the previous evening. It apparently dated back to the Revolutionary War:

We parked in a nearby plaza and walked down a short road near an embankment full of scuttling fiddler crabs. I couldn’t snap any pictures as good as the ones I took on the Cape, though, so you’ll just have to trust me that they were there. We visually searched a swamp near the road for any signs of gators but didn’t see any. When we arrived at the cemetery, though, we found something else:

A multitude of daddy longlegs! Or “harvestmen” if you want to be all weird about it. Up North they’re usually found roaming grass or loose gravel all alone, but apparently in the South they like to clump together:

I’d heard about it before but never seen it in person until then. Neat! As we walked on into the cemetery we also saw a male anole in his brown phase clinging to a large gravestone. As he got to the top he told us that he was the Lizard and we were in his territory:

The wildlife there seemed to definitely be a bit on the aggressive side. Becky spotted a wasp’s nest under a palm frond and I discovered that the ground was filthy with fire ants, making sitting down a bad idea. Heck, they even had hungry zombie trees:

As the mid-day sun shone through the Spanish moss-encrusted trees, it sure was pretty, though:

Apparently nearby Savannah is a hotbed for the ghost/paranormal activity community, so I’m sure the cemetery was hainted. We did see one rather strange grave:

Now that’s all wrong. He’s a Captain, not a doctor.

On our way back to the car we saw a couple of crows carousing up in the trees:

Gaimanesque.

It was high time we got lunch. The previous day we had the choice between Fuddrucker’s and a pizza shop called Giuseppe’s and so this time we went with the pizza:

We got a good booth during a lull in business as we arrived around 2. Good, as by the time we left it had (rather inexplicably) gotten much more crowded. We got some cheesy garlic bread and a pepperoni pizza with jalapenos on my half. As we waited for our food Becky took our her haul of flattened pennies:

Not bad for 2 1/2 days. The food was pretty good, all things considered, and after we finished we drove on back, stopping in briefly at the Palmetto Dunes general store for some more cough drops for Becky and some ice cream. Because I wanted ice cream. So there.

We relaxed for a while back at the house, took care of our laundry, and napped for a while to recover our strength. Around 4:30 we rustled ourselves back up and out to the beach once more, this time at low tide as the sand stretched the length of a football field from the dunes to the water. Unfortunately, the salt water was irritating my sensitive Yankee skin and so I couldn’t swim for long. No matter, as it gave me more time to work on the masterpiece of a drip castle I constructed in the tide pools:

I probably could have kept on going building it for another hour but we were getting baked out in the sun and needed to seek shelter. So, I allowed Becky to stomp on the castle to return it to the crabs for building material and we headed back to the house, hosed off, and briefly dipped in the pool as we’d not really used it. As it had been exposed to the fierce Carolina sun all summer already, though, the water read as a piping 91 degrees: not exactly refreshing if one is looking to cool off. And so we got out after a short swim, showered off, and relaxed in our cool room reading for a while before heading downstairs for dinner. I tinkered away at my RSS reader and sipped on a beer as Sean cooked the steaks Dave had ordered in the previous day. Along with some twice-baked potatoes they offered far more food than the 12 of us remaining could possibly eat and so, by the end of the evening, we were all stuffed.

At 10:00 I resolved to head back upstairs and found Comedy Central on the local cable so as to watch the new Futurama episode. I’m glad I did as it was another classic, taking on Creationism and Intelligent Design. I hope they can keep up the good work for the rest of the season.

We would need to get up relatively early (later than we would were we going to work, but earlier than one likes to get up when on vacation nonetheless) the next morning and so, when Futurama was over, we decided to turn off the light to try to get a solid night’s sleep before our travel day. It turns out we were going to need it.

Friday, August 13 - we groggily dragged ourselves out of bed at 6:30. I had to remind myself that, had we been at home and going to work, we would have been up for a half-hour already by that point. We gathered all of our things together and brought them downstairs to get ready to go. We had a light breakfast of some fruit salad my mom had made and some Krispy Kreme doughnuts my sister had bought before saying goodbye to everyone and heading out with Uncle Mike and Nancy, who had offered to drive us to the Savannah Airport.

When we got there and got our boarding passes around 8:30 we noticed that our flight had been delayed. It was supposed to take off a couple minutes before 10, but now it was scheduled for 10:47. This was a bit troubling but not altogether super-alarming as we had a decent layover in Atlanta and, if it left then, we could still make our connecting flight. So, we thanked Mike and Nancy and said goodbye to them as we headed through security and to the gate to wait for developments.

The skies were crystal-clear in Savannah, which begged the question as to what the reason for the delay was in Atlanta, only 200 miles away, where the commuter jet was headed from and returning to on a regular route. Suspecting there might be some sort of mechanical problem or other shenanigans that would interminably delay the flight, I hooked up to the airport’s wireless to figure out what the situation was in terms of getting back to Boston. It seemed like our best option was to continue to Atlanta even if we missed our connecting flight to Boston at noon and just try to catch the next one at 1:30. Shortly after I figured this out they announced the flight had been delayed another hour, now to 11:47, meaning we’d absolutely miss the noon flight to Boston. This triggered most everyone waiting to form a giant, slow-moving line to the gate counter. While I waited I had Becky hand me my computer so I could look up Delta’s customer service number. I got hold of a helpful gentleman without much wait who was able to get us confirmed seats on that 1:30 flight and elected to change our itinerary to the next flight from Savannah to Atlanta, at 11:35. I told him to go ahead with both since I know from experience that if a flight is delayed a couple of times they would prefer to keep delaying it than to try to reschedule a different flight, so I figured the 11:35 flight was a safer bet than the one we were scheduled to be on. We didn’t have any checked bags so it didn’t much matter either way.

I did all of this over the phone and so when I got up to the counter all I had to do was instruct the woman there to print out new boarding passes for us and we were all set. She gave us some food vouchers to go with them for our trouble. It sucks to be delayed, but all in all it was a pretty simple procedure to get rescheduled. We sat down at our new gate to wait for the plane to board:

As it so happens, our old flight got off first anyway, around 11:30. So changing planes was a gamble, but I stand by my decision since I felt it was the safer option overall. Unfortunately, due to unrelated reasons the new plane was delayed by about 20 minutes. It seems like it had not only FOUR people requiring wheelchairs on the flight, but was also full of servicemen returning from Iraq. Their wives and families were allowed into the terminal to greet them and as each came out there was a small procession and a round of applause. All of which is perfectly proper and justified, of course, and I was more than happy to wait for them, as many hadn’t seen their families in years. A striking percentage were meeting their young children in person for the first time.

All of this meant that our 11:35 flight didn’t get into the air until well after noon. We were seated way toward the back and we could feel the engines whine as the pilot tried to make up the scarce few minutes he could in the air, for which we were quite grateful, albeit slightly deafened.

We hit the ground in Atlanta at about 12:50. “Okay,” I thought, “we won’t have time for lunch in the airport but we’ll make the flight, no worries.”

By the time we taxied to the jetway it was 1:00. “Okay,” I thought, “it should be boarding by the time we get off and we might have to hustle a bit but we should make it, no troubles.”

Did I mention we were in the back of the plane? Like, the way, way back? We waited some 15 minutes as folks slowly crept off the plane. It was agonizing. By the time we hit the airport we just had to wish our flight to Boston was also delayed. It wasn’t, and it was already well into boarding. What followed was the second time in two years that Becky and I have had to make an all-out sprint between gates at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. We were deplaned into Terminal A, and, of course, we had to get to Terminal B for our flight. We ran until our sides hurt and pressed through throngs of crowds. The tram arrived just in time for us to catch it, saving us crucial seconds. We skittered up the escalator, sprinted once more to our gate and arrived, heaving deeply with the coppery taste of blood in our throats, just as final boarding was ending. We shoved our connection passes at the gate attendant and she printed us out our seats. Not 3 minutes after we entered the jetway they closed the gate door. We just ever-so-barely made it.

We actually got really good seats, in the first row of coach just behind first class, right near the exit door and close to the lavatory, with plenty of leg-room. Though we appreciated the comfort on our longer of the two flights, the easy access to the exit on our other flight would have saved us the sprint through the airport. Oh well. We were just glad we’d made it, by however a narrow a margin.

The flight was in the air before our heart rates had returned to normal. Unfortunately, I’d had to gate-check my small rolling suitcase, so I wouldn’t see it until we landed in Boston, but that hardly mattered at that time. When the flight attendant came around with the cart I asked hesitantly if I could use our vouchers on the plane. He said “yeah…” as if I was asking a stupid question. Which, in his defense, I was, but disallowing use of vouchers on their own flights is just the sort of retardation the airline industry would resort to, so I thought it was important to ask.

They didn’t have any meals for sale on that flight but they had plenty of snacks. And so we ordered a ton of them. He didn’t seem to care much either way what we got or how much the vouchers were worth and just shoved them in his pocket at the end. We had $24 to spend and we only took $18 in snacks, which was already way too much for us as we wound up saving several things for later. So, we didn’t get a proper lunch, but at least we got a lot of free snacks for our troubles. We were so hungry that we plowed through much of them before it occurred to me to take a picture of it all, but I at least got a shot of the tiny suitcase-box of mints they gave us with it all:

We landed on-time in Boston but then had a rather frustrating wait for my suitcase in baggage claim. It wasn’t that it didn’t show up; nothing showed up on the belt for almost 40 minutes after the flight had landed. When it finally got there we grabbed it and immediately headed out to catch a cab back home. Unfortunately, by that time it was about 4:30 and we got caught in the early Friday rush-hour traffic entering Union Square. We elected to stop our fare there and hoof it in the mild mid-August weather instead of waiting in the sauna that was our taxi (why do all cab drivers everywhere keep their cars at a steady 120 degrees year-round? It’s really frustrating). Our driver, who was losing money with each minute he sat there, was more than happy to drop us off and go take another fare, and so we walked from there about a mile home, finally arriving at about 5 PM, two hours after we were supposed to, but, considering our troubles that day, not altogether that late. It was a nice little vacation, but it was good to be back, too.

Saturday, July 24 - at some point this summer it occurred to Beck and me that we’ll have been dating for 5 years as of mid-August and will have lived in Massachusetts for the entirety of that time but have never been to the Cape together. Clearly, this is something we had to fix before we’d be given permission to move out of New England. So, on Saturday we woke up around 7:45, lazed around a bit and then got up to walk the dog and packed up beach-going supplies and some water and juice for the road. We stopped to get me some coffee at the Dunkie’s down the block and then got going toward I-93 South around 9:30.

It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day and we fully expected there to be immense traffic headed toward the Cape but we actually lucked out in that it wasn’t so bad just yet as we made it through the tunnel without incident and managed to hit Route 3 South’s split with I-93 around 10. With the exception of the normal traffic backup around Weymouth where the highway drops down from 3 lanes to 2 lanes we had smooth sailing all the way to our first stop in Plymouth:

Total distance: 45 miles

Yes, I know Plymouth’s not the Cape. But it’s a good jumping-off point to the Cape and I figured we could use the opportunity to stretch our legs should traffic be worse later on. Plus we’ve only been there once together before, since, as it’s so close to Becky’s home town of Marshfield we hardly ever give it much consideration as an exotic destination. But we figured this time we’d give it the full tourist treatment. We arrived at 10:35 and found a good metered parking spot and went out from there on foot:

Hooray for Plymouth!

We saw the same whale watching boat we’d taken nearly 2 years previously on our last trip there in the week after our wedding as it was about to disembark with a full load of passengers:

After that we walked around the town wharf to this place called Cabby Shack Pub whereupon Becky procured some Plymouth-style flattened pennies, including one she’d later send in the mail to a friend who lives in California. While she did that I noticed that we were being watched:

What a sneaky octopus.

As we headed out Becky also caught an anthropomorphic cupcake offering us up his delicious children:

We politely declined, though, since we didn’t want to ruin our lunch. Instead we continued on down the road to the main tourist attractions, such as the majestic Mayflower:

The Mayflower being, of course, the ship on which Shakespeare discovered America:

But there was one more thing we needed to see.

Close. Try again!

There we go! Now we have a picture of us with Plymouth Rock. Now there’s no reason whatsoever for us to return to Plymouth ever again. And so we returned to the car and hit the road again, continuing on Route 3 South toward the Sagamore Bridge. We managed to make it within 2 miles before we hit the ubiquitous summer weekend wall of cars, which, all things considered, isn’t so bad. We picked our way through it and crossed over the canal, onto US-6 East and onto Cape Cod at 11:50.

Our traffic luck continued as the flow of cars down US-6 moved around a steady 40-45 mph throughout the western highway section. For those who’ve never lived in New England, on a sunny summer Saturday this is equivalent to traffic on a normal highway moving at around 130 mph. We followed it until the divided highway ended in Dennis and then exited to look for a place to eat. We had it in our heads to find a fried seafood shack. Not finding one that suited our fancy in that area, we decided to turn eastward onto Route 6A as it seemed to be a far more scenic and less stressful drive than the mainland. Before long – shortly after entering Brewster around 12:40 – we found this:

Perfect. We put in for our first official stop along the way to get some lunch:

Total distance: 90 miles

We seemed to arrive just on the early side of the rush of folks coming in from a morning at the beach. There were maybe a half-dozen cars there when we arrived and well over twice that many by the time we’d left. Good timing. We ordered our food – I got a clam strip roll and Becky got some buffalo chicken strips and some clam chowder – and we sat down at a picnic table beneath a shady tree. Around 10 minutes later our food was ready:

Predictably, our eyes were bigger than our stomachs, but we managed to eat most of all that. It was exactly what we wanted, too. The only trouble was the townie couple in a dune buggie who pulled up along side the restaurant near where we were seated and parked in a puddle of mud and just… sat there. And didn’t do anything. For, like, 20 minutes, at least, before we left. It’s something that seems to be, if not unique to New England townies, at least their trademark: the sitting in the car and not doing anything nor talking routine. I find it fantastically creepy. They had a really cute dog who desperately wanted attention, too, but they were too offputting to even look his way. Oh well. Still good fried seafood.

We continued along Route 6A up to the intersection with US-6 East in Orleans at the crook of the arm of the Cape and kept going until we reached Wellfleet where the former-highway had dwindled down to a two-lane road. We made the hard left onto Lieutenant Island Road from there, headed to – surprise surprise – Lieutenant Island, probably one of the last really unspoiled spots on the Cape. At this point it’d be nice to go through Cape Cod’s history:

Everyone remembers that the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620. What’s often glossed over is that they first landed in Provincetown at the end of the Cape and promptly said “screw this mess” and kept going. Why? Well, the Cape’s more or less a gigantic windswept sand bar. It was pushed down by the last glacial period in North America around 16,000 years ago and so doesn’t have much of a solid rock bed with which to hold topsoil. Which means, of course, when it was later colonized by settlers who tried to turn it into farm land there was trouble. They cut down most of the trees and tried to make the sandy soil arable. It didn’t work. By the 1840s farming was more or less abandoned on the Cape as it was, by then, a wasteland. It took a half-century for it to return to its natural state, around which time wealthy Bostonian families started to build vacation homes out in the isolated fishing villages. In the 1930s the first highway was built onto the Cape along with the Sagamore Bridge and, by the 50s, it was becoming the vacation destination for middle-class families as well. And ever since then more and more tourist traps have sprung up along the peninsula and not much of that pre-colonial part of the Cape remains. Lieutenant Island is the exception. After going down a windy, narrow road for a couple of miles one comes to a small, single-lane bridge:

From then on out everything is single-lane. If one comes upon a car, one pulls over as the other car waves. Everyone waves on Lieutenant Island. Most of the couple-dozen houses there appear to be rental units or timeshares so most everyone seems to have that air of politeness of being a guest in someone else’s house that is clearly nicer than their own. Which is a good attitude, I think.

Before long the pavement runs out and the road becomes a dirt path. Frost heaves over the years have caused it to ripple so the ride from there on out is rough ride, but not impassable. After about another mile at around 12 mph we reached the end of the road at the beach head:

There were only two cars there when we arrived but there wasn’t really a parking lot proper and so we had to try to move to the side as much as possible so we wouldn’t block anyone in. We reapplied some sunblock and got out to enjoy the nearly empty beach at about 2 PM:

Total distance: 110 miles

Shortly after we exited the car Becky found a small colony of fiddler crabs flitting in and out of holes in the sand. She made friends with one:

We continued over the dunes and to the beach. It was past high tide and so Becky was able to go about collecting some horseshoe crab husks from the beach:

From there she went off to frolic in the bay:

I saw a pretty mermaid out in the water!

So I went out to go investigate:

The water was incredibly warm. I mean, for the Atlantic. When I turned around to look for the mermaid, though, I noticed that, surprise!

It was just silly ol’ enlegged Becky playing a trick on me! She really got me good!

At that point several groups of folks showed up all at once and we took that as our cue to get a move on. We got back to the car, knocked the sand out of our shoes as best we could and then drove back along the bumpy, sandy roads, back across the tiny bridge and out to US-6. We continued eastward for a short while and then took some local roads through Wellfleet’s downtown and out to our next stop, the Great Island Trail:

Total distance: 120 miles

As you can see, the Great Island isn’t really an island but a narrow sand bar that juts out into Cape Cod Bay forming Wellfleet Harbor. At high tide the end is submerged but one can walk out to the end at low tide. We knew we weren’t going to walk that far as it was a solid 4 miles one way and it was already past 3 o’clock. Still, as we parked and walked out into the splotch of pitch pines at the beginning of the trail:

We stopped to take some high school year book photos:

When we got out of the woods we came upon a fairly large colony of fiddler crabs:

Most of them ignored us, but some of the males displayed to us before scuttling into their holes:

As we walked along the dirt path we turned a corner and saw that the crab colony was part of a larger Crab City:

The brown land between the grass and the reeds there is just lousy with hermit crabs and is about the size of an outdoor running track. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them there, maybe even millions.

We pressed on with the major dune hill that forms Great Island ahead of us:

The signs indicated there was an abandoned pirate trading post on the property, too, and we thought it might be fun to see. That hill in the distance was the halfway point, though, and as the path went from dirt to hard sand to loose sand, the going got much slower and the sun started to beat down on us ever more intensely. Finally, when we reached the hill we just gave up and decided to cross between the dunes to our right and onto the beach to cool off a bit. It was there that Becky found a bigger crab-friend than the tiny fiddlers:

He made it clear, though, that he didn’t want to be friends with Becky:

Becky put down Sir Pinchalot and he bubbled his way back into the surf, looking angry the whole time:

We decided we’d had about enough of Great Island and so we hit the trail back to the car, demolishing whatever liquids we had left when we got there. It was hot out. As I knocked the several pounds of sand I was carrying out of my shoes Becky went off to investigate something she saw in the woods:

It’s a memorial to a Native American Indian Woman. As you can see, numerous Sacred Things given as offerings adorned the marker. Becky was good and restrained herself from taking any of them. That would have upset the Mother Earth Goddess.

After regaining our composure and assuring ourselves we weren’t going to suffer heat stroke we hit the road again back to US-6 and up to the very tip of the Cape, to Provincetown:

Total distance: 135 miles

We arrived around 5:15 as an intermittent light rain fell. Upon Becky’s suggestion I parked in a lot along Prince St and we walked down to Commercial St, the main drag of Provincetown. Now, even non-New England natives know that P-town is a thriving gay and lesbian community. It’s also an enormous tourist trap. So it makes for an interesting scene. Sort of an East Village along the shore. We first stopped off in an army surplus store where Becky picked up some rainbow suspenders:

I should note here that my camera somehow got stuck on 640×480 resolution and I didn’t notice it until I’d taken many of the photos in P-town, so I apologize for how craptacularly grainy they are. Why in the name of God when I can buy a 16 GB flash card for, like, 30 bucks do I even need a setting that low res on the camera? Seriously. I’m all for legacy settings for software but this is just ludicrous. Anyway.

After that we headed straight for the old penny candy store. While we were there a little girl of maybe 5 ran giggling out the store and then ran back at the behest of her mother, plopped a quarter on the counter, and ran back out. Becky was better than that, though; she paid for her candy all by herself:

From there we went across the way to the other penny candy store that, while it has inferior candy, has superior fudge. We wound up getting 1 1/4 pounds of the stuff:

Hey, it’s a special treat. We’re allowed. Plus they gave us 1/4 pound free with the purchase of 1 pound. That’s value, right there! We’d be foolish not to buy that much!

After only a brief walk from there Becky found a P-town penny machine to use:

As we continued up Commercial St Becky made another friend, a wolf… dog… whatever:

We asked him if he wanted to come home with us and he said no. Just as well; we already have a The Dog.

That dog… wolf… whatever-thing was situated directly across from the part of P-town that largely appeals to teenagers:

We went into the latter to relive teenage years ourselves but didn’t linger long as it was soon assaulted by a cabal of about a dozen college-aged (at least, they might have been in their early-20s) kids all of whom seemed to not be able to contain their loud giggles about going to a sex shop. They were acting like a Stereotypical Bachelorette Party plus male companions. This is why the suburbs are death, people: it breeds people who act like that in their 20s. Come on now. Grow up. No one finds you amusing apart from yourself.

We decided to keep walking up into the end of Commercial Street full of small art studios with elaborate decorations:

From there we doubled back and walked out to the pier, encrusted with small huts offering fishing and whale watching tours:

Becky decided there that the best way to fit in in P-town is to just hang out with all the buoys:

I’m sorry, that was horrible.

We walked out to the end of the pier to see the docked fishing boats:

As we went along we were watched by a couple of expressionless seagulls:

As we turned around we saw the sun starting to set over Provincetown in a manner that clearly called for artistic use of black and white:

And that about did it for us. We had originally planned to get some dinner there but it was already closing in on 7:00 and we needed to be on our way. We walked back to the car and exited the lot with a slight bit of trepidation. As I pulled up to the gate I was immediately struck by how the woman in the booth was the singly most terrifying human being I had ever gazed upon in my life. I actually had to suppress a yelp she so viscerally frightened me. So when she bluntly asked “HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN HERE” I felt as if my mortal soul was being judged and was, like so many spiders held aloft by Jonathon Edwards, was about to be plunged into eternal hellfire damnation. I managed to stammer out “tw-tw-two hours” to which she snapped “FOUR DOLLARS.” I handed it to her and silently zipped onto the highway. We were in Truro before my heart rate went back down.

Aside from that encounter with whom I’m presuming was one of the Ancient Ones called up by Cthlulu himself, it was a lovely trip. We drove all the way home down US-6 to Route 3 to I-93 and back to Somerville without stopping and arrived back at our house a bit after the sun had completely set around 9:

Total distance: 260 miles

We declared our Cape Adventure to be a success. We walked Buddy since he had not seen us in about 12 hours and I then went to get us some Chinese for dinner. We sat down to eat while watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on TV before heading to bed around 11:15. It was an action-packed day and a very good one at that for not even having left the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Sunday, March 21 - Becky and I woke up and read in bed for a while before deciding that we wanted to have a small Adventure Day. It was a beautiful early spring day and we wanted to get out of the house. After banging around on Roadside America for a while Becky came up with the idea of going down to see as many Rhode Island Mr. Potato Head statues as we could in one day. Constructed as a sort of corporate art project around 2000, there were – depending on who you ask – anywhere between 37 and nearly 60 of them spread out across the tiny Ocean State at one point. By now many had been de-commissioned, destroyed, heavily vandalized or sold to private owners and so no one has a good idea just how many are left. So, finding what we could seemed like a good adventure to us!

We left around 11 AM and headed down to the first stop, the Mr. Potato Head at the Hasbro world headquarters in Pawtucket. As good a place as any to start, we figured, as it was both the closest to the highway from Boston and was logically the first one to go to since it was the most likely one to still be there after 10 years:

Total distance: 48 miles

As it was Sunday there was no one there.

We had no trouble in finding Mr. Potato Head #1:

No surprise that he was rather immaculately preserved. Such would not be true of all of them, as you will see.

On our way down we texted Lou and Mary Elizabeth to see if either or both would like to meet up with us at some point. While taking pictures in Pawtucket they both got back to us and said yes, so we formulated a plan to meet up with Mary Elizabeth and Dave first for lunch and then pick up Lou later as we made our way south. So, we swung by Cumberland from Pawtucket and then headed on down to Providence to get food at Tortilla Flats. Because everyone likes Steinbeck-themed Mexican restaurants:

Total distance: 60 miles

It was some pretty good Mexican and reminded me a lot of the Border Cafe in Harvard Square minus the part where it’s packed non-stop. Actually, it was still pretty busy for Sunday lunch standards but we were able to get seated and served without any troubles.

Dave had driven separately since he would not be joining us on our adventure-ing as he was feeling under the weather. So, after eating he headed back home and Mary Elizabeth jumped in our car and we continued on to the next stop just down the road in Providence’s “little” Italy outside of a greasy pizza place:

Total distance: 62 miles

Two things became immediately clear as we arrived. The first was that we had walked into what was apparently an Italian-American Stereotype Convention and we very much stuck out like sore thumbs. That I was not wearing a track suit and had several gold chains on made me rather conspicuous. We stood to the side was we watched a bleached-blonde woman sit idling in her gigantic SUV apply liberal amounts of lipstick while looking in her side-view mirror. It was quite the scene.

The other thing was that this particular Mr. Potato Head had seen better days:

I’m assuming that – previous to a decade of being subjected to drunken douchebaggery – he was holding a pizza. And had arms. And a nose. And didn’t look like the saddest thing ever. We moved on before we drew more attention.

The next statue on the list was one situated in Roger Williams Park on the south side of Providence:

Total distance: 66 miles

I let out Becky and Mary Elizabeth as I circled for parking. They found the statue relatively easily where it was being climbed-upon by young children, but, amazingly, didn’t look nearly as bad as the previous one abused by drunken idiots:

Unfortunately, though, he wasn’t custom-painted and instead looked just like the one at the headquarters. I suspect that this, combined with his good condition, means that he is not the original one there from 2000 and has been replaced there relatively recently. I still used him to hide:

After that we continued on further south, first to Lou’s abode to meet his The Puppy and convene with him and his lady-friend and then to continue on to where there was another, privately-owned Mr. Potato Head statue in Warwick he knew about:

Total distance: 71 miles

This one was one of my favorites. He had wheels!

The sun was bright. Everyone except The Puppy seemed to notice that. Must be nice to be a puppy.

Now carpooling as a group, we pressed forth up I-95 and then down across I-195 to our next stop down in Warren at a Dunkin Donuts near Bristol:

Total distance: 92 miles

There was an Old Timer sitting out front doing Old Timer things, namely smiling off into space and tapping his hand on his knee as 50s music blared on the speakers outside. I observed that this seems like what he does, not what he was simply doing, so we tried our best to work around him:

Please note that I was standing in the drive-through lane for that shot as a van was pulling through. I’m sure it was the most excitement Warren has seen in some time. Lou, though, got in the American spirit as the statue inspired him to eat a whole chocolate glazed doughnut at once:

Truly he was something to see. Our next stop, though, promised not one but two statues at the same location! It was just down the road in Portsmouth:

Total distance: 100 miles

Sure enough, there they were, outside of a local supermarket. Apparently they had both been moved there from previous locations. The first – originally outside a hotel, one presumes – was a bellhop:

Sadly, the bell was fiberglass and not actually functional.

The next one – just down the way by about 100 feet – was definitively the weirdest one:

As you can see, he was supposed to be something involving grapes… making wine, maybe? Who knows. His alien-like, soul-less eyes kind of creeped us out, though:

And that was all of them on our list. But wait! As we were heading out from Warick, Mary Elizabeth had spotted one along the highway! We’re still not sure how she saw it but we were thankful for her sharp eyes. Becky looked up the location based on the businesses it was near and, after a bit of difficulty, we were able to find him on our return trip:

Total distance: 132 miles

He was outside the Day-O-Light company and, as such, was covered in reflector LEDs that, based on the extension cord coming out from his behind, must light up at some point:

Again, The Puppy did not seem to understand concepts such as “jump on 3,” citing reasons such as “I’m the Puppy and I’m made of cute.” Which is true.

We drove back down the road to Lou and Amanda’s place, said goodbye, dropped Mary Elizabeth back off at her place and headed straight home as we had one The Dog ourselves who would be in need of a walk by that point.

Total distance: 200 miles

Not bad at all for an impromptu mini-adventure. We immediately went grocery shopping at Porter before arriving home and then gave Buddy his walk. After that we were fairly exhausted and just ordered some Domino’s for dinner. Probably wasn’t a great idea to order it so soon to going to sleep, we later found out. Big surprise there, I know. We ate it and watched a bit of that Life show – begrudging the fact that they re-did David Attenborough’s narration with freaking Oprah – and then just went to bed. We had set out to find 7 Mr. Potato Head statues and we wound up with 8. Pretty good, I’d say.

Sunday, February 14 - we woke up around 8:30, showered and made some breakfast. A little bit after 10 we hopped in the car, pulled around to get some gas, and then headed North on I-93 to I-95. After about an hour of smooth sailing we put in at our first stop along 95 in Hampton, New Hampshire:

Total distance: 50 miles

We stopped there to make our semi-annual trip to the New Hampshire State Liquor Store to stock up. The last time we’d gone was August 15 – the day before our anniversary – and the time before that was February 15, on our way back from Vermont. So we’re pretty regular about the “every 6 months” thing. After successfully picking up everything we needed we hit the road again, about 15 minutes later.

We exited off I-95 a short while into Maine to get onto US Route 1 North. After only a few blocks we made our first stop in Maine in Wells at noon:

Total distance: 84 miles

We were headed to the cleverly-named Maine Diner to get some Maine-themed squashed pennies. Maine.

When I think of good themes for gift shops, my first thought is the Spanish-American War, too.

We originally wanted to get lunch there, but we quickly discovered that the Maine Diner was the place to go after church for the good people of Wells and, as such, it was overflowing, so we pressed on after getting pennies to the next stop just a few miles up the road in Kennebunk:

Total distance: 88 miles

We stopped to go to HB Provisions for their penny machine.

I’m sure it’s lovely and full of things for people with the last name Bush to do, but we had more things to see and so we continued on up Route 1 toward Portland. We made our next stop a bit after 1 in Scarborough:

Total distance: 109 miles

We found this place called the Rock and Roll Diner a little bit outside of town and stopped to get lunch there.

As you can see, it was the 50s-est 50s that ever 50s-ed. Food was good, though. I got a pretty good bacon cheeseburger and we perused our coins:

Our real stop in Scarborough, though, was up the road at Len Libby Candies. Namely, a giant-ass moose made of chocolate:

Everything there looked and smelled fantastic. We wound up getting about 20 bucks worth of candy and chocolate before heading on. Our next stop was the highlight of the trip, in Portland:

Total distance: 116 miles

At about 2:15 we arrived at the (not yet) world famous International Cryptozoology Museum:

It’s in a back room of a book store and is cram-packed with tons of stuff related to cryptids. It’s based on the personal collection of Loren Coleman, who is also the sole proprietor and the only one running the place while it’s open. It’s one of those weird quirks of the early 21st century that you can just walk up to some places and get a guided tour by someone who is on TV every now and then. For $5 apiece we did just that as he gave us and another couple also there at the same time. The whole place was a hodge-podge of various cryptids varying from verifiable, factual Lazarus taxa such as the coelacanth to more fanciful entities such as Nessie and several different iterations of Bigfoot.

It was hard to get a bead on the gray, bearded Coleman. Certainly he wasn’t a skeptic but he wasn’t exactly a conspiracy theorist, either. He was more than happy to let us take as many photos as we wanted as we squeezed through the tight spaces between the displays. The largest percentage of his collection seemed to be Bigfoot-related paraphernalia and he had one case displaying “fake” footprint casts next to “real” ones.

He seemed to think the differences were night and day but we couldn’t tell just what those differences were. Still, he was very indulgent in letting us take pictures and answering our questions and so we bought a couple of figurines on the way out, for which he offered us change from his wallet. I don’t think he was suffering from lack of traffic to get a cash register; he just had nowhere to put the damn thing in that cramped room. Funny thing is, this was supposed to be his big expansion, too. I can’t imagine what his house looked like before he opened the museum.

We took our picture with Bigfoot on the way out:

If you’re going to the International Cryptozoology Museum, you have to have your picture taken with Bigfoot. It’s the rule.

We went across the street to the Monster Funbox Emporium after visiting Bigfoot. Half comic book store and half vintage game shop in the spirit of Multimedia 1.0 in the East Village (may it rest in peace), the Funbox Emporium is a beautiful place.

The “Funbox” part refers to a giant steamer trunk filled with various Happy Meal-sized toys and other detritus sold for $1 apiece at the entrance to the store. Becky found a friend:

After purchasing him and a couple packs of Nintendo trading cards, we got back in the car and continued to head north. Our next stop was in Yarmouth, ME:

Total distance: 129 miles

We got there at about 3:40 and had no troubles finding what we were looking for right off the highway – a giant rotating globe:

Unfortunately, we couldn’t go inside as it was closed on Sundays. We couldn’t visit their map store, either:

That’s too bad. I like maps.

As we were starting to see the sun lower toward the horizon we made one final stop just up the road in Freeport, ME:

Total distance: 134 miles

We came to see the one and only Big F’in Indian:

If you’ll recall from our Great American Road Trip, a sort of theme was taking pictures underneath the crotches of giant statues. This was no exception:

Of course, someone left offerings for the Gigantic Stereotypical-and-Probably-Offensive Indian Statue:

As daylight started to fade we said goodbye to the Indian and started to head home:

We had no troubles on the drive back and, after a brief pit stop in Kennebunk along I-95, we got home safe and sound at around 10 after 6, completing our journey:

Final distance: 261 miles

Not a bad little trip at all.

Saturday, December 26 - we slept in some to make up for not sleeping well the previous night. After showering we got breakfast downstairs with my family and then I headed over to the Joseph A Banks store with my mom to pick up the suit and sport jacket I had been fitted for over Thanksgiving. Becky says they make me look sharp.

When I got home I did a lot of legwork in planning for our time in Philadelphia. I printed out a map and marked locations for where we wanted to go and contacted the folks we’d be meeting to make sure we had all our ducks in a row. Around 1 we packed up all of our things into the car, said goodbye and headed out down south through Jersey. We stopped for a quick lunch at a Burger King in Princeton along the way. I’d like to imagine that House would eat there on occasion and say something snarky about the people working there. I imagine all of Princeton to be like that, actually.

We arrived in Philadelphia around 3:30 with very little difficulties, checking into the Ritz-Carlton amid the light rain. We’re not suddenly rich; I had a free hotel stay from hotels.com thanks to booking 10 rooms with them on our road trip and, as it turns out, the only stipulation on that is that the room must be under $400. So I got us one as close to that cutoff as I could. A “superior” room at the Ritz-Carlton was about $360 for that night (down from the usual $600 due to trying to fill rooms between Christmas and New Year’s) and I paid only $38 in the form of taxes and booking fees. Epic. Win. The room was, in fact, superior in quality, too. It was tough to convince ourselves to get back outside in the rain once we checked in.

But we had places to go. We hopped in a cab out to the Franklin Institute. The cabbie took an exceptionally circuitous route but we still got there before long.

Our primary goal was to see Body Worlds 2 there, just like we had seen the original Body Worlds there on our first trip anywhere together nearly 4 years previously. It’s like Philadelphia is an NPC in our world that always says “Body Worlds! Mütter Museum!” on repeat. Hey, it beats the pants off of what we think of Utah.

It was about 4:30 when we got our tickets but the soonest admission we could get was for 5:30, so we had some time to kill. Fortunately, the rest of the museum officially closed at 5 and they allowed admission for free after 4:30 so we were able to roam around the rest of the museum for the next 45 minutes or so (until they really started cracking down on the whole “museum is closed” thing) for free. The first thing we did was see the Big Giant Heart:

It was a cardiac adventure!

Here I am pointing out where the heart is snipped to release blood pressure during a trans-cardial perfusion:

Becky was not amused:

After pretending to be blood passing through a gigantic heart and learning all other sorts of things about the circulatory system we continued on to other parts of the museum:

You can’t quite tell there, but that is unequivocally the most steampunk solar system model in existence.

We tried to avoid security guards for as long as we could but we were eventually herded back to the lobby. Thankfully, by that time they were letting in for Body Worlds already so we didn’t really have to wait long and we headed into the display after a short time in line:

They didn’t allow photography so Becky had to take those on the sly, hence why the camels appear to be in a J.J. Abrams production. The camels were probably one of the highlights of the display, too. I definitely recall some things also being in the original Body Worlds, too, such as a display on fetuses at various stages of development. All in all it was definitely worth going to and I’m glad we did.

As we wandered out of the museum the rain had abated to a light mist so we elected to walk back to the hotel in an attempt to find a liquor store along the way. We did, but it was only liquor and wine, no beer. We had gotten beer the last time we were there. Has Pennsylvania state liquor law changed since then so that it’s like New York in that you can’t sell liquor and beer under the same roof? I honestly don’t know. Tell me if you do. As for then, we continued walking and eventually found another, larger liquor store that served our purposes, albeit sans-beer. Unfortunately, by that point it had really started raining again and we were getting soaked:

As we sneaked back into the Ritz-Carlton soaked to the bone, bags of bottles of liquor in-hand, we must have been quite a sight. I didn’t care, though. I was wet, hungry and thirsty. We took care of the first and last of those as we took turns using the in-room hair dryer to try to dry off our clothes as we sipped on the drinks we’d gotten. Around 8 we decided to take care of the hunger one and headed out to get dinner. There was an Olive Garden just across the street and, in the rain, it was just fine. Thanks to the inclement weather and the time of year we walked right in and got a table despite it being 8 o’clock on a Saturday, so that wasn’t bad at all. We enjoyed our carbohydrate overload and got in touch with Mary Elizabeth to arrange to meet with her and her husband later on.

Speaking of which, after we returned to our room and relaxed a bit while watching Dirty Jobs, said couple came over, having recently arrived in town and gotten dinner themselves, and helped us drink our boozes for a couple of hours. Around 12:30 they headed back to their hotel and we called it a night ourselves. We got a little more rained-on than I anticipated, but overall it was a great afternoon and evening.

Sunday, December 27 - we slept in a bit again in the morning (nb: “sleeping in” for us means sleeping past 8 AM. I realize that’s not normal for many people but we’re used to getting up at 6 AM on weekdays so it is for us) and lazily got up and checked out of the hotel. Before that we walked around the corner to take pictures with the Big-Ass Clothespin:

That sure is a huge-ass clothespin.

I used the video checkout and grabbed all of our things to head down to get our car out of the valet. Or, at least, I thought I grabbed all of my things. The bill informed me the valet for the car for overnight was $40. So it cost more for my car to stay at the Ritz-Carlton than it did for us. Good to know.

We left the hotel and headed west a few blocks, having no trouble finding street parking for free. Which sort of makes up for paying $40 the previous night, I guess. Or something. We walked a few more blocks to 30th Street Station. Fortunately the weather had greatly improved and walking was now a much more pleasant experience.

Several minutes after arriving – around 10:45 – we met one Mr. J. E. Rosbrow, who had just arrived via an early train from New York. Not more than a couple minutes after that Mary Elizabeth and Dave arrived as well and so we all headed back out to get us some brunch. I had selected Devil’s Alley from my search of the Internets and, I gotta say, I chose wisely. It wasn’t too busy at all for brunch hours (at least as compared to 60-minute-wait Boston standards), the food was pretty good and the decor was awesome:

Heck, even the bathrooms were awesome:

And topical, considering the nature of where we were about to go! I don’t want to toot my own horn too much and I can’t speak to the quality of the place as a dinner restaurant and bar, but site-unseen I think I did a pretty darned good job of picking out a brunch place.

Well-fed, we walked a couple of blocks over to the main attraction for the day, the Mütter Museum. We had been there before on our similar trip back in 2006, but it was always neat to see again. Plus, this time they had displays on Presidential assassinations and on lead poisoning that weren’t there last time and were pretty fantastic. My favorite, I think, was a syringe made of lead that was used to inject mercury into the urethra of patients with syphilis. I am absolutely gobsmacked at how utterly none of that sounds even remotely good. This is why we have shied away from 19th-century medicinal practices, people.

Becky once again took some sneaky pictures, though the guard on-duty was admittedly pretty apathetic about doing anything that involved something that might be construed as enforcing the “no photography” policy and so she didn’t have to be too sneaky:

As we had been to the museum before we finished before our companions and wandered into an adjacent lecture hall they had converted into a video viewing room on the museum:

We decided it would help if we looked Official:

We also went over to the gift shop where Becky purchased this book that resulted in an endless barrage of vintage-1994 Pearl Jam jokes from me. Don’t get it? Then this is not for you.

When our companions were finished we all took a moment to admire the museum’s Christmas tree before heading out. It really was something:

I think the preserved Rudolph in a jar with the date on it is my favorite as it’s close to my heart, but I really do admire the paper cutout of Chang and Eng with the heart that says “BFF” is pretty fantastic, isn’t it?

After departing the museum we made a futile attempt to find some coffee and wound up parting ways with our traveling friends near where we parked our car around 3. We wished them well and headed on out to try to take a picture with Philadelphia’s statue of Rocky. To our dismay, there was a line of people about 20-deep in front of it. There was no way we wanted to wait that long to take a picture with a statue of a character from a movie neither of us were even that terribly in to, so we decided to hit the road. And went winding around. And around. Philadelphia, it seems, is not very fond of due diligence when it comes to signs leading to the highway. We finally made it out, though, and headed back up North on I-95.

Traffic was smooth sailing with the exception of a bit of congestion on the NJ Turnpike all the way to northern Jersey. That’s when we hit a wall. Around the same time I realized I’d forgotten my brand-new suits in the hotel room. Good times. Becky kept a calm head, though, called up the hotel and helped me arrange for them to be shipped back up to us (they arrived safely yesterday). She’s the best. As for our progress home, though, we crawled for an hour to go only about 10 miles before pulling off at an over-crowded service plaza in Fort Lee:

Distance traveled: 111 miles

It was swamped with people coming from all directions and was generally a sticky, grimy mad-house but it got us off the highway just before I was about to either start whimpering or start screaming. As a small bonus, though, Becky found some really old penny machines with horribly out-of-date designs (such as one celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986) and was able to grab a few with the change we had on-hand. We each decided to grab what we could from the self-serve racks at the Burger King instead of waiting 15 or 20 minutes for something of our own selection. As much as that sucked it at least got us some food and revived us a bit for the rest of the trip home.

The lines at the gas station were predictably horrific and so I elected to press on with what we had in the tank. It would end up getting us nearly to the CT-MA border, so it was one of those cases where having a super-efficient little car actually did us good.

I had realized somewhere along the line that I was stuck in a 20-mile backup to the George Washington Bridge and, to avoid it further, I got off the highway as soon as possible and took surface streets toward the Palisades Parkway. From that point on we had absolutely zero trouble with traffic and flew on home, stopping only briefly for gas in Tolland, CT. We finally made it home around 11:

Total distance traveled: 345 miles

A much tougher drive than I was expecting but at least we made it home. We wearily unloaded the car and plopped ourselves in bed as soon as we could. Though the drive back was hectic we had still had a great time and it really went amazingly smoothly and according-to-plan. I’m glad we were able to meet up with folks while there and enjoy those things as a group instead of just by ourselves. While we do like to do things just us two all the time, it’s good to invite people along, too. I hope we can do more of that in the future.

Sunday, August 16 - our first wedding anniversary. To have a day for ourselves and to prepare for our upcoming Road Trip of the Supereon across these United States of America, we decided to go on a mini-road trip across… Massachusetts. Becky had done all the planning and so I agreed to do the driving. I had to go into work, as usual, but since it was more or less on the way out, I brought Becky with me, and thus, we started our road trip.

Total distance: 25 miles

Hey, it’s a start. Becky patiently waited upstairs as I took care of my mice. Before long we hit the road again, winding up 495 to Route 2 West. Our first real stop was in Leominster.

Total distance: 65 miles

Now, you might be asking yourself, “what’s there to see in Leominster?” And that’s silly to ask yourself that, you should just ask me. Or rather, wait for me to tell you. There’s this:

That’s right: it’s a grave of a man persecuted for wearing a beard. Not just that: persecuted for wearing the beard. I mean, really, it is a the beard isn’t it? Certainly Becky and I admired it.

Now, of course there’s a story. Perhaps I’ll tell it to you – or at least link you to a blog article Becky found about him – if you ask real nice-like. For now I’ll just let it be a mystery though, and have you know that it wasn’t always easy being a hipster and that hipster forefathers had to fight hard and sacrifice for their ironic cause. It’s true.

We continued a short distance down the road to Gardner:

Total distance: 80 miles

What’s in Gardner? Why, only the world’s “largest” chair!

You see, apparently they’re big on wooden furniture in Gardner. It sounds boring but if you’ve ever passed through Gary, Indiana you’d know there are worse things to be known for. At one point the good people of Gardner decided to construct the world’s largest chair to celebrate their accomplishments. It turns out this is no trivial matter, though. And so, the current chair – dedicated for the bicentennial in ‘76 – only held the title for but a brief fraction of its life to date. But it still stands there, a proud if graffiti-covered symbol of Gardner’s chair-construction prowess. As I am a man of significant stature and therefore do not photograph well with Very Large Things, Becky climbed up to sit on it for perspective:

Rock on, Gardner, rock on.

The next stop took us down off of Route 2 for a while into South Deerfield:

Total distance: 120 miles

Unfortunately I do not have any pictures from this point. The purpose of the stop was to get smushed pennies for Becky’s (now rather impressive) collection. We had two stops here. The first was at the Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory. Now, as you can imagine, this is not very impressive unless you happen to be a) four years old and b) Mommy’s Little Princess and so we skipped the admission since the machine was outside of the ticket area. Instead we got lunch at the adjacent restaurant, notable for low ceilings that make one feel as if you’re is eating in your great aunt’s basement and not really in a good way. Food was decent, though, so it worked out in the end.

The same cannot be said for the Yankee Candle factory store a short distance down the road. Imagine if one of those gigantic Wal-Marts and a Christmas Tree Shops got all drunk one night and had a torrid love affair. This store is would be what was birthed from that. It was like a Vegas casino of crap that smells like grandma’s house. In other words, terrifying beyond comprehension. I was convinced that if we took a wrong turn we’d either end up at Wright’s Chicken Farm or Hell. Maybe both. Somewhere in between Christmas Gnome Land and R’lyeh we found the penny machine, used it and quickly exited, vowing to never return as we hit I-91 North back to Route 2.

The next stop, in East Charlemont, was much more of a rousing success:

Total distance: 140 miles

When you think of really down-and-dirty, blatantly racist-against-Native-Americans Indian Goods Stores you think of what, South Dakota? Maybe Oklahoma? Not so much Massachusetts. But oh, it’s there. And it’s fantastic in how completely and utterly shameless it is. Behold:

As you can see, Becky is there standing betwixt the legs of Big Chief Injun. Or at least that’s what I called him. But that’s not all! Inside – amongst the shirts proclaiming a cabal of Indians carrying rifles as “America’s Original Border Patrol” and other general sentiments of this odd sort of xenophobia from the angle of Native Americans as sold by conservative white men, the cognitive dissonance from which is enough to make your head spin – there’s also this totally not offensive life-sized statue of a Redskin begging for coins:

And this guy outside, who appears to be vogueing:

Him likem paleskin with pointy boobs. Makem feel pretty on inside.

But oh noes! There was also a bear!

But don’t worry! He was wearing his retainer:

NERD BEAR!

Of course, what Injun Goods store is worth its salt without a gen-u-ine aluminum-sided tee-pee?

That second shot’s what it looked like on the inside. Paradoxically one of the most authentic things there. But hey, you’re probably saying, “that tee-pee’s good for big cheifs, but how about little squaws?” Never fear, as Becky demonstrates here, they’ve got you covered, too:

Truly a magical place. Though we felt like we’d reached the pinnacle of our adventure, we decided to press on, anyway. We stopped briefly in Florida (Florida, MA, that is) for a break before tackling the Berkshires and finally wound up at our ultimate destination, Williamstown:

Total distance: 170 miles

Our goal was to find an installation of eye sculptures near Williams College. We searched for nigh upon a half an hour before finally finding the darned things just up the hill from where we started. Heh. Guess it pays to look both ways. So we decided to have some fun with them after finally making it:

The idea is that I’m the mouth in that last one. Don’t know how well that worked out but we tried. After that we turned onto US 7 South and went down through Pittsfield and out to the Pike back home:

Total distance: 325 miles

We got home, walked the dog, ordered some Thai, watched a Smallville and called it a day. And a good day at that.

Saturday, February 14 - after a good time at Julian G’s party the previous night, it was difficult to get up and get moving in the AM hours on Saturday. However, we managed to get some breakfast and then get Buddy and our overnight bags loaded into the Prius by around 11. I threw down 2 layers of sheets over the back seat to prevent hair from gathering, as Buddy Hair becomes a ubiquitously-expressed surface marker on everything he touches far long after he’s touched it. Having a black dog with the surface area of an oriental rug is good like that.

We initially pressed westward on the Mass Pike until Exit 2 in Lee and then turned up Route 7 toward Vermont. Far from the most direct route, but we wanted to visit Pittsfield again to briefly to see some things we missed when we last visited 14 months previously. Really, I could only think of three things. The first was to eat at Teo’s Hot Dogs on East Street. I’d link it but the most prominent Google return is the Yelp for it full of moronic hipsters reveling in its “blue collar charm lulz” and desecrating my childhood memories. In short, though, it was precisely as it’s always been:

Packed full of townies, even at 2 PM. A gruff waitress asked us what we wanted the second we sit down. Which is basically asking how many hot dogs one wants and what one wants on them. The hot dogs are slender and only have about half as much mass as a regular ballpark frank, so the best thing to do is order twice as many as you think you’d eat of good, solid-sized hot dogs. So I got 6 – 4 with ketchup 2 with chili – and Becky got 4 with mustard. Within several minutes of ordering, the same waitress plopped our order down in front of us on paper plates, followed by the check. No frills, in and out. The whole ordeal took about a half an hour and cost us $20 after a 30% tip because it was the gruff waitress’s birthday and because I didn’t feel like trying to break the 20. It’s one of those simple pleasures that remind one of the parts of childhood one hopes never change. And so I hope that, along with Teddy’s Pizza, Teo’s will still be there long after the rest of Pittsfield becomes an uninhabitable post-apocalyptic wasteland. Well, finishes becoming an uninhabitable post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The next thing I wanted to see was the golf-ball machine at the Allendale Shopping Center. Now half-empty, the Allendale Center stands as a stark reminder of over-speculation of strip malls in the 80s. The golf-ball machine was half kinetic sculpture, half Rube Goldberg machine, all awesome when it was in its prime, sending up one of dozens of golf-balls along various tracks in an order that would take weeks of watching to discern, and that comes from weeks of my childhood trying to do just that while my mom shopped.

The machine is in the Underground section, now nearly completely abandoned. We had tried to see it on our last trip but the doors were locked. This time, in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday, we had better luck and were able to go down to see it. Sadly, it was no longer functional, but it was still there, sans balls, at least:

The third and final location I wanted to see was the old country club pool I swam at every summer as a kid. As late as 2000 it was still the same as I remembered it. Sadly, some time in the past 9 years it was overhauled into a smaller, “safer” pool with no deep end or diving board. So that’s one “improvement” in Pittsfield I’d rather have done without. Becky says the same exact thing happened to her childhood pool in Algonquin, Illinois. Man, between that and the rubber-padded playgrounds, kids these days just don’t know what they’re missing. Ah well.

We got back on the road toward Vermont after that, passing the entrance to Mount Greylock, most definitely closed in the middle of February. Across the border and into Bennington, the tiny hamlet that readily illustrates that hippies:Vermont::rednecks:New Hampshire. Another half-hour or so north of that we made it into Manchester Center, where my parents would bring us for back-to-school clothes shopping every early September. Many of the outlet stores I remembered were still there, but as no 12 year-old boy in his right mind cares about bargain shopping for clothes, that wasn’t what we were there for. Rather, I wanted to show Becky Vermont as I knew it, as she’d never been. I know it might seem silly for someone who lives in Massachusetts to have never been to Vermont, but in the 4 years I lived in Illinois I never went to Iowa, so I guess these things happen.

I figured she’d appreciate it if we found a good Vermont general store. I think I was right:

Really, the highlight there was the Lego candy:

We also got some maple candy there, which, from what I can now understand, is a part of Becky’s soul that was missing until just then. Glad we fixed that.

We pressed on about another 40 minutes north to Rutland, where we checked into our hotel, a dingy Red Roof, the only one in the entire southern half of the state that had availability and allowed dogs. While not much for looks, it would certainly do for the night. Buddy was glad to get out of the back seat of the car, seeming a bit confused by the whole ordeal:

After a brief rest, we went out to get dinner before heading down for down to Manchester again. The Ninety-Nine across from the hotel was packed to the gills already at 6 PM, so we went down the road to a Ponderosa. Now, neither of us had ever been to a Ponderosa before, but it turns out it goes like this: you pre-pay for your slab of meat at a fast-food-style counter and then sit down and the waitress brings you what you ordered. And, in the mean time, you get to eat at a buffet. So really, you get two meals for the price of one. If that’s not the America-est America that ever America’d, I don’t know what is. The clientele looked a lot like New Hampshire locals but… nice. As in they didn’t hate you for being from Boston and being a big-city gay-loving hippie pinko commie queeah. Which was nice.

So, having finished our very America meal, we headed back down the road toward Bromley Mountain, which promised a “winter festival.” It was everything I hoped it would be: a crappy band playing crappy covers of crappy 70s songs, cheap beer, and glow-necklaces for the kids. Becky speculated that we might not be cool enough for that party:

Though they did have some unique spelling on their signs:

The fact that they got the day of the week wrong was one thing, but you’d think that a ski resort would know how to spell the word “mountain.” Like, that might come up once or twice. Maybe.

The good news, though, was that it was pitch-dark outside away from the lodge and gave us some fantastic star-gazing due to the lack of light pollution:

I was able to make up for our lack of proper star-gazing in Santiago there a bit, I guess.

After all that excitement, we decided to head back up to the hotel and call it a night.

Sunday, February 15 - we woke up and got ready to check out, deciding to take advantage of the complimentary breakfast they supposedly offered. However, when we got there, the lounge was inundated with unwashed teenagers with poor manners when it came to waiting in line for food. So, we decided, screw it, let’s just go. We headed east on US-4 as a means of getting to I-89 South, the most direct route back to Boston. We stopped along the way in Killington at another general store for some quick breakfast and more maple candy and got to the highway with little trouble. Becky enjoyed her wax lips on the way down through New Hampshire:

We hit I-93 South and stopped along the way at the New Hampshire State Liquor Store to make our semi-annual restocking run and then headed on home, much to Buddy’s relief.

Thursday, May 27 - we slept in a bit to recover from the previous day and got out of bed around 8. It was already unbelievably humid then but it was also unbelievably beautiful outside:

The residents of Ruskin appeared to be sleeping in that morning and so we took the opportunity to wander across the road to the hotel’s beach onto Tampa Bay.

Not only was the beach picturesque and empty of any people other than ourselves, but the water in Tampa Bay was so warm it was positively bath-like. It had to be close to 80 degrees. Becky took the time to frolic a bit in the gentle waves:

She also found some clues!

As you can see, some of the clues were various pieces of detritus dropped by daytime beachgoers: children’s toys, discarded hand towels, beer cans, the usual signs of life not yet combed up that morning from the previous day. But she also managed to pick up a couple of chunks of shell-encrusted rocks that, later, when we were home, she was able to identify as fossils common to Florida! So that’s nice. Being able to identify fossils is one of those things Becky would like to be able to learn how to do. So far this isn’t so easy since New England has a rather remarkable dearth of fossils. Everywhere else in North America, though, you can just find them lying around. Like on the beach, for example!

We walked back to the room, showered, packed up and checked out, departing and hitting the road shortly after 9. We first quickly stopped to get gas and snacks for the day upon getting back to the main road in Ruskin, whereupon I had a brief discussion with a local man who had purchased his beach buggy from a friend in Massachusetts and had noticed our plates. In New England this line of conversation would come off as oddly prying but down South that’s just the way people roll. “Hey, you’re from Massachusetts? I bought a car from someone there once!”

We followed the directions Google Maps gave us and drove up US-41 North instead of I-75 North, which ran parallel a couple of miles further East. Figuring that the Interstate might be heavily trafficked on a weekday, we stuck with the back road. By the time we reached the southern extremes of Tampa, though, it was clear that our progress wasn’t what it was supposed to be as we had fallen 20 minutes behind schedule. Which was a bit of a bummer as it was then 10 and we had to be at our next stop about 50-60 miles away by 11. Clearly we needed to risk the highway. A shame, as by then we didn’t have time to re-enact every Hold Steady song ever and wake up in Ybor City.

The highways weren’t so bad by then, and we were able to hit FL-589 North, fight through the toll booths that seemed to be every 5 miles, and made it to our destination just in time, about 10 minutes of 11:

Daily total distance: 81 miles

Our destination was the one and only Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, an old, post-war era amusement park about an hour north of Tampa in the middle of not a whole lot.

So what’s so remarkable about Weeki Wachee? They are home to the world’s one and only daily mermaid show. That’s right: for decades now the lucky women and some men of Spring Hill have dressed up in fin-tailed suits and swam in a giant, underwater tank acting out plays. While we were there they were putting on two performances: one, about how great America is that was, unfortunately, being put on only in the late afternoon (we had a lot of driving ahead of us and couldn’t wait that long), and a performance of their very own adaptation of The Little Mermaid. The Hans Christian Andersen version, not the Disney one, since dead Danish poets tend to be less litigious than the Mouse Overlord next door. Though they still did give it a happy ending, for what it’s worth, so it wasn’t totally true to the tale. Even though it was clearly geared for kids, the 11 AM performance was perfect for our schedule, and so we bought a couple of tickets for it and sat down in the indoor arena facing the tank several minutes before the show commenced.

The mermaids came out and first did some underwater tricks and coreographed moves. Those hoses they’re holding are their air supply; they never surface in front of the audience for air, meaning they’re underwater for sometimes 5-7 minutes at a time. I can imagine that must take some getting used to. The air hoses seemed to be all they needed, though, and the bubbles they created while not in use had the added benefit of creating a fairy-tale atmosphere.

After they did their thing the Little Mermaid emerged from below-stage near the mermaid castle:

And you certainly know how the story goes: the Little Mermaid dreams of a life outside of the sea and then one day a hapless sailor who also happens to be a prince gets thrown overboard and into her fishy arms:

After Prince is revived by her magical kiss and/or air hose he swims off and she confides her infatuation to her friend Chester the Turtle:

I don’t quite recall him being in the original story but then again it’s for the kids. Unfortunately, Chester the Plot Device had to share the stage with an interloper in the form of an actual turtle who desperately wanted love:

After the Little Mermaid batted away the stage-hog turtle to the delight of the kids in the audience (and us, too, because it was pretty darned funny) the musical could continue as the Little Mermaid hatched a plan to gain legs and therefore access to the surface by making a deal with the evil Ursula:

See? Evil. She granted the Little Mermaid a set of legs and lungs in exchange for her voice and the mute Little Mermaid came to the surface to dance, soaking wet, with her Prince, whereupon it was revealed that they were both extraordinarily short:

Seriously, he was maybe 5′ 4″ and she couldn’t have been over 5 feet tall. One presumes the magnification effect of the water – and not to mention the tail fin – gives the impression of being much taller. But they danced together like magic until – oh no!

The evil Ursula attacked through a port hole near the ceiling! And, while you might have thought that, given her location, she was doing her best Ceiling Cat impression, she was actually calling to the easily-confused Prince in the Little Mermaid’s voice! And, uh, being evil!

So, skipping over all the heartbreak and deception in the original story, they did the American thing and went right to the fighting!

And Ursula was vanquished into an off-stage… erm… off-pool whirlpool to nowhere! And everyone lived happily ever after! Hooray!

Truly a performance for the ages. We wandered around the rest of the park for a bit but, as not much else was open yet, we decided to move on, having been inspired for the day by the mermaids of Weeki Wachee:

We were getting hungry, though, so after driving the 40-or-so minutes east on FL-50 to the intersection with I-75, we stopped in for lunch at a vaguely Irish-themed sports bar called Beef O’Brady’s.

Daily total distance: 105 miles

And that website pretty much says it all. If the name Beef O’Brady’s didn’t already. Other than us and a smattering of other couples, the restaurant was chiefly occupied by a handful of bikers enjoying several beers over lunch on a Thursday. Our waitress was a woman who looked like she had spent a lifetime in the sun and should have considered sunblock a half a lifetime ago. But hey! Pepperjack sliders! Can’t beat that!

After our lunch there Becky took the wheel and drove up I-75 North toward the Florida panhandle. After a couple hours of uneventful driving she pulled off around 3 so we could make a pit stop and get some gas around Lake City:

Daily total distance: 235 miles

We switched places again after the stop and I took us onto I-10 West along the Gulf Coast. Traffic was quite light and, having gotten a solid lunch followed by a couple of hours of rest, I felt refreshed enough for a good, long shift driving. So, I took it out through Tallahassee and… wait, what? Entering Central Time Zone? Huh?

Yeah, turns out that the western end of the Florida panhandle is in the Central Time Zone. I had totally forgotten about that, what with Florida being on the East Coast and all. But, for one, the panhandle is deceptively long: about 300 miles across. For two, it’s pretty far west to begin with. By the time we’d get to Biloxi, MS the next day we’d be a bit further west than Chicago. And before we got that far, we’d have to hit the Central Time Zone. And so, at 5:10 it became 4:10. Again.

I continued on for another couple of hours and, a solid 4 hours into driving I thought it best for us to stop for dinner before I lost feeling in my rear from sitting so long. And, so, approaching Pensacola, we looked for a place to eat:

Daily total distance: 525 miles

Again using Becky’s Yelp app on her iPhone, we found what looked like a perfectly decent cajun restaurant there in the form of Jerry’s Cajun Cafe and, sure enough, it was a winner. It wasn’t very busy at all and so we sat down and had a very nice meal. I got a nice Abita IPA from Louisiana to calm my nerves after such a long shift driving and ordered the crawfish étouffée, which was also excellent. Feeling recharged, I drove the remaining distance on I-10 West for that day, crossing into Alabama at about 7:15. Shortly after doing so we passed a truck hauling a tank. Like an honest-to-God ready-for-combat tank. Welcome to Alabama!

We exited off onto US-98 East before reaching Mobile and swung down to Fairhope, arriving at our hotel around 8 PM:

Daily total distance: 580 miles

Our hotel was the rather enigmatically-named Key West Inn, which was cheap and functional but not much else. A gruff woman at the front desk checked us in and we pulled our car around to our room, noting with a degree of disdain what looked like a couple of typical frat boys hanging out on the porch above and a few doors down from us. Fortunately, they’d stay quiet that night, so perhaps they weren’t as bad as I suspected.

Our room was grungy but serviceable. It was hot and humid as the A/C had been turned off when we arrived, but after about 30 minutes it got down to an acceptable temperature and, by the time we turned off the light, it was cool enough to sleep. The easy chair in the room had a greasy stain on the headrest where, as Becky noted, it looked like someone let his or her Soul Glo. So we didn’t sit there. Still, we were in Alabama! A new state for both of us!

Cumulative total distance: 2480 miles

I didn’t marvel at that for long, though, since I quickly discovered that my computer was apparently broken. I’d turn it on, the light would come on for a second and, before the boot sequence even started, would turn off again. Hmmph. Plugged it in. Same thing. Let it sit for a half-hour or so. Same thing. Pulled out the battery, blew on it, rubbed it a bit, spun in a circle three times and put it back in. Same thing. “Okay,” I thought. “So this is one of two things: either the battery’s completely blitzed, which would suck but not be that bad since I have a spare at home, or the motherboard is fried, in which case my computer’s out of commission for a few weeks.” Either way, I wouldn’t have it for the rest of the trip. And, of course, it would turn out to be the latter. I kept it plugged in overnight in case the battery had just decided it needed another good, solid charge, but to no avail. Despite working after being left in the car all day in huge parking lots at various theme parks across Orlando the previous day, it was the seemingly far-more-benign drive that day that seemed to do in the motherboard, presumably from overheating.

I had been in the mind to get online if they had wireless and proclaim that there is Internet in Alabama, contrary to popular belief. Instead I found much the opposite: Alabama killed my computer. As for most things that go wrong in my life, I blame Lynyrd Skynyrd.

After conceding there was nothing more to be done then for my poor computer, I settled in to read a while before we turned off the light a bit on the early side, as we had a long day of driving ahead of us the next day. We’d be popping across the border to Mississippi the next day before doubling back all the way across Alabama and to Atlanta, the first major city we’d stay in since Washington, DC a week earlier. A long drive, for sure, and so we tried to make the best of our night in the Deep South.

Friday, May 28 - All screwy from the unanticipated time zone change, I woke up a bit after 6 AM, muttered a bit and brushed my teeth and then tried to nod off again. I gave up about a half-hour later and decided to get up in earnest. I prodded my computer a couple more times and confirmed that, yep, it was broken and there wasn’t a thing I could do about that until we returned home. Damn your computer-breaking ways, Alabama.

We packed up everything into our car and decided to wander across our hotel’s parking lot to take a couple of pictures to prove we were in Alabama. Becky posed under a live oak tree, since they are only found in the South:

And I found an old timey fire engine that said “AL” on it:

So we were in Alabama. We have proof.

We checked out of the hotel around 7:30 and hit the road back up to I-10. Along the way we stopped for gas and snacks for the day. Becky decided to get some sodas with some local flair:

Diet Dr. Wham wasn’t good nor bad – though I’m sure if we’d had it before bed it would have woken us up before we had to go-go. Diet Grapico, though, was something else. It was foul beyond belief. It tasted like grape soda with about 40 packets of Sweet-n-Low and a handfull of floor sweepings from a sheetrock factory mixed in with it. I could only stomach a few sips of it before giving up on it altogether. So, yeah, avoid Diet Grapico if you’re in Alabama. Just sayin’.

We entered onto I-10 West and made our way into the heart of Dixie, Mississippi:

Where they remind you to just say no… to imported shrimp:

For too long they’ve been taking the jobs normally reserved for honest, hard-working American shrimp!

Around 9:00 we exited onto I-110 South and from there turned onto US 90 West, the highway along the shore in Biloxi, our farthest point West on the entire trip:

Daily total distance: 85 miles

We had a stop in mind, of course, but something caught our eyes first and we had to pull over:

An alligator-mouthed entrance (second of the trip) and a shark busting out of the wall? Why, how could we not stop at Souvenir City? They even had a fine selection of Katrina merchandise!

Katrina merchandise, by the way, was mostly shot glasses, koozies and various clothing items emblazoned with “I survived Katrina.” Including clothing for children clearly less than 5 years of age, which draws into question the grasp of causality the potential owner must have. But, hey, if that’s not your thing, you could also bring back a live hermit crab!

Becky found what she wanted, though, in the carved coconut wing of the store:

She got a few trinkets and stocked up on state magnets she was missing from our journey. I couldn’t find anything that fit my fancy myself, but I was a big fan of the photo opportunity just outside:

It should be noted that those “I survived Katrina” signs everywhere are no joke. Biloxi’s not far from New Orleans as the crow flies and it got hit just as hard. There were still signs of damage everywhere, nearly 5 years later, as buildings were still being reconstructed. Our main attraction for that day – Beauvoir – the Jefferson Davis House (warning: website plays embedded MIDI and no, I’m not certain at all that they are aware it’s 2010) – was no exception:

That’s what’s left of the Jefferson Davis Library. It’s still under construction. Apparently Beauvoir was roughly 80% destroyed by Katrina and so it is still being rebuilt from the ground-up. The gift shop and museum is still housed in a temporary trailer:

We arrived a bit after 9:30 and just missed a tour group head out. We were told they ran every half-hour and we’d have to wait for the next one at 10. So, after paying for our tours and getting our frankly unnecessary wristbands, we wandered around the gift shop looking for goods from the South. Becky found a Dixie bouncy ball:

…as well as a Dixified penny machine:

And I got a lovely hand-painted Christmas tree ornament for my Mom. While I paid for it the woman behind the desk – a middle-aged woman with a heavy accent and the voice of a smoker – asked me if I needed it wrapped in bubble-wrap. I said no, I was driving, so that wouldn’t be necessary. She replied, “oh, okay, cuz you don’t want them monkeys in baggage claim breakin’ it!”

I blinked silently, wondering if I’d heard what I’d just heard. She continued, “you know, them monkeys! The way they throw everything!”

I wanted to see how long I could drag it out and keep her under the impression that I didn’t know that by “monkeys” she meant “black people,” but I was honestly a little afraid of causing a scene (the parking area was monitored by a short but stern woman with a pistol the size of her head strapped at her hip and I suspected they were just a bit touchy at Beauvoir these days) and so I muttered some sort of “thank you” for the completed transaction and silently walked out to put the ornament in my car. So there you go. Mississippi, ladies and gentlemen.

As we waited to start our tour we viewed some cases full of Jefferson Davis’s possessions that were destroyed by Katrina:

Those were just some of the valuables that were destroyed by Katrina; representative samples. I saw enough smashed-in and crumpled metal that day to convince me to evacuate if I’m ever in the path of a hurricane. As for the house itself, they had some pictures of it much worse for the wear in the aftermath:

These days the main house has been almost completely restored and looks much like it did before the storm hit:

We wandered out of the air conditioned trailer and into the hot Mississippi sun along the Gulf toward the house to meet our tour guide:

Our tour guide was a woman of about 80 years who had a slow, stately Southern voice and a deliberate way of pronouncing everything that gave the air of her being as much a part of the history of the South as the house she was showing us. I’m certain she must be able to trace her roots to any number of old-money plantation-owning families.

Our tour group numbered about a dozen: apart from us there was a family of four, a middle-aged couple, an elderly couple and a small group of road-worn bikers that, in their dress-down summer clothes, looked more like house painters than rebels. The house itself wasn’t nearly so large as one might imagine: its main receiving hall was but 30 or at most 40 feet long and it fed into four modest rooms, each on a corner. Behind two were the kitchen and a dining room on each wing. And that was it. I’d guess it at around 1600 square feet, in terms of usable space. Maybe over 2000 if you counted the basement, which was off-limits to the tour during the continuing repairs. Not the sprawling mansion one might imagine would serve as the post-Civil War home of the one and only President of the Confederacy and his immediate family for decades.

As we were given the brief tour around the house we walked from doorway to doorway in the receiving hall and took turns gazing across brass barriers into each of the rooms:

While the Davises were of course the most famous of Beauvior’s owners, they were not the first nor the last. It was built in 1848 by a wealthy planter named James Brown. Following the Civil War it was sold to Southern writer and intellectual Sarah Dorsey who coined the name “Beauvoir” and, in 1877, invited Davis, then living on the road (including a brief period in exile in Cuba), to live in a guest house (not viewed on the tour due to damage). He and his family would later come to occupy the entire house, and his widow continued to live there after his death until hers around 1900.

After that it was turned into a convalescence home for Civil War veterans and widows until 1957 (do the math: those were some ancient widows) when it was closed and, eventually, re-purposed to its final state as a museum of Southern heritage. Of course, it has been, since then, a source of controversy and has been vandalized on numerous occasions (which might explain the armed guard a bit). Becky read a testimonial of a former employee who claimed that the entire ordeal was exceptionally racist but, aside from the woman at the register, we found the tour itself to be quite non-confrontational (and not to mention refreshingly secular) and couldn’t help but wonder if what Becky had read was a load of sour grapes. Really, the tour didn’t focus on the Glory of the South much at all and instead was largely about the painstaking process of restoration the house had undergone post-Katrina:

And so we ended our tour of the house and walked out to the Confederate grave yard on the property’s back lot. Apparently there was, at one time, snow cones there?

Sure, why not. I know I like a snow cone to go with my graveyard. Actually, it would have been nice to help fend off the already-menacing sun as we walked the 200-or-so yards in an open field. Sure was pretty, though:

The centerpiece of the graveyard is the Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier:

Given the lack of proper identification among soldiers at that time, I’m sure finding one whose identity was a mystery wasn’t all that difficult. What was far more impressive was some original marble paneling that was laid out to the side under the shade of a live oak tree, shattered by Katrina:

“Stranger, [tread] lightly here, [for] this spot is holy ground.” Here are buried over 200 of our Confederate dead. Once the home of Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy. Now the Confederate Soldiers’ Home of Mississippi.

“Each soldier’s name shall shine untarnished on the roll of fame and stand the example of each distant age, and add new lustre [sic] to the historic page.”

And with that we continued our tour of Beauvoir along the Gulf of Mexico, battered by Katrina, but not yet erased from the history of the South.

We had originally planned to view a Katrina memorial also in Biloxi, but we figured that everything we had seen pretty much stood as a monument to Katrina and so it wasn’t really necessary. So, we got back on the highway and started our long journey home, headed East along I-10. We crossed back into Alabama around 11:30 and exited onto I-65 North around 20 minutes later. We decided to start looking for food right away, since there’d be a long haul until the next city. We managed to sniff out a Sonic Burger in Saraland and decided to go for it:

Daily total distance: 165 miles

Now, Sonic Burger intrigues me. They show commercials up here in New England all the time but there’s nary a one to be found north of the Mason-Dixon Line. So I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Apparently it’s a carhop restaurant, meaning you sit in your car, press a button to order food, and your meals are delivered by an overworked and exhausted teenager on roller skates.

All of which worked out just fine, even though I was worried of making some sort of faux pas in the whole transaction. It looked like I could have pulled away from our station once we had our food but, since barely a third of them were occupied, I guess it didn’t really matter. I tipped our kid a dollar, too. Maybe not necessary, but for one it was offensively hot out already and was probably just as stifling 50 or 60 days out of the year and for two he was skinny, pale, and had an emo haircut which, in the Northeast I’d roll my eyes at a bit but in Alabama I had to kind of feel for him since I’m certain there was more than a grain of truth to the standard teenage “my parents don’t understand me” in his case.

The food did not disappoint. I had a delicious jalapeno cheeseburger and got a Butterfinger Blast – a mix of candy and soft-serve ice cream – that I happily slurped through a straw for the next hour or so as it slowly melted and I drove up through the Heart of Dixie.

I took us onto I-85 North near Montgomery and shortly thereafter we put in for a pit stop at an Exxon station just out of town, around 3 PM:

Daily total distance: 330 miles

We got some more local sodas there but avoided Grapico. Becky took the wheel for a while and gave me a chance to rest up a bit. We crossed into Alabama at 4:10, at which point we entered the Eastern Time Zone again and it became 5:10, meaning we’d spent precisely 24 hours in the Central Time Zone. Though it had been sunny all through Alabama, it was starting to cloud up something fierce in Georgia and so Becky pulled over around 5:45 to let me take the wheel again in case there was rain as I had had time to study the maps and knew where we were going:

Daily total distance: 435 miles

Sure enough, just as we were approaching Atlanta, the skies opened up and torrential rain fell upon the city. The traffic slowed to a crawl, which at least gave us plenty of time to follow the various highway interchanges to make sure we got to our exit safely. From there our hotel was only a few short blocks away and we arrived around 6:45, safe but soggy:

Daily total distance: 485 miles

We were put up at the Days Inn Atlanta Downtown, which, all things considered, wasn’t that bad at all. Checking in became a bit of a to-do, though, through no fault of the staff. The lobby was a zoo, and an indignant woman was in line ahead of me shouting something semi-coherent at the concierge behind the desk. He finally threatened to call the police if she didn’t vacate the premises and then dealt with me. I got checked in and secured a bag cart – largely held together with duct tape and with a stuck wheel that made it want to travel in circles – and loaded up the bags with Becky as I drove around back to park. When I got back to our room I found Becky waiting outside in the hallway: our key didn’t work. I stomped back to the lobby where I was told that apparently the hotel had been struck by lightning during the storm (not as bad as it sounds; tall buildings get hit in electrical storms all the time to no ill effect so long as they’re grounded properly) and, as a result, many of the key systems were on the fritz. I got new keys that, grudgingly, worked, and we finally got into our room around 10 after 7, ending our travel for the day:

Cumulative total distance: 2970 miles

We relaxed a bit in our room and waited for the storm to pass completely before venturing out for dinner.

Around quarter of 8 we decided to give it a try. We’d looked up some restaurants and decided to give this one called Agave a shot. We hoped that maybe the heavy rains would cut the regular Friday crowd. Nope. Not there, at least. By the time we arrived it was clear that we weren’t going to get seated any time soon simply from looking at the parking lot, which was jam-packed. A valet guy waved us in but I knew we’d be facing probably an hour wait and it simply wouldn’t be worth it. Oh well, we tried, at least.

We drove back around to downtown and found the strip of touristy franchise restaurants near our hotel. I’d previously observed that, during inclement weather, these can actually be easy to eat at, since folks normally walk there and no one wants to go out to walk to eat during a thunderstorm. We parked back in the hotel lot and hoofed it out to this Tex-Mex ordeal called Jalapeno Charlie’s which, sure enough, was nearly empty, and so we got a table and a waiter who looked like Steve Carrel right away.

As you can imagine, “authenticity” wasn’t the best word, but it was getting late and we were hungry enough to eat about anything. So it worked just fine. I had a decent beef burrito and a few bottles of Dos Equis to wash it down and my mood improved substantially as a result.

We decided to explore a bit after eating in the light sprinkles and decided to see for ourselves just how ghetto the purportedly highly-ghetto Underground Atlanta was. The answer? Meh. Looked a lot like Atlanta’s answer to the question of Faneuil Hall that no one really asked. Not scary, just trashy. The mall part was closed and we didn’t feel like exploring the bar part since we got the idea. A fellow selling incense out of a plastic bag accosted us and we took that as our signal it was time to head back to the hotel.

We returned to our room around 10 and, despite the rain and the bungled dinner plans, felt pretty good about Atlanta. It reminded us of Boston in a lot of good ways, but it’s not Boston, which is something we value in a city. So, hey, maybe it’s a pretty good place. We feel bad that we didn’t have time to drive around and explore it more, but it’s definitely got potential. We hope to return some day.

As for right then, we read for a short while and felt recharged just to be back in a major city. We went to sleep ready to tackle the first of two major days of driving to bring us back to the Northeast the next day.

Saturday, May 29 - we woke around 7:30, showered, packed up our things, and loaded up the car. We didn’t check out of the hotel just yet, though, since we wanted to do a bit of sightseeing first. I grabbed a cup of coffee from an urn in the lobby – now significantly quieted from when we arrived – but it was both boiling hot and profoundly stale (probably re-heated from the previous day) and so I abandoned it after a couple of probing sips.

We decided to walk down the block a bit toward the tourist attractions just starting to open for the day. First there’s the Coca-Cola Museum. Since we didn’t feel like paying for what’s effectively one gigantic advertisement for a company that doesn’t really need much more advertisement to begin with, we didn’t go in. Plus they had metal detectors. I mean, seriously? Metal detectors for the Coke Museum. C’mon, people. These kept even Coca-Cola’s founder out, as it turns out he is made of metal:

But far be it for us to turn down an offer from mecha-John Pemberton:

Plus, Becky could look in longingly at all the Coke history she was missing from the outside:

Our real goal, though, was to head next door to the Georgia Aquarium to get Becky a couple of flattened pennies from Atlanta. We figured at least one machine had to be in the gift shop (true), and that the gift shop is almost always public-access since museums want to encourage people to spend money even if they didn’t buy admission. Well, not at the Georgia Aquarium. We could see the gift shop. We could see the machine in the gift shop. But we couldn’t get there without buying a ticket. Becky asked a security guard if she could just go into the gift shop and the guard hemmed and hawed and finally said she would need an escort. Becky said thanks, but no thanks, it wasn’t worth it. Curse you, Georgia Aquarium.

As we wandered about its perimeter looking for another way in (we thought maybe there was a hallway that led past the gift shop if one entered from the parking lot in the back, but no such luck) we saw that the aquarium was plastered in posters featuring its new mascot, a computer-animated clownfish with big eyes named “Deepo.” Deepo talked to us over the outdoor speakers and told us about the museum. One can’t help but wonder if a certain mouse fond of his intellectual property is going to have something to say about that. Perhaps he already has, since a cursory look through the Aquarium’s website just now didn’t turn up any references to Deepo. Ah, Deepo. We barely knew ye.

So, having failed to get pennies, we decided to head on to our first real stop of the day and hoped we would have better luck there. We checked out of the hotel and hit the road again around 9:15. We followed US-78 East until it became a highway and took Exit 8 out to the entrance of our first destination:

Daily total distance: 20 miles

We were headed to Stone Mountain Park, an outdoor theme park with lots of physical activities for the kids but, more importantly for us, the one and only Stone Mountain, steeped in Southern history and a non-trivial amount of historical association with the KKK. These days, though, Stone Mountain seems to be about good, clean, Southern fun for the whole family for folks of all races. Which is nice.

When we arrived around 9:45 the amusement park was just getting set up for its 10 AM opening and so families were just starting to file in. No one wanted to go on a duck boat ride yet:

After a bit of confusion and milling about we were able to discern that we did not have to pay admission right there to go see the carving. Good, since we’d already paid for parking. We found a path leading up a hill from where we’d parked and came up to the main visitor’s hall, which by that time was open for the day. We walked through and found ourselves face-to-face with the famous carving:

You’ll note in the first photo that there appears to be some people laying out a tarp and some blankets. They’re there to camp out for the fireworks and light show that night for Memorial Day. The light show was probably around 10 PM, maybe 9:30 at the earliest. It was then 10 AM. They were planning to camp there for 12 hours. To see a light show. Now, I’m certain that it is a Southern Spectacular and Not to Be Missed if we had the time, but I don’t know that there’s anything in this day and age for which I’d camp out for 12 hours. Ah well, maybe it means I’m too jaded in my Yankee ways.

Drawing upon your US History class in high school, you might recognize the three men on the rock face as, from left to right, Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. Though General Lee’s got a stoic gaze, Davis looks a bit upset. His face is nothing compared to the unbridled look of terror on their horses, though:

The soul-less zombie eyes are a hell of a thing, too, aren’t they?

If we wanted to learn about Stone Mountain, a helpful magic box in the wall would tell us all about it in five different languages!

I kept pressing them all just to see if I could hear the sound of Pat Buchanan having a seizure somewhere off in the distance. Or at least Lou Dobbs suffering a stroke if I pressed the “Spanish” button enough times. Failing that, we decided we had to do what needed to be done:

It didn’t come out quite as well as the one for those other four guys, though:

We walked back in the visitor’s center and through the gift shop so Becky could pick up some flattened pennies and I could get a delicious Coca-Cola beverage to supplement the caffeine the nasty coffee from the hotel failed to provide me. Becky found a friend there:

We got some other candy but left Big Chief Suckerpop’s plumage alone. It looked too carefully laid-out to mess with, really.

From there we decided to ride the cable car up to the top of the mountain. It was pretty cheap and there was no line then (though from the amount of ropes it looked like they anticipated a very lengthy line around peak times) so we gave it a whirl:

From there we couldn’t see the carving since we were standing right on top of it, but we did have an excellent view of much of Northern Georgia:

As you can see, they put up fencing to discourage folks from falling to their deaths down the sheer rock face, so we had a little patch of bare rock on which to roam but couldn’t do much in the way of climbing. It was windy up there, too, which made it pleasantly cool, even a bit chilly. A nice change of pace from the blistering sun we’d endured the past several days.

After sitting on the rock face for a while and enjoying the view we decided we’d best catch the next cable car down, as I heard the conductor mumble something about how they only come once every 15 minutes. This time we hopped in line early and I wedged myself in between the door mechanism and the back window so I could take photos of the carving on our way back down:

And with that we decided we’d seen all we needed to of Stone Mountain. It was around 11 by then and we needed to be on our way, as our next stop was time-sensitive and some distance away. After a bit of trouble finding the way to the park exit (it was hard to fight the natural inclination to follow other cars out, but, of course, they were all going in then) we got ourselves back to US-78 headed West. From there we hooked up I-285 North and got on I-75 North headed through the Georgian foothills of the Appalachians. Around 10 of 1 in the afternoon we crossed into Tennessee:

A new state for Becky (the last on the trip), but not for me since I’d been there once before to visit my uncle out in Memphis way on the other end of the state. As for us, we weren’t going much farther, as we exited off onto I-24 West and then drove out to the Chattanooga Riverfront:

Daily total distance: 155 miles

Why were we there? Why, to take a lovely river boat cruise down the Tennessee River on the Southern Belle. We were early and, as such, the boat wasn’t anywhere to be seen when we arrived. So, we kept driving around, trying to get the lay of the land in the tangle of streets near the riverfront. After trying – and failing – to find a gas station, I decided to pull in to park somewhere. I noticed a fairly active parking lot that charged for parking, but also had city metered spaces lining it along the street, many of which were empty. The meters only allowed a maximum of 2 hours at a time. I did the math and figured we’d be gone for about 2 hours and 20 minutes from when I parked, though; too much time. Since it didn’t seem like the good people of Chattanooga were as ridiculously strict about parking laws as folks in the Boston area are, though, and since it was a holiday weekend, I decided “what the heck,” and risked a ticket for the cheaper parking.

From there we walked across the road and onto the pier where we figured the boat would dock when it arrived back from its earlier cruise. Sure enough, before long the Southern Belle chugged toward us down the river, calliope blaring an upbeat tune:

It docked not where we were seated on the pier, though, but astride a floating building made out to look like a riverboat just upstream from us that we’d previously marked as a restaurant or a casino, maybe. Turns out it was a restaurant, yes, but it was also where the Southern Belle docked:

It was down a sharp hill from the riverfront road, you see, and we couldn’t see its sign from where we’d parked. Good thing we’d gotten there early. We walked across the green and toward the entrance:

By then there was already a substantial line of folks waiting to board, but fist things first, I needed our tickets. I waited behind a middle-aged man who was excelling at failing at life at the ticket counter, nervous that they’d start boarding any second and shove off without us. After he finally left, though, the man behind the counter took my name and handed me our tickets, all ready to go, from a small pile in front of him. Huh, that was easy. Much relieved, I rejoined Becky, who had found the flattened penny machine and was looking at t-shirts. As the line seemed to not be moving for a while – and then did so slowly as numerous old folks filed on board – Becky ran back and purchased the shirt just in time for us to board the Southern Belle.

I’d gotten us tickets for the lunch cruise, which, as it turns out, was the same as the regular cruise, except that we got to eat first. They had a good layout of cold cuts, cheese, soups, and salads and we each helped ourselves right away, as by then it was 2 PM and neither of us had had much in the way of anything substantial to eat yet that day.

Still, of all the things on our journey, ones that require showing up at a very specific time and, if we’re late, we miss altogether tend to make me the most nervous. I was pleased as punch to be sitting down to a nice lunch, having successfully made what I’d deemed to be our easiest-to-miss attraction. And I’m glad we made it, too. After cleaning our plates, we each grabbed a Moon Pie from a big bowl of them they had out – apparently they’re made locally right in Chattanooga – and sat outside on the terrace along the port-side main deck to enjoy the view and a light, cool breeze on a beautiful afternoon:

We sat in our chairs with only two other couples occupying the entire port-side terrace on that deck (we’d later head starboard, which was equally sparse. Apparently everyone else had huddled up on the bow of the upper deck as if on a whale watching cruise) and watched as the Tennessee River slowly chugged by:

The view was not without points of interest, though. There was the occasional water skier:

…and some ludicrously huge houses that our captain pointed out over the PA were where “the rich people live:”

Now, I can’t quite recall how much he said that behemoth with all the decks cost, but I believe it was either $600k or $800k. Certainly under a million, whatever the number was. For the record, a decent-sized (by which I mean probably about 2400 sq feet) condo across the street from us – in Somerville, not even Boston proper – recently went for a hair under $600k. That sucker looks like it’s 10,000 sq feet, easy, probably closer to 12,000. For about the same amount. Dag, yo.

After marveling how ridiculously cheaper real estate was in Chattanooga than Boston, our ship slowly turned an about-face around a bridge pylon and headed us back up-river.

We saw the Delta Queen, a decommissioned steam boat out of New Orleans that had been pulled via barge up to Chattanooga and was being turned into a casino:

…as well as an abandoned, floating TGI Friday’s that was also tugged in years ago but, due to lack of proper permits and trouble with its construction, had sat empty ever since, slowly rusting and rotting into the river:

But there were good things, too! We saw one island – McLellan Island Nature Preserve – that was home to any number of fisher bird species, such as this great blue heron:

Unfortunately it had also become populated by a clutch of non-native cormorants that had taken up residence there and – the captain had heard from folks who maintained the preserve – largely subsisted on heron chicks instead of river fish. So that might be something they will need to address in the near future.

That said, Chattanooga is a city that is in a renewal. Much like Pittsburgh, in the wake of the departure of the heavy industry that it grew up on that will not be coming back any time soon, it has transformed itself into an art-friendly environment, complete with a new arts center along the river:

So maybe one day Chattanooga will be more than just a town in southeastern Tennessee with a funny name. It remains to be seen. Right then, though, we had seen about all there was on our 90-minute tour and, much as it had done earlier as we watched from shore, the Southern Belle fired up her calliope and played us a jolly ol’ tune as we pulled in to dock:

As we headed back into the gift shop I had to show Becky one last thing: a display of magnets called “Memory Lane” that displayed many of the same Jim Crow-era advertisements we’d seen in the Blacks in Wax Museum back on Day 1. Unfortunately, I’d neglected to take a picture right then and, as each minute that passed was another minute I could get a parking ticket, we didn’t have time to shop around right then. So, we rushed back to the car, making a note to look out for Memory Lane magnets in the future.

Whether due to luck or the fact that Chattanooga didn’t clearly advertise that they were not enforcing parking meters over Memorial Day weekend, we didn’t have a ticket. And so we got back into the car, content from our lovely cruise down the Tennessee River. We got back to I-75 North and quickly stopped for gas while still in town. From there we pressed forward through eastern Tennessee, refreshed and ready for a good, solid drive. As the miles ticked by afternoon became early evening and Becky took a few shots out the window of the lovely scenery in historic Franklin:

We also saw some guy who appeared to be hauling what looked like some sort of cross between a fan boat and a go-kart:

I’m not sure what the hell it was, but it was awesome and I want one.

I-75 merged into I-40 East and we followed that up until when we hit I-81 North a bit before 6. We continued along I-81, crossing into Virginia around an hour later. Wanting to get a good, solid driving shift in so we didn’t have far to go after dinner, I pressed on until 8:00, when we finally pulled over in Wytheville, VA:

Daily total distance: 450 miles

Wytheville is, if nothing else, home of a very… fabulous water tower:

…though I doubt the residents think of it that way.

It also allegedly had a Cracker Barrel. I mean, it did. We could see it. We just couldn’t figure out for the life of us how to get there. Finally, after making a break-neck turn up a road with a steep incline that sure looked to me like I was going the wrong way down a one-way street, we managed to get there. I earned my country fried steak, dammit. And double-side of mashed potatoes. Because by that point in the trip I’d pretty much given up on any hopes of keeping a modest diet on the road. If my gut hanging out in any of the above pictures wasn’t enough evidence of that.

It was a good, solid meal, and just what we needed. As we had eaten the sun had set. In the darkness I got turned around and accidentally got going the wrong way on the highway. So, after sorting that out and muttering about how that Cracker Barrel appears to have been in a sort of Virginian Bermuda Triangle, I got us headed on our way and to our hotel, which was, fortunately, not all that far away. We pulled back off the highway around 10:15 a few miles past Roanoke:

Daily total distance: 530 miles

When we arrived it became immediately evident that this was probably going to be one of those “character-building” hotel experiences. Oh how right we were. A gruff looking man with a moustache and a stained NASCAR t-shirt stormed out of the lobby as we arrived, jumped in his needlessly-enormous pickup truck, and peeled off into the night. As we walked in, a bleach-blonde woman with more fingers than teeth and a tan that was not entirely natural even for southern Virginia yelled out in a rasp, “well, to he-yull with hi-yum!” In my notes I described her as “irrationally ugly.” I stick by that.

We quietly checked in as the woman returned and asked a few things of the lady behind the counter. She seemed to work there, the blonde one, but she wasn’t wearing a uniform or a name-tag. Meanwhile a cabal of young, silent men watched the whole thing from across the lobby in a darkened nook, huddled around a laptop screen. The whole thing was starting to take on a David Lynch vibe. We got to our room quickly and locked the door, not to come out until morning:

Cumulative total distance: 3500 miles

The room had some… quirks, too. The carpet was damp. All of it. I sincerely hoped it was because it had just been shampooed and hadn’t dried yet. I’d hate to think what would cause that otherwise. Also, as if to ramp up the Lynch-iness, when I went to use the bathroom the light started flickering. And then it went out. Doing one’s business in the dark is not fun nor recommended.

Still, it had been a long day, we were tired, and we didn’t have all that far left to go. So we just sighed it all off and went to bed pretty much right away. It had been a very good day and we weren’t going to let a crappy hotel get us down. The next day we’d have one final attraction before driving back to New Jersey to see Buddy for the first time in 12 days. And that was something to look forward to.

Sunday, May 30 - trying to ignore the troubles with our hotel, we slept until about 7:45. When we woke up we found that there were two police cars and a half-dozen officers all milling around outside our window. “Of course,” we thought. After the scene we’d witnessed last night, it was only a matter of time. We decided to get out of there as quickly as possible. Which was made markedly more difficult by the lack of light in the bathroom. Showering in the dark is also not recommended.

Still, within an hour we were checked out and had our things back in our car, which, fortunately, was not part of the reason the police were there. We were glad that was the last hotel we would stay in on the trip, because it certainly didn’t make us enthusiastic about another night like that. We hit the road without delay after stopping for gas and snacks and took a lovely drive up US-220 North until we reached I-64 West and took it into southern West Virginia. Our destination, White Sulphur Springs, was just a few miles past the border:

Daily total distance: 70 miles

We were headed to the lovely and historical Greenbrier, a sprawling Victorian resort plunked down on the western slopes of the Appalachians with the idea of attracting Washington socialites and old-money Virginians alike for secluded getaways. The Greenbrier has a very slow, rolling, Southern air to it, even though it’s by no means in the Deep South. We arrived around 10 minutes after 10 AM and parked in the self-park lot across the way from the main entrance:

I’ve been to the Greenbrier as a guest maybe 4 or 5 times in my life, normally for large family gatherings, the last of which was probably 2000 or 2001. I wanted to show it to Becky. We walked in past the guard and toward the main building, which was undergoing a massive renovation:

Unable to access the front from that angle, we walked around the huge building and off to one side to another entrance. Before we did that, though, I spotted a gazebo. Now, White Suphur Springs was chosen as the specific location for the Greenbrier because of the spring water that comes from there that – you can probably guess – contains a lot of sulfur. Stuff smells like rotten eggs and doesn’t taste all that great, either. But leave it to the Victorians to decide that that must be healthy for you, and so they built up the resort around it. I’d tried it from the Greenbrier’s spring once on a previous visit and could vaguely remember it being contained within a gazebo, so we wandered over to check it out.

It wasn’t the right gazebo, though. The Greenbrier’s entire property is enormous (it’s officially listed as 6500 acres – a bit over 10 square miles – but much of that is woods) and so there are several gazebos that dot its landscape. At that moment with steady high humidity and rising heat we didn’t feel like traipsing about and inspecting every gazebo for foul-smelling water, and so we decided to head on inside.

The interior design’s the sort of trip that can only be provided by the combination of Victorian interior design and old-money Southern luxury. Even the bathrooms were swanky:

Just how swanky?

That’s right: mandatory luxury. Anyone caught using a paper towel will be promptly escorted from the premises.

The great thing about arriving there in the late morning on a Sunday of a holiday weekend is that most folks were still just getting going: at the pool, eating brunch, maybe playing a round of golf out back. The hallways, though, were fairly empty of people. And so we were able to have the run of the place to take some photos in the various rooms. A big thing in mansions of that size, apparently, is to have rooms with names reflecting their theme, such as the Green Room, the East Veranda or the Trellis Lobby. The result is, when left to one’s devices, some really great pictures:

Of course, just like the flickering light and irrationally ugly people did at our hotel the previous night, that checkerboard floor and the oppressively vaulted and echoing ceilings made us think of David Lynch. We tried to tap into that spirit:

In the process we saw some doors propped open to an expansive ballroom. Toward the back we saw something…

A g-g-g-g-g-g-ghost!

She told us that in heaven, everything is fine. We took her word for it and returned to the Trellis Lobby.

By that time it was getting close to 11 and it was almost time for us to check in. Not to the hotel, mind you, but to our activity for the day: the one and only Congressional Bunker Tour. We checked in with a short, perky woman in a pantsuit who, thankfully, had our reservations (when I had booked them they didn’t take any credit card info over the phone and there was some confusion where they thought I’d meant June 30 and not May 30 and so I was a bit concerned it didn’t get booked properly) and got us settled up, taking our cameras in the process, unfortunately.

Now, this was the third time I’d done the Bunker Tour. The first was probably around ‘98 or so, shortly after they started doing it, and the second was when I’d last been there, in 2000 or 2001. it was so interesting to me that I wanted to return a third time with Becky. Both times they’d allowed photography, but, of course, I didn’t have a digital camera then and so didn’t take pictures. Unfortunately, the Greenbrier’s policy on photography on the tour changed, and relatively recently.

You see, a while back the whole United States real estate market and, as a result, the entire financial system kind of went kablooey. A lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of people lost their houses, and we were thrown into a recession for a solid two years. You might remember hearing about it. It was on the news.

The Greenbrier was not immune. Suffering the ill effects of the economy as folks cut back on luxuries, it was forced to declare bankruptcy in Spring of 2009, reporting $100 million in assets and, apparently, close to $500 million in debts. It was sold off and purchased by wealthy West Virginian developer Jim Justice, who purchased the Greenbrier for reportedly around $20 million. Justice immediately enforced some changed to get the Greenbrier out of the red. He started a major renovation project and pushed through plans to set up a casino that had been on the books for years but could never get the governmental approval needed to start. In order to staunch the bleeding out of cash until the casino could be completed (it just recently opened at partial capacity while the rest is still being completed but was not yet open when we were there), Justice leased out part of the bunker to a subsidiary of logistics giant CSX (previous owners of the Greenbrier, actually) called CSX IP for them to put numerous servers containing proprietary data underground in a temperature-controlled environment encased in thick concrete. Unfortunately, CSX wasn’t too keen in letting folks take pictures around all their data and so photography has, since then, been expressly forbidden on the tour. Nuts.

We passed the half-hour between when we checked in and when the tour playing Scrabble, having found a board tucked away in a drawer near where we paid for the tour. We watched as the rest of the tour group filled up. Though we’d later be joined by a small group of bikers, the other 8 or 10 folks on the tour were exclusively couples 40-60 years of age suffering from what Becky found termed “Weekend White Guy Syndrome:” wearing white or yellow polo shirts tucked into boxy, khaki shorts that come up above the knee, complete with loafers. One man – I was surprised it was only one – pitched a minor fit about how he had to be away from his phone for the duration of the hour-and-a-half-long tour. I came close to suggesting to him that perhaps he shouldn’t go on the tour if he can’t be away from his phone for that long but decided we’d gone too far our of our way to cause a scene. I suspected that at least half of our group – excluding the late-arrival bikers – were Tea Partiers. A couple of them grumbling below their breath throughout the tour at a lack of need to protect those bums in Congress these days helped confirm that. I did my best to ignore them and enjoy the tour for its historical value.

Now, I wish I could provide you with some photos of all the striking things I saw, but I can’t. You can, however, go to this PBS website that gives a virtual tour, which is about the best I can do for you, aside from suggesting you go down there yourself, which I do, should you have the opportunity.

The back story: it’s late in the Eisenhower administration. The Cold War is ramping up. A memo crosses Ike’s desk imploring Congress to entertain a worst-case scenario contingency plan should the war go hot and Washington DC be attacked with nuclear weapons. Plans are made in secret to construct a fallout shelter across the Appalachians at the Greenbrier. The classified project would become known as Project Greek Island and, after Eisenhower’s initial memo, left no official government paper trail: everything was paid for by the Greenbrier, who was then reimbursed by the US government who had already been leasing some space from the Greenbrier. All employees of the bunker were Greenbrier employees, not US government employees. During its construction in the early 60s, the bunker was tacked on to a medical clinic already planned to be built on-site. It was built directly beneath it, carved into a rocky mountain. Workers at the time privately expressed incredulity in regard to just how deep they were digging and just how thick they were laying concrete for the purposes of a medical clinic for rich folks with tennis elbow, but they all seemed to know better than to ask questions publicly. Many signed non-disclosure forms and passed through security screenings on a daily basis, and that seemed to do the trick to hush them up.

When completed, the total operating budget of the bunker was under $1 million which, as far as the government was concerned, could be written off as rounding error in annual budget ledgers, meaning that, in the 30 years it operated, the US government never had any record of actually paying for it. Aside from the owners of the Greenbrier, only top government officials were told about it: the President, Vice President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Majority Leader. All others were assured there was a contingency plan in place if they asked, but were not given details. During its operation time no government official ever came forward with their knowledge of the bunker. One presumes the same could be said of any number of Cold War-era secrets they were privilege to.

Employees of the bunker – a skeleton crew of only about six to maintain and clean it and keep it in a state of readiness – were only allowed to work in very specific areas, shuttled in at the beginning of their shift and back out at the end. Again, many knew they were in some sort of secret area of great importance, but none guessed at what it really was. The bunker remained hidden in plain sight behind blast doors leading directly to the hotel, covered in ostentatious wallpaper to discourage folks from lingering too long in front of them:

At the other end, an entrance for trucks was simply covered with a false door with a sign reading: “WARNING: HIGH VOLTAGE” to discourage anyone from hanging around there, either. The trick worked for the remainder of the Cold War. The Greenbrier used the open spaces of the bunker to hold conventions. Companies like Ford and GM had auto shows inside the bunker’s main lobby attached to the hotel. Cooking classes were held in the bunker’s galley, decked out in abrasive and clashing patterns, again to keep attendees from wandering around after the class. Meetings were held in one of two auditoriums: one with precisely 435 seats, one with exactly 100. Again, no one stopped to ponder the significance of those numbers, or if they did, they figured it to be a coincidence.

Buried below these, in areas inaccessible to the public, the Greenbrier had built and kept maintained enough beds for all of Congress. Apparently with each new Congressional election every two years, the bunks were re-assigned. It was the task of one of the heads of the Greenbrier to decide, in the event of a nuclear apocalypse, which Congresspeople were to bunk with one another. There was also another clinic specifically for the bunker that was constantly stocked with fresh medical supplies, showers, and a broadcast room with a false backdrop of the Capitol to send out TV signals allowing folks across the country to think that their leaders were still in Washington, DC, safe and sound. One side of the backdrop showed the Capitol in Spring, surrounded by cherry blossoms. If flipped over, it showed it in Fall with orange leaves.

As members of Congress would have arrived, they would have been herded through special showers to remove as much radiation fallout as possible. When they had all arrived the blast doors would be sealed. Strong enough to withstand conventional bomb blasts, the blast doors could not stand up to a direct nuclear strike. Built before the era of ICBMs, the bunker was to be used only for fallout: it was thought that Washington, DC would be hit, but not some backwater town on the West Virginian side of the Appalachians.

Enough food and fresh water was always kept on-hand to feed 500 people for at least 30 days. It was thought that, after this time, the level of radiation outside would have dropped to low enough for the doors to be opened. Power was provided by two enormous Diesel generators fed by gargantuan tanks of fuel that, again, had to be fired up and recycled periodically during the time the bunker was active, as well as an incinerator that would have been used to get rid of any garbage generated, or any dead bodies. Congress’s family members were to also be brought to the Greenbrier, but they would have to stay above-ground. It was uncertain in the contingency plan developed for the bunker if they would survive up there or not. A cache of weapons – including shotguns and M16s – was kept on-hand in case a riot developed in the bunker.

And so the bunker sat, in plain sight but out of the public eye, though the end of the Cold War. In 1992 an investigative journalist named Ted Gup probed into the records surrounding the bunker and smelled it out. He interviewed some folks associated with it but didn’t get very far. Still, he was able to cobble together a piece exposing it and, citing the end of the Cold War rendering the bunker as obsolete, published a report on it in the Washington Post. While it was still in-press, the Greenbrier’s ownership decided to go public with an admission about the existence of the bunker in order to cut off conspiracy theorists at the pass.

Of course, the US government terminated providing financial support for the bunker. Not sure what to do about it for several years, the Greenbrier finally elected to open it up for tours in the late 90s, which is when I first saw it. The tour has slightly changed from then: it’s given in a different direction, a few small areas are now off-limits, and one dramatic effect: the slamming of a huge, 40-ton door behind the tour group to simulate getting locked in the bunker is no longer performed, as the door was developing fractures in its hinges from being opened and shut thrice daily. But it still brings home the point how very real the Cold War was at that time. For folks like me who can only remember it as the mighty United States surging past dysfunctional, broken-down USSR limping toward its inevitable collapse, it really shows just how real a threat the Soviets – and total nuclear war – was seen as at the height of the Cold War. And so I’m glad it has been opened up as a historical testament to that time, even if, 18 years on, the Greenbrier still has no love lost for Mr. Gup.

Our cameras were returned to us at the end of the tour. We were walked outside on a patio where we were allowed to resume taking pictures:

We were asked to turn around and look at the medical clinic situated above the bunker behind us:

There it was, obscured by pine trees. And for 30 years, it was really that simple. An incredibly successful example of the ability to hide things in plain sight.

We were handed a packet of souvenir postcards from the bunker. We thanked our tour guide and with that we departed the Greenbrier. By that point it was 1:00 and we wanted to get some lunch. However, there’s not all that much to the town of White Sulphur Springs, especially on a Sunday before a holiday, and so our options weren’t all that many, which is to say, practically none. Finally, just a short bit before we met back up with the highway, we found a pizza-and-subs joint called April’s Pizza that looked perfectly decent and, more importantly, open. There were only two couples in there other than us – both of whom seemed to know the owners – and so we figured we’d get in and out and on the road quickly. We ordered some garlic bread to start since we were quite hungry and I got a chicken parm sandwich. And we waited. And waited. With the sort of never-in-a-hurry-ever attitude that’s the trademark of West Virginia, our food finally came out and we wolfed it all down quickly. It was good and it was certainly inexpensive, but man, did it take forever.

We left at 2:00 and got back on I-64 East to Virginia. We took it all the way to I-81 North and followed that, hitting West Virginia again – this time on the eastern panhandle – a bit before 5:

We passed right over it and into Maryland, where we decided to put in for a stop for gas in Hagerstown:

Daily total distance: 300 miles

This was, apparently, easier said than done. I had to drive several miles to find the dang Exxon station signs assured me was right off the highway, getting a tour of Hagerstown I never asked for in the process. After further trepidation in trying to get back to the highway thanks to some rather difficult one-way roads and unexpected construction, we finally made it back heading North, crossing the remaining short clip of Maryland into Pennsylvania at about 5:40.

About an hour and 15 minutes later we exited off I-81 North onto I-78 East. We followed that for a while, figuring we’d stop for dinner somewhere around Allentown or Easton. When we got there, though, we couldn’t find anything that appealed to us, and so we continued across the Delaware River and into New Jersey around 8:00. A few miles in we found a Burger King right off the highway and decided that would do just fine:

Daily total distance: 475 miles

When we arrived a minivan full of about 8 Arabic (or maybe Iranian) men and women unloaded at the same time as us. Now, not because they were Middle-Eastern but because they were just so many we quickly decided to be a slight bit rude and run ahead of them to get there first. This bold decision turned out to be a good one since the Burger King appeared to be staffed by precisely two people then and, after we were done eating, the group of eight were still slowly getting their food. Apparently the day before Memorial Day is prime-time for slow service.

From there we weren’t too far from our final destination and so we pressed on down I-78 East, up I-287 North and across on NJ-10 to my parents’ house in Denville, arriving safe and sound at about half past 9:

Daily total distance: 530 miles

We saw one The Dog who was very happy to see us, if only because we’d provide a foil from the cats who had, again, taken up a full-time task of antagonizing him. We also saw my parents and their neighbors, whom they had over to celebrate a birthday. They were winding down when we arrived and so left shortly thereafter for the evening. I grabbed a couple Amstel Lights from the beer coolers my father had laid out to help relax a bit from the long, hard drive that afternoon and evening.

Cumulative total distance: 4030 miles

My mother had prepared far too much food – as is her wont – and so after cooling down a bit I tried my best to help her clean up. After that we gave them their presents we’d gotten, started our laundry going, and crawled upstairs to hit the sack around 11. We weren’t home yet, but it was good to feel like we were practically there. Exhausted as we were, we slept well that night.

Monday, May 31 - I woke up around 7:30, switched out our laundry into the dryer, and proceeded to go back to sleep until about 9. After that we got up, showered, folded up our laundry and gathered up all of our things into the car, including, for the first time in two weeks, one The Dog:

It was supposed to be blazing hot that day and, upon loading it into the car, we discovered that Buddy’s blanket reeked of urine. We thought he’d peed on it, but we later figured out that it was the cats claiming their territory who’d done it. Cat piss smells horrible. So, we would have to drive the entire way back to Boston with our back windows rolled down. Cats are not my favorite animals.

My Mom had already left for work that morning but Dad had the day off and so he made us a cooler full of drinks for the road and saw us out as we left around 10:30. We hit I-287 North again, crossed into New York and across the Tappan Zee Bridge, hooked onto I-684 North, took that up to I-84 East, and hit Connecticut around 10 minutes of noon. From there we pressed on to Manchester, where we put in for a stop for lunch:

Daily total distance: 160 miles

We stopped at our old favorite on the NJ-MA route, Shady Glen, around 1. We got our standard fare of cheeseburgers, milkshakes, fries and onion rings, trying to eat as quickly as possible as Buddy was still out in the cars. The windows were down and we were in the shade, but it was still immensely hot that day. We managed to make it back out in decent time, gave Buddy some leftover fries and onion rings to calm him down, and hit the road again right away, crossing into Massachusetts around 2.

From there it was the same drive down I-90 I’ve done dozens of times before and we got back home to good ol’ Somerville a touch after 3 in the afternoon:

Daily total distance: 260 miles

We unloaded the car and unpacked our things. Becky was particularly fond of her coconut head she’d gotten in Mississippi:

We also immediately threw Buddy’s blanket in the wash. It would need to go through twice before the cat urine smell dissipated enough to give it back to him. With all of our things secure and nothing gone wrong at home to report – both The Guinea Pig and The Lizard were just fine and dandy – we were able to declare our trip officially completed, another rousing success:

Final total distance: 4304 miles

We’d driven barely half as far as our first Great American Road Trip, but we think we’d managed to pack in just as much adventure. Not bad at all, I’d say.

I called up Alex C and went over to pick up our keys from him, thanking him and Ashley F again for taking care of our lower-maintenance animals in our absence. After that we dragged ourselves to the grocery store (since we didn’t have much in the way of food), relaxed a bit back at home, got some Wings Over Somerville for dinner and then watched Even Dwarfs Started Small off Netflix. Dave D had recommended it to us the previous summer and I’d put it in our queue. It took that long to come up, I suppose. It’s… well, it’s something. It’s Werner Herzog directing a bunch of ne’er-do-well dwarfs as they engage in various antics. And that’s about it. Interesting, for sure.

After that we retired to bed, read a bit, and went the heck to sleep. We’d both have to return to work the next day. We definitely weren’t looking forward to it, but, such is life. It goes on. And so do we.

Tuesday, May 25 - having gotten a solid night’s sleep, we woke up at 6:45 to start what would be the second-biggest day of our whole trip. We checked out of the hotel and hit the road at about 8, getting back to I-95 South via I-516 East to I-16 West. From that point the drive was smooth and sunny and without incident. We hit the Florida border a bit after 9:30 and, still feeling fresh and enthusiastic about our day, I decided to keep going past Jacksonville and all the way down to Exit 223 just a bit north of Titusville. There we stopped around 11:45 to get gas and make a pit stop. The gas station had the Florida equivalent to Russian nesting dolls for sale:

There’d be plenty more alligators where those came from, too. But more on that later. Right then, though, we wanted to get some lunch before we started our activities for the day and so, after driving for a bit down US-1 South into Titusville, we elected to stop at a Wendy’s at about a quarter after noon:

Daily total distance: 275 miles

Titusville is a bit weird. You get a mix of Floridian local rednecks and people working at the Kennedy Space Center, which is to say, rocket scientists. The Wendy’s didn’t disappoint in that regard. It was mostly locals with thick, leathery tans, trucker hats and more tattoos than teeth, but there was one table of middle-aged men all talking in big Science Words who stood out as Not From Around There. It made me glad to think that science and discovery can find a way to carve out an existence even where it’s not as openly accepted.

After getting a Baconator that made me feel simultaneously ill and yet awesome, we continued on down the road and exited onto the long, straight-as-an-arrow NASA Causeway and out to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex:

Daily total distance: 285 miles

We arrived a bit before 1 and parked in their immense lot to start walking toward the main entrance.

All around us there were flags commemorating the space shuttle mission in orbit then:

STS-132 was the final planned mission of the space shuttle Atlantis and the third-to-last planned shuttle mission overall. There’ll be one more in October-November of this year and then the final one in February-March of 2011. And then that’s it. The 30-year space shuttle program will have come to an end. As for that mission, Atlantis was scheduled to land the day after we were there. It turns out it did, successfully, at Kennedy, but we were sort of glad we weren’t there for it as the Space Center would have probably been much, much busier and I can’t imagine that seeing the space shuttle land from afar looks much different than seeing a plane land. Still, it was kind of cool to know that everything we were seeing was in preparation for the landing the following day.

As for us, we were just happy to be there on a nice bright and sunny day:

After paying for our admission, getting a map and a few squashed pennies for Becky, we sat down to formulate a game plan for our time there. We decided that the best thing to start off with was a walk-through display called Robot Scouts: Trailblazers for Human Exploration!

That last one there is our robotic host. He guided us through each room as we learned about how robots are used to explore space. It was a sort of fictionalized account of how they’re “trained” to become space robots and explore new worlds. In that particular display he’s conversing with various rovers and satellites throughout the solar system. In a Futurama-like twist, though, the audio track for the robots he’s talking to was totally out-of-whack and so the entire experience made no sense. Modern technology!

There’s where we saw a Mars rover getting “trained” by a robotic “engineer” whom – in honor of Futurama as it was then on my mind – I decided to nickname Dr. Goodensexy. With perfect teeth and a peppy attitude right out of an after-school special, she looked about as much like a robotics engineer as I look like Samuel L. Jackson. But hey, for the kids, right?

From there our robotic host took a space ship out to Mars!

And there it is! The Red Planet! As you can see, Becky was there on a mission to help terraform it so that puny mortal human astronauts can go there one day and see it for themselves. Until then it’s purely the domain of brave robots such as our host!

After the 2-year journey home, we returned safely from Mars and continued our way around the Visitor Complex to our next stop, the Rocket Garden:

The Florida sun was beating down upon us with great ferocity by then, but we made some time to launch ourselves into orbit once or twice:

From there we walked over to briefly see the Early Space Exploration center. I was a bit disappointed that it seemed to be all about early human space exploration and didn’t contain any space monkeys. I’d have liked to have met one. Oh well, at least there were some 50s hi-jinks:

We also got to meet a real astronaut!

He let us go to the Moon and drive around in a rover!

Those last two pictures were taken by a lone Russian-sounding man who suggested he would take some photos of us in exchange for us getting shots of him. Despite the fact that his camera looked more expensive than was entirely necessary, what he took with mine – above – didn’t look all that great. At least he offered, though, I suppose.

By that point it was starting to get later in the afternoon and so we hoofed it across the Visitor Complex to the bus depot to take a tour of the Space Center ground where regular automobiles aren’t allowed.

The first major thing our bus went past was the shuttle hangar:

Now, it’s hard to get much perspective, but that right there shuttle hangar? It’s freaking huge. Called the Vehicle Assembly Building, it’s 525 feet tall. That means it comes up shoulder-high on the Prudential Tower here in Boston. That flag along the side? Twenty stories tall. Some window washers along side the building helped to give us some idea of the size:

The reason for this is that the space shuttle – and pretty much everything at NASA – is way bigger than one pictures it as being. Believe it or not, it takes a lot of fuel to generate enough power to launch something into space and that makes everything pretty big, I suppose.

Continuing along, we also saw the track where the crawler that takes the space shuttle to and from the launch pad drives:

The reason it travels on a gravel pathway is that the crawler is so heavy that it would crumble an asphalt road beneath its tracks. And so, every time it’s moved, a new layer of gravel is prepared. They were in the process of laying one as we were there.

We also saw the distantly-placed launch box that contained the electronics responsible for controlling every launch from the Kennedy Space Center:

Sorry to say, launches are not, in fact, controlled by a man pressing a giant red button.

Our first stop on the bus tour was at a Mercury-era launch pad converted into a museum outpost. This was a bit of a surprise to me not because I didn’t expect them to show that to us but because I had not read the description of the bus tour properly. I had assumed it was a roughly half-hour journey around the property in which we all stayed seated and snapped photos as our driver offered explanations of what everything was. After reading my pamphlet my heart sank into my stomach when I saw it instead had some three stops and was supposed to take an average of 2 1/2 hours. Time we very much didn’t have. After trying to think it over a bit and grabbing some astronaut ice cream to keep us busy while waiting for another bus to arrive to take us to the next stop, we immediately continued onward to the Apollo Center, which was much more built-up into a proper museum:

Outside, we discovered that, by simply walking around back we could hitch a bus that skipped the third stop (the International Space Station Center… bo-ring) and went straight back to the Visitor Complex. With that in mind we felt much more at ease and spent some more time exploring:

I was a bit disappointed that that sign on the floor didn’t blurt out “one day, Alice!” upon stepping on it. But I suppose the kids wouldn’t get it. And, really, it’s all about the kids.

And Astronaut Vans: the official van of astronauts.

The Apollo Center had a small wing that contained some artifacts from the real moon missions, too. Like moon rocks!

And tools with which to pick up after your Moon Dog!

And this, donated by one Klaatu B. Nikto:

And with that I could not make any dorkier jokes and so, after a quick trip to the gift shop to pick out a couple of things for ourselves and for our friends taking care of our guinea pig and lizard while we were away, we hopped on the bus back to the Visitor Complex. When we arrived we had time left only for one thing, and so we walked over to tour the model space shuttle:

From the top of the adjoining tower we could see across the whole of the Visitor Complex:

Inside, though, the micro-gravity associated with being in orbit was a bit tricky to get used to:

After we landed we decided that it was time to get going to our next stop. On our way out we saw a sand sculpture made by the natives of Astro-land:

Truly an advanced people.

Our passes to the Space Center included admission to the Astronaut Hall of Fame just down on the Titusville side of the NASA Causeway and so we headed there next to quickly see what was there:

While there we were able to see an early illustration of what space travel was like before NASA:

Though functional as sleepwear, early space pajamas had much in the way of improvement to be made to protect against the vacuum of space.

We also saw the helmets and uniforms of astronauts past:

Nobody knows where all the astronauts are now…

I tried to call to find them, but to no avail. But wait!

There they are! In America, on the Moon! Hooray! We’re #1!

Becky tried to launch off a rocket to celebrate:

Unfortunately it didn’t seem to be working, but she still got to reach out to E.T. Astronaut on our way out:

And with that we ended our magical journey through the Kennedy Space Center. It was 4:15 and we needed to get a move on toward Orlando. We took local roads to FL-528 West, one of Florida’s approximately 8,000 state-run divided highways that is also a toll road whenever it feels like it. Advice to folks driving through Florida? Bring lots of small change and $1 bills. For what it’s worth, though, the roads are well-maintained and traffic keeps moving at a smooth pace, and so we made it to the Orlando area without any troubles.

We made our way onto I-4 West just south of Orlando and then hooked onto the Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway. I don’t know who Irlo Bronson was but I like him because apparently it’s the only road in the US named after him so it was easy to locate on Google Maps. As we were driving we passed by a gigantic orange:

…as well as a place that referred to itself as “Fun Spot” but was most definitely not FunSpot:

What we were looking for, though, was much better than that. We found it a couple more miles on and had to stop for it:

Daily total distance: 350 miles

What did we stop for? Nothing less than a GIANT CAR-CRUNCHING ALLIGATOR:

Though he was quite impressive – far more so than the semi-abandoned, dilapidated motel he was advertising – he wasn’t without some wear over the years:

As getting tetanus was no more on our to-do list that day than getting hepatitis was the previous day, we decided to heed the sign’s warning and not venture out onto the rusted-out-rebar section of the gator and take pictures safely from the ground instead:

We barely had to go anywhere for our next stop as it was just next door: the Orlando Castle for Medieval Times!

Now, neither of us had ever been to Medieval Times before and we figured that the exceptionally touristy section of our trip was a perfect time to do so. The “performance” was at 7 and the tickets I’d printed out instructed us to arrive by 6. Sure enough, when we checked in around 5:45 we were far from the first to arrive.

We were given our seat holders – apparently we’d be in Yellow, Table 1 – as well as paper Burger King-like crowns for each of us. Mine predictably did not fit around my enormous head. This is something I’ve long been used to so it came as no surprise to me. We were then sent to have our picture taken with the King and then left to our own devices. As I figured the 6:00 time printed on the ticket was to encourage people who fail at life to not show up too late, I took this as a queue to get us some drinks:

I don’t suspect they really had Ye Olde Fruity Girly Drinks in medieval times but they were quite reasonably priced given how big and how strong they were. And we got to keep the hologram cups they came in! Bonus! We wound up having two rounds simply to pass the time. Which passed. Slowly. 6:15. 6:30. Nothin’ much happening. It was clear we could have shown up an hour after we did and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. We passed the time as best we could.

We also wound up buying that picture with the King simply to have something else to look at. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much money out of boredom in my life. Well played, Medieval Times. Well played.

Finally, around 6:45, after a lot of hullabaloo from the actors we were let into the arena. We were quite excited, not to mention hungry:

That’s the Yellow Knight – our section’s hero – in Ye Olde Programme above. After Ye Olde Waitere came around with Ye Olde Tomato Soupe and Ye Olde Pepsie the performance began! The Good White Knight came out with a message of peace, but, oh no!

He was captured by the insidious Black Knight! Meanwhile, Princess Whatserface wondered what became of her love, as Ye Royal Narratore welcomed us to Medieval Times:

After a display of Arabian horses and falconry in which Ye Royal Narratore had to yell at Ye Olde Douchebags in the crowd not to reach up for the bird with claws primed to tear their eyes out, the knights came out, along with our main course! Now, the menu stated it would be chicken and short ribs. I assumed this would be equal portions of both. Instead it was a single short rib and an entire half of a chicken per person. And, as anyone who has seen The Cable Guy knows, there were no utensils in medieval times, therefore there are no utensils at Medieval Times. Which made rationing Ye Olde Singular Paper Napkin carefully all the more important.

At any rate, before long our hero, the Yellow Knight, came out!

He and all the other knights were greeted by the King while Princess Whatserface continued to look worried:

After the King gave his blessings, the Procession of WoW Players passed through the arena and the tournament began!

It was then that we noticed that, amongst all of the jobs at Medieval Times, the worst was clearly Ye Olde Poope Scoope:

As the displays of skill and heroism came to a head, Ye Olde Jouste began!

However, without their helmets on, it seems that Ye Olde Knights were Ye Olde Ren Faire Nerds:

After the joust a terrible secret was revealed! The thus-far-evil-looking Green Knight was actually the totally-evil Black Knight! Shocking! And so the hand-to-hand dueling that culminated the tournament (and made for lousy, blurry pictures, I’m afraid) became a battle of Good versus Evil! But fear not, for after much trepidation, the Green Knight was defeated by… our own Yellow Knight! Forsooth and huzzah!

Perhaps by arriving early we got seats at the winner’s table. I wonder if everyone who was a late arrival got stuck with the Green Knight. At any rate, it felt good to be on the winning side. After completing our meal and our experience and leaving a generous tip for Ye Olde Waitere who was working his ass off the whole night and was getting lousy tips from the people around us, we headed out and made our way back to I-4 and safely arrived around 9:20 at our hotel, the Best Western Orlando Gateway, near Universal Studios:

Daily total distance: 360 miles

I had to get a parking pass after checking in, and to do so required talking to a woman at a “special offers” desk. So, I sent Becky up with most of our bags and dealt with this lady. Unfortunately, I had to wait as a retirement-aged couple ahead of me were actually falling for her pyramid-scheme shtick. I stood growing ever more frustrated for nearly 15 minutes. Fortunately, I think my thoroughly-unamused demeanor made her give me only a cursory overview of her “services” and she wrote me out the parking pass without much further delay. I parked and made my way up to our room to relax around quarter of 10:

Cumulative Total Distance: 1770 miles

The room seemed to be perfectly good for our purposes. Clean, cool, recently-renovated, and with working Internet. Couldn’t ask for more. We’d have a surprise for us the next morning related to that renovation but right then it seemed just fine and dandy. We relaxed a bit, I looked on the Internet some to check up for what would end up being the last time on our trip, and we went to bed content that we’d had a successful, full day. Our singularly biggest day of the whole trip was ahead of us the next day.

Wednesday, May 26 - we woke up around 7:45 rather suddenly, as I had apparently left my phone on vibrate from Medieval Times the previous day and didn’t hear it at first. We got up and I quickly jumped into the shower, at which point I realized something was amiss. The tub faucet was pushed out a solid 4 inches along the copper piping that fed to it. Wondering if I’d just somehow missed it the previous day, I shrugged it off and started the shower. About 2 minutes in the faucet popped off with a rather gentle thunk and water started spraying out directly from the copper pipe. This, of course, resulted in the shower immediately ceasing to work. As it so turns out, that recent renovation on our hotel must have been underbid since whomever did it cut corners in places like, oh, not bothering to caulk the tub faucet to the wall. After a degree of trial and error I figured out that if I shoved the faucet back along the pipe and sort of twisted it, it would take 2-3 minutes to slowly work its way back out, at which point I needed to push it back in again. Through this I was able to complete my shower successfully, albeit with a bit more difficulty than I had anticipated.

Then it was Becky’s turn. While I didn’t exactly have to force all my weight upon the faucet when I pushed it back in, I did have to give it quite a shove, and Becky was concerned about slipping as she did the same. So, while she showered, I sat across the curtain, arm sticking into the shower, holding the faucet in. We could already tell it was to be a magical day.

As we checked out I felt obliged to mention to the woman at the desk what happened. I didn’t force the issue, though. I mean, I suppose that if I raised a stink I could have gotten, like, a voucher for $20 admission to Disney, or something. In exchange for spending an hour writing about what happened and giving them all of my personal information and signing up for a time share. Forget it. Not worth it. We had a new hotel to look forward to that night and there wasn’t much sense dwelling on the past.

We left around 9 and drove back down into Kissimmee, not terribly far from where we had been the previous evening. We got to our first destination around 9:30, not too long after it opened up for the day:

Daily total distance: 18 miles

Our first stop for the day? The world-famous Gatorland:

You know a place is serious about alligators when it has a mural of one busting through the wall and a giant set of jaws leading to the park. And at less than half the price of admission at Sea World and about a third the single-park admission at Disney, it’s recommended for all ages of central Florida visitors, as far as I’m concerned. Becky found a clue outside as to what might be inside:

Do you think there are alligators inside?

Yep, there sure are.

And turtles? Sure, why not.

You might notice that the gators pictured above all look about the same size. This is completely intentional: they segregate them by age since bigger alligators have no qualms with stealing food from, attacking, or even cannibalizing smaller gators. Since American alligator hatchlings weigh only around a pound and yet can grow to over 1,000 pounds in adulthood, juvenile gators are no match for full-grown adults. Those above were not nearly full-grown. We’d see some bigger ones later.

Though the vast majority of the alligators at Gatorland were contained in those large pools, a couple were housed separately due to special concerns, such as their couple of white gators:

Though the gator pictured above lacks much of its pigment, technically it’s not albino. Albinism is a complete lack of melanin and is noted by the lack of coloration in the iris of the animal, rendering their eyes red from the blood vessels and almost always resulting in blindness by adulthood. Instead this gator – as well as one other of the three they had contained in that low-lighting area – had a different genetic mutation resulting in leucism. Leucistic animals have a severe reduction in skin pigment but do not completely lack it (as is evidenced by the smattering of black around its muzzle). They almost always still express normal pigmentation in the eyes, meaning that they have normal or only slightly reduced vision, unlike albino animals. However, leucistic alligators still lack the ability to blend in with their surroundings that’s key to hunting for food, and furthermore, their bright white appearance makes them targets for cannibalism by larger gators as hatchlings, so they often fare no better in the wild than albinos. Therefore, the leucistic and albino alligators had to be farm-raised and were kept separate from other gators their entire lives.

We continued on down through Gatorland and found a Mold-a-Rama machine:

This was the first Mold-a-Rama we’d seen in four years; the last one we’d gotten was from the Milwaukee Zoo in 2006. They don’t seem to be as popular these days as they tend to emit a rancorous smell of boiling hot plastic as they inject the mold. But, a little bit of carcinogens never stopped us from getting a cheap souvenir and so Becky loaded it up with a couple of dollars and out popped a model of a man wrestling a gator:

Why, did I just say gator wrasslin’? Now that sounds like a good idea!

We sat down for the early show at 9:45. There were maybe a dozen people in the park by that time, only 45 minutes after opening (I can’t say why there weren’t more since the Florida sun wasn’t nearly as brutal then as it would be by the early afternoon) and so, after a brief introduction we were all invited to come stand along the railing separating the crowd from a mote filled with 6-foot long alligators. As another gator wrangler came out to grab one out of the circular pool, it became obvious that gator wrasslin’ had a lot more to do with quick, confident motions than it did with cautious safety measures:

Yes, he did just reach his hand into a pool full of gators and grabbed one out by the tail and dragged it onto land. Yes, it did look as stupidly dangerous in real life as it does in those pictures. He claimed it was an old way of gator wrasslin’ that was passed down through generations of Florida natives and then asked the crowd if there were any original Floridians in the audience. After being answered by silence he remarked that they were a dying breed. One wonders if there isn’t a cause-and-effect relationship going on here.

He then plopped himself down on the back of the gator – which, I should note, was not even 1/4 the size of some of the larger ones they had that were far too large and too dangerous to wrassle – and asked us what part of the gator we thought was most dangerous:

Figuring it for a trick question, a couple of people ventured “the claws” and “the tail” as guesses. He answered “I ain’t holdin’ it by the tail, am I?” and stated that it was its notoriously powerful jaws that was most dangerous. Rednecks aren’t big on trick questions, it seems.

Fortunately, gators aren’t big on tricks, either, and, since they haven’t much had to evolve since the Cretaceous, they’re not the brightest of nature’s creatures. So, doing something as simple as putting a hand over their eyes will render them relaxed and more pliable to wrasslin’. From there their jaws, capable of biting down with astounding force but with only very weak muscles to open back up again, can be held tight with one hand:

You’ll notice there his fingers on his right hand are perched just outside the mouth and not inside the teeth. Whatever goes inside the teeth does not come back out. He then said, “hey, watch me do this,” and then chuckled and added, “redneck’s famous last words:”

Not recommended to try at home.

He then showed us another little part of the crocodilian’s simple neural anatomy: if you roll them upside down, the blood pressure in their heads will drop and they’ll fall asleep, just like frogs:

Out like a light. But don’t worry! He’s okay!

It’s at that point that the real value in the ticket for Gatorland kicked in. For a mere $7 above the normal price one could get a special VIP package that included getting a chance to sit on a gator yourself! Why would anyone not do that?

I think I’m going to use that picture for all my official correspondence from now on.

Having wrestled a gator ourselves, we left to wander about the rest of the park. We got a chance to feed some of the other gators with bits of raw hot dog.

Most of the time they didn’t pay any attention to the floating pseudo-meat but when they did it was pretty impressive.

Unfortunately we used up all of the hot dogs on the medium-sized gators before walking around back to where the really big boys were:

It’s hard to tell the size of that guy based on the picture alone, but he had to have easily been 12 or 13 feet long and must have weighed a solid 800 or 900 pounds. The one swimming next to him was missing one foot, presumably from an encounter with that big boy or another gator his size. That’s why it’s crucial for them to segregate them based on how big they are. Meat is meat to a gator. Which is why it seemed so odd that there were so many birds hanging around there:

The stately white ones are great egrets, common in Florida. They’re normally fishers but they live and nest in Gatorland by subsisting off the scraps tourists and gators leave untouched. The scrawny brown muppet-looking ones I’m not so sure about but I think they might be juvenile great blue herons that live there to much the same purpose. Since the egrets at least are not a threatened or endangered species in Florida the people at Gatorland seemed to consider them as a sort of pretty-looking pigeon that they tolerate but do not exactly enjoy the presence of.

As we walked by them the sun started to beat down more in earnest and we elected to head into shade to await the next show at 10:45, the one and only Gator Jumparoo:

Now, the concept of the Jumparoo is simple and the folks at Gatorland have been doing it for decades. After a brief skit in which the same fellows who wrestled the gators earlier dress up in trucker caps and overalls and act out the part of local yokels named Bubba and Cooter, a bunch of pieces of raw chicken are suspended on wires and held a few feet above the gators, who must leap out of the water to grab them. This isn’t part of an alligator’s normal behavior and so it’s taught to them through a sort of operant conditioning at the very edge of the gators’ weak cognitive abilities. Therefore, these alligators at Gatorland are the only ones in the world that will exhibit this behavior.

After getting the gators’ attention by waving pieces of raw chicken at them and calling to them like slow, scaly, lumbering dogs, the Jumparoo began, first on wires held out into the pond:

They then moved over to a platform jutting out into the pond and fed the jumping gators by hand:

Once again, not recommended to try at home with your gators. These fellows were trained professionals, or at least certifiably insane. Those were bone-in half-chickens they were feeding them, too, the texture and composition of which are not too dissimilar from a human forearm, lest you think they couldn’t have just as easily had their arms wrenched off at the elbow by these gators. Let’s see Disney try that!

Of course, all that meat flying around was bound to attract some carrion birds, and sure enough, we saw a turkey vulture there skulking around, waiting to clean up the mess afterward:

Becky noted that the gators seemed far more active in that Jumparoo than they did in one she’d seen when she was last there over two decades ago. As they hold two a day – one in the morning and one in the afternoon – I suspect it’s because she had previously seen the afternoon one, after they’d already been fed and were far more docile. In the morning they’re probably hungrier and more liable to jump, so long as the water was warm enough to keep their body temperature up which, in late May with a high in the mid-90s, it most certainly was.

We exited through the gift shop, where they had a tank of tiny gator hatchlings about a foot long, not too much bigger than our pet bearded dragon:

That’s about the cutest they are, not too long after emerging from their eggs. A decade later they’ll grow so big and mean that they’ll readily eat cats and small dogs for daily meals. People in Florida didn’t seem to have outdoor pets as much as folks do elsewhere.

As we exited we saw posters of Gatorland’s founder, who looks eerily like my maternal grandfather:

As well as his wife, whom one presumes was a very special woman to old Pa Gator:

And that was it for Gatorland. Money well-spent. By that point it was closing in on 11:30 and we decided to get some lunch before continuing on. We saw a pizza place across the road from Gatorland and decided to give it a shot. It was already open and, as it turns out, pretty darned good. I explained to Becky how good pizza is one of those things that exists in Florida by the graces of the sheer volume of New York transplants that retire down there. Certainly it was better than we were expecting on such short notice. We left content and continued on to our next attraction a few miles up the road:

Daily total distance: 26 miles

After stopping quickly to pick up some more cash, we arrived at the gates at Sea World Orlando. Now, Sea World has smartly realized that folks’ least-favorite part of going to theme parks is waiting in long lines and, as such, many tickets can be purchased in advance online. So, we zipped right on through the parking gate and the main gate and got inside a bit before 12:30.

We first hit up a few penny machines – of which there many throughout the park – to help Becky fill her quota:

Earlier I mentioned how butterflies are often the subject of demo photos for cameras because they look so striking. The other oft-employed subject is flamingos:

See? It gives the appearance that I know what I’m doing!

We continued on to visit a friendly sea turtle…

…as well as the captain of the Exxon Valdez:

We finally made our way to one of the main attractions, the dolphin tank:

The dolphins swam up close to us but stayed just out of reach. They clearly liked their handlers more than us:

One presumes we’d have been better-received if we had fish in our pockets, too. For the low-low price of an arm and a leg one can swim with the dolphins, but that requires previous booking. If we’d waited around for another hour we could have paid a more reasonable fee to feed them, but we didn’t have the time to spare. We opted instead to go down below the tank to get a better view of them from behind glass:

From there we walked through a tiny garden, in which the only anole lizard we’d see on our entire journey caught our eyes:

Becky and I are both very intrigued that there are parts of the world where lizards skitter about like mice and chipmunks do here. Back in the world of mammals, though, we made our next stop at the manatee tank:

The gentle pandas of the sea…

Amorphous as they are, though, they’re remarkably difficult to photograph, and so Becky had better luck with ones made out of shrubbery instead:

She was using her umbrella as a parasol as, by that point, the sun was beating down on us with great ferocity. We’d opted to go to Sea World in the middle of the day as it was the park we were least interested in that we still wanted to see, and so we figured we’d lose the least out of our experience if the sun was brutal and the crowds were overwhelming. The former held true but the latter actually wasn’t so bad, presumably as, being the week before Memorial Day, most folks hadn’t yet started their summer vacations. So that was nice.

We continued on indoors for a bit to a small gift shop inside an aquarium:

That Plexiglas flooring separating us from the manta ray tank below was jumped on repeatedly by several kids as we were in there as their parents watched on and thought it was cute. Just in case I was feeling too hopeful about the future of humanity or something.

From there we walked on a bit and discovered the answer to the great mystery of what ever became of New Kids on the Block:

We watched them bang out all the greatest hits of the early 90s as we ate a slush cone we’d gotten to cool off a bit. From there we went into the adjacent puffin and penguin enclosure:

You can barely make him out, there, but there’s a man in forest green waders shoveling artificial snow through fields of penguin crap toward the back. As he went along we could actually hear his facial expression marvel at how he ever thought it’d be fun to work at Sea World. Well, at least it’s cool in there.

We decided that catching a show was the best way to stay out of the heat. There was a performance at 1:45 at the sea lion and otter theater nearby and so we settled in there and waited for hi-jinks to ensue:

HMS Pinniped, get it? Get it? Fine, be that way.

The plot unfolded as such: pirate-lady captain crashes on supposedly abandoned island with her sea lion sidekick:

They hatch a plan to steal the gold they think is on the island while an otter surreptitiously sets the scene for future hilarity:

But oh no! The island is already inhabited by another pirate with his own sea lion sidekick:

The two meet, glossing over giving due consideration to their outrageously unlikely circumstance:

They decide to team up, which apparently involved serving lunch to the sea lions:

But then later they fight!

But then they make up and also there’s a walrus:

Presumably continuing his never-ending quest for his bucket.

And that’s how the show was supposed to go. Trouble is, the old Hollywood adage is never work with animals and children and, while this lacked the latter, it hinged upon the former and their unpredictable nature. It’s not that the sea lions blew their queues but, in a dog-like eagerness to please, they hit their marks too early, departing or entering the scene before the actors had time to say their lines. That, more than the show itself, was what was really entertaining.

We decided that we would be remiss if we went to Sea World and didn’t see a Shamu show and so from there we walked on over to Shamu Stadium.

We immediately noticed that they’d spruced up the place a great deal. We were expecting something semi-educational about the great killer whale (probably glossing over how they’ll occasionally kill humans like one did there not long before we arrived, but whatever) but the place looked like it was instead set up for a Flock of Seagulls concert. Which, as it turns out, would have been preferable to what the show actually was:

As you can see, the whales did their regular jump-around-splashing-the-audience routine but now there was a performance! With plot! It was called BELIEVE (no foolin’) and the basic idea was that one of the trainers – a phenomenally gay man in his late 20s or thereabout – was once a child who always loved killer whales. They played sepia-toned flashbacks to him a long time ago – like in the early 90s – when he delicately carved a tail fin out of wood that he then wore as a necklace. As opposed to, you know, playing Nintendo. They then showed him as the same child on a boat whale watching and look! Whales! It’s magical! They then showed the picture of the boy and the trainer side-by-side just in case anyone in the audience didn’t get the excruciatingly dull point.

As the stage transformed a young girl was called from the audience and the magic talisman was draped across her neck to give her the POWER of the WHALES.

And then there was some choreographed dancing:

I believe it was Bart Simpson who put it best when he said, “it’s craptacular.”

Later, we saw carbon-copies of the MAGICKAL TALISMAN on sale in a gift shop for $4 apiece. So you, too, could be a part of the MAGIC.

I picked up my sister a remarkably macabre 3D model of the anatomy of a dolphin – guts, skeleton and all – and we decided that anything we saw at Sea World from then on would pale in comparison to BELIEVE and so we went on to our next stop:

Daily total distance: 35 miles

Lest you think we’re the sort that go to a steak house and don’t order steak, yes, it was Disney World. Epcot, to be specific, since, even with a full day one can only really see one of the Disney parks at a time and Epcot, while not as iconic as the Magical Kingdom, seemed to me to be the most adult-friendly of the Disney parks.

We arrived around 3:30 as a man who looked strikingly like the King of Cartoons wearing an absolutely fantastic button-down shirt patterned with Spaceship Earth wished us to “have a magical day” in a boisterous baritone as we paid for parking. As it was the late afternoon not too many people were entering the park anymore, but not many had left yet, and so we had to park pretty far out and take the tram in. Fortunately, one arrived moments after we found a space and we shuttled into the main gate:

I had reserved our passes as will call, which was great, as there was no line at the will call booth. The woman who got our tickets told me she was from South Boston as she saw my Massachusetts driver’s license. She must have been living in Florida for some time, though, as she didn’t have the impossibly thick accent that is the trademark of Southies. We got our passes with no trouble whatsoever and entered the gates into the land of notoriously litigious magic:

I’d like to point out that the Monorail in the first shot was moving at around 25 mph when I took that picture and that I doubt I will ever produce a more picturesque photograph in the rest of my life.

Of course, first things first we went right for Spaceship Earth:

We were intrigued to discover these Space Cavemen that were apparently inside. Now, I’d been to Epcot a couple of times, most recently 16 or 17 years ago as a pre-teen when my sister was about 8. Becky had never been, though, so this was an experience for her to see what it was and one for me to see what had been updated since the early 90s. I think neither of us were disappointed. It still told the story of the history of mankind, from early cavemen:

…to post-Civil War industry:

…to the foxy, groovy computer scientists of the 70s:

Yes, I’m sure that’s how it went.

As we reached the top of Spaceship Earth we focused on the Earth itself, so tiny as a speck in outer space:

All this was part of Spaceship Earth as I remembered it from years past. What was new, though, was that, on the way down, or on-board screens presented us with a number of questions about what we’d like to do on our vacation. It did so in German because we’d selected German on a lark as our language on the way up, which proved interesting as it was as, when we passed the Roman Empire display, the centurion guard spoke German, giving him an instant Nazi feel.

We picked through the menus with our collective remembered bits of German from school and, in return, were presented with a short video of us on an adventure!

An adventure into the Future! Which apparently meant taking a Jetsonesque spaceship to the Great Wall of China, for what it’s worth.

Down in the lobby we were able to use an interface to draw up our video and email a link to it to ourselves.

Unfortunately it seems like Disney expires any videos not accessed within a week of processing as we weren’t able to get to ours when we returned. Oh well, it was still lots of fun.

We saw some interactive games lining the outside of the lobby that looked like fun but each and every one was occupied by kids who looked like they were in no position to surrender their time playing them and so we continued on. We picked up a map of Epcot and decided to walk through a sort of interactive educational area next:

Educating children, apparently, about garbage trucks. Disney’s a milti-faceted experience these days, people.

After passing through there and playing with a few bells and whistles, we decided to go on one of only two rides we’d go on that entire day, Mission: SPACE.

It’s also colloquially known as “Mission to Mars” since the whole thing is narrated by Gary Sinise. The requisite joker yelling out “Loo-ten-ant Da-yun!” was a few spaces in line behind us.

We chose the “more intense” version of the ride, which subjected us to maybe 2 or 2.5 Gs as our pretend rocket ship blasted off from Earth and we were spun inside a giant centrifuge. As the centrifuge slowed down we dropped down to a low-G environment, too, so the whole experience was pretty neat and, as promised, more intense than I thought it would be. I mean, I didn’t feel sick or anything afterward but I could see how it might be a bit much for young children or the elderly. Who, clearly, would make lousy astronauts. Lesson learned.

From there we walked along the western perimeter and up to the international pavilion. We figured that by systematically hitting up each country’s land we would be able to get Becky the maximum number of flattened pennies. She even used her iPhone to look up which ones had penny machines (most, but not all, did) and so we proceeded with a game plan, starting with Mexicoland:

As you can see, there were Mexican laborers slaving away to create tiny wooden… what would one call those?

Ah yes, animales fantasticos. That’s it. There was even a petite Mexican woman sitting in the center of the vestibule at an open workshop painting these animales fantasticos who got to enjoy sweaty white people pointing their cameras at her all day long as she worked. Which, all things considered, is probably still not as bad as staying in Mexico.

We got our penny from there – featuring Mickey wearing a sombrero – and immediately figured that the pattern would be the same design with Mickey wearing a different, stereotypical hat in each one. Which it was. Which is pretty awesome, actually, to have them all displayed together. I recalled that the Mexico ride was pretty boring and so we continued on to the next location, Norwayland, whereupon we saw the Fjording:

Here I recalled that the Norway ride wasn’t that bad and, since the line wasn’t all that long, we decided to give it a shot:

The same mural showing how the vikings of yore are now the oil rigsmen and cruise ship directors of today was there when I was last there, too. As we exited after our adventure through Norse mythology we wandered into the gift shop where we saw the Norwegian natives running the place with a rather poignant look of longing on their faces as they dealt with the same sweaty tourists day in and day out. I couldn’t help but think they must be pining for the fjords.

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

From there we continued on our quest for pennies through Chinaland!

Germanyland!

As you can see, Germanyland is home of Der Teddybär. Nearby there was also a vista from which one would take pictures across the pond from Spaceship Earth. We got one of the army of Epcot employees milling about to take one of us:

From there it was onto the rather unremarkable Americaland:

Which was more “some sort of mashup of late colonial and Civil War-era South land” with not much in the way of attractions. It did have ducklings, though:

After that we proceeded to Japanland where, since they lacked a penny machine, we decided to stop for dinner, if only so I could say I ate sushi at Disney World:

It actually wasn’t bad. I mean, it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad. The wasabi was incredibly weak, though, and I had to use the whole dollop to get only a little heat, whereas I normally only use a bit of wasabi the size of a pea and end up pounding the table. But hey, it was filling and it was cool, which were two things I wanted on such a hot day. And I didn’t get food poisoning. Which is a plus.

We continued to Moroccoland, whereupon we saw the Book of Aladdin:

Now, I thought that Aladdin took place in the Middle East – present-day Iraq or Saudi Arabia – and that Morocco is nowhere near there, but hey, it’s all the same, amirite? Disney apparently thinks so. At least they had the culturally-sensitive Fez House:

Moroccoland was actually a bit daunting to us. There was a penny machine listed there but, for the life of us, we couldn’t find it. We crawled all up and down its labyrinthine alleys to no avail and finally gave up. We had better luck at the next stop, Franceland:

Voila les Chefs de France!

Voila la Casserole!

Voila la Tour Eiffel!

Wee wee! Je suis de Paris!

Having exhausted hilarious French stereotypes, we continued on to Englandland:

You’ll note that it has never, in all of history, been that sunny in England, ever.

We finally came to the last country at Canadaland:

Which appeared to be more like Native Pacific Northwest Indian Land, since, well, you know. It’s Canada.

After that we hit up another outpost in which we were able to pick up a couple of pennies we had missed and then headed back to Spaceship Earth as the sun started to descend toward the horizon:

We were exhausted by then but we decided to make one last run through Spaceship Earth, since there was no line by then and we could walk right on. This time we did it in Spanish.

And with that we concluded our trip to Disney World. It was 8 PM – we’d been there for 4 1/2 hours, going nonstop – and it was high time we headed to our hotel. We exited Epcot and got on I-4 West toward Tampa, hooking down on I-75 South and pressing through dark local roads to arrive around 9:30 at our hotel in Ruskin:

Daily total distance: 125 miles

After our plumbing mishap that morning I was glad to be in a new hotel, the Resort at Little Harbor. It was also my first time on the Gulf Coast, so that was pretty exciting, too. I was a little worried we were in trouble when the snooty girl at the desk who clearly did not want to be working the late shift spent several minutes on the phone and ignoring us as a security guy who clearly was going above and beyond his job description felt bad for us and offered to help us, but that turned out to be the one and only bump in the road in an otherwise fantastic hotel off of Tampa Bay:

After such a long day we were happy to see a lovely room:

…and Becky proceeded to collapse in bed:

I took a much-needed shower and laid down to watch TV and read for a bit, concluding our most active day of the trip:

Cumulative total distance: 1900 miles

My computer was working just fine then but I couldn’t access the Internet. “Oh well,” I thought, “I’ll get on it later.” Turns out I’d be wrong about that. But, for then, we were immensely happy to be put up in some swanky and very relaxing digs as we prepared for the final leg of our trip, in which there would be fewer daily sights to see but more more driving. The next day we’d both enter a new state – Alabama – for the both of us. We were looking forward to it.

Saturday, May 22 - I woke up around 7 to go to breakfast with my work colleagues before leaving. It was evident then that Becky was in absolutely no condition to get out of bed – let alone go down to eat solid food – and so I went by myself. After eating and saying goodbye to them I was officially on vacation. Five days after Becky. Better late than never.

I roused her out of bed and we checked out and started loading up the car slowly but surely as Becky walked gingerly to try to avoid another flare-up of nausea. After having some difficulty dealing with the parking (I specifically made sure it was charged to my bill and yet the parking ticket did not show up at zero balance as I left) we pulled out of the hotel and back on the road around 9:15.

We got back on the highway without any difficulties and decided to stop to gas up before getting out of the DC area, stopping off I-395 Exit 5 around 10. It’s a good thing we did as Becky started feeling much worse and then, after voiding whatever liquid was in her stomach, much better. So whatever it was that was bothering her, it only lasted around 9 hours. Good, as we had a full day ahead of us.

We got back onto I-95 South through Virginia, exited onto I-85 South around Petersburg, and stopped for lunch at a Subway off of Exit 39 around 12:30.

Daily total distance: 162 miles

Before we went out to eat in the car we noticed some local delicacies, such as sassy pickles:

We also noted that, apparently, driving license restrictions in Virginia are not as restrictive as in New England:

See? In Massachusetts, there’s a separate license for campers and we only let dogs drive standard passenger vehicles!

After eating we continued on I-85 South and crossed into North Carolina – the first time Becky had driven south of Virginia – around 1:30. About 45 minutes later we arrived at our destination for the day in Durham, NC:

Daily total distance: 260 miles

We pulled into the driveway at Jenny Wood-Leonard’s lovely house set at the edge of the woods and gathered up our things. As we did so we were greeted by her numerous dogs: Lovey Dog, Pillow Dog, Pissy Dog, Tiny Dog, Old Dog and Other Dog. Six of ‘em! We allowed them all to greet us as we got settled in, having reached our next home base for the next two days.

Cumulative total distance: 790 miles

Though we were done driving for the day we were far from done with activities. After getting ourselves situated we decided to first head out to the Duke Homestead Tobacco Museum up the road in Durham:

Distance: 7 miles

“Tobacco museum?” you ask. Why, yes. A tobacco museum. Tobacco’s a big part of North Carolinian heritage. And a big part of tobacco is Big Chief Flavor Country:

…and spittoons of all shapes and sizes:

Turtle spittoons!

Panda spitoons?

I guess. There’s also a darker side: roaming gangs of Victorian women abusing snuff:

“Ah, q’il est bon!” they say. And then they stab you and steal your wallet. Fortunately, we didn’t come across any in our travels. We did, however, come across some of our national treasures re-created in tobacco leaf:

We came to understand the impact of tobacco, which apparently turns North Carolina:

…into cigarettes!

Hooray! Tobacco ahoy!

It was at this point that we met the centerpiece of the museum, this animatronic gentleman farmer:

We pressed the button on his panel. Nothing happened. We pressed it again. Still nothing. “Oh well,” we thought, “he must be broken.” Just as we were turning to walk away, he suddenly sprang to life, moving and beginning his monologue about tobacco farming in North Carolina.

Becky let out a yelp and Jenny actually jumped back in surprise. Man, he got us good. At the end of his minute-long talk he continued moving his arms and mouthing words that were no longer coming out for a solid 15 seconds, just to add extra creepiness.

But oh, he was not alone! Though they did not move, several other models of tobacco industry workers had audio tracks playing over their locations:

They all stood over their machines, stern and silent, gazing off toward a distant horizon in their minds.

Their overdubbed words spoke of the better life the tobacco industry gave them, but their expressions betrayed an unspoken sense of longing of a life they knew they’d never have. A life like that of the Tobacco Rave Indian:

He knows how to live. Back in North Carolina, though, tobacco was the big commerce that ruled the lives of men and, occasionally, ran over dogs:

Ah, don’t worry! It turns out he was okay all along!

Though that farmer boy might want to consider the virtue of wearing shoes around hot embers.

As we wound out the museum we saw tobacco ads throughout the ages!*

* Ending in the 1960s when people discovered that smoking is pretty horrible for you.

There were all sorts of ads! Gay ads!

Racist ads!

Political cartoons!

Deranged cattle and lions!

And finally, this… thing!

And so ended our museum experience. But wait! There’s more! Out on the back of the property there was a couple of century-old tobacco sheds and houses to explore! Becky was so excited she had to frolic in a tobacco field:

We went up to inspect the sheds:

There was that stuff hanging all over the place! Even a pile of it on a bench:

I tried to figure out what it was:

Jenny assured us that it was, in fact, tobacco!

It was truly a tobaccoful experience for all of us. Becky even found a bug that looked unlike anything found in the Northeast:

Leaving the little isopod to guard his tobacco, we continued on down the road to stop for snacks at a local establishment in Raleigh-Durham, Locopops:

Total distance: 11 miles

Locopops serves hand-crafted popsicles of all sorts of different delicious flavors and it was hard not to fall in love with the place.

I got the amaretto latte pop, Becky got a ginger pop and Jenny got the Mexican chocolate one. They were both crazy delicious. Or should I say loco delicious! Yes, yes I should. But the pops weren’t all Locopops had to offer! There was also the artwork of various local school children describing what they want to do when they grow up, such as that of this boy:

What’s his favorite place? His bedroom. Why?

Hey, at least he knows what makes him happy. Still, his pales in comparison to the life goals of one T.J., who described why wrestling ladies is a key part of his master plan:

He’s got it all figured out, really.

We stopped back at our host’s house for a bit after finishing our pops and then headed back out around 5:30, this time over to Raleigh for the Got to Be NC Festival at their fair grounds:

Distance: 19 miles

As we parked and walked in the skies had started to go from looking “cloudy” to “foreboding” to downright “threatening:”

Still, the place was hopping when we arrived, all full of Freedom 2000 rockets…

…and, of course, children in a small pool running in giant hamster balls:

Wayne Coyne’s contribution to the fair, I’m sure.

We thought it wise to get some food first thing, as it looked like it could rain any second. There were meat coils:

…as well as giant turkey legs being consumed by giant, cannibalistic turkeys:

But for $8 bucks a leg those were definitely for the birds. We instead opted for some quick-although-not-that-healthy pizza and nachos. And I paid with a $10 but the dude gave me change for a $20, so, hey, free food.

Mere seconds after we got our food in-hand the skies opened up and it started pouring down the rain with great ferocity. We took shelter in the nearest indoor display hall. It had a football-shaped crimped roof that funneled the rain into rather spectacular waterfalls on each corner of the building:

We decided it best to wait until the rain subsided to a force less than that sufficient to bend steel before venturing back outside. We overheard a man stating that it was a “slow-moving storm” and so we buckled down for a while. We saw what few things were in the display hall: mostly hilariously misspelled home goods and vendor displays. And a lady giving an in-person infomercial:

She frightened me in a way I can’t completely comprehend. It was like my soul got cold every time she walked by.

But hey! There was also a giant, gas-powered shopping cart!

For the serious shopper.

Now, in New England, “slow-moving storm” means that it’s going to be raining for the next four days. Apparently in the South, though, prone to more mercurial bouts of weather, it means that it’ll be raining for maybe an hour. And so, before long, the deluge had subsided to a manageable light rain and we hustled on over to another building that hopefully contained some more interesting things. We would not be disappointed: it was the local food vendor floor, chock full of all different kinds of ways to eat pigs and sauces with which to eat them:

Did you know that freshly-cooked pork rinds are delicious? I do now! There were so many vendors selling their sauces on samples of meatballs, wings, and whatever else one can put sausage on that we probably could have filled up on food there and didn’t even need the pizza and nachos. Oh well. Amongst all that, though, was the souse and liver pudding table:

Looking at the two, it was clear we’d need to try one. Of course, “liver pudding” sounded wholly unappetizing and so Becky and I both went for the souse. Mistake. It was cold and had the texture of cat food. It tasted like chewing on ground-up pig intestines, which is probably what it was. Ugh. I’m sure it’d make great specialty dog food, but for humans, I don’t think so. Must be one of those acquired tastes. Jenny said that the liver pudding was better but I didn’t fancy giving it a shot after that.

By the time we finished there the rain had all but stopped completely. It was about 6:45 and so we headed across the way to where the main draw was for us: the tractor pull. It was scheduled for 7 and the guy selling tickets assured us it would be going off as planned, and so we settled into our seats. The grounds were clearly very muddy and I figured it might be delayed a bit as they cleaned things up.

Sure enough, the announcer – a North Carolina good ol’ boy whose words were barely intelligible as English – got on the microphone and informed us to wait just several minutes as they cleared the track.

I figured “heck, how long can it take? I’m willing to wait it out ’til 7:15, 7:20, no problem!”

And so they started grooming the field with two tractors:

And back and forth they went! Back… and forth… back… and forth… back… and-for a freaking HOUR they did that. By that point we were staying purely on principle. Meanwhile, the carnival had started back up:

And Monster Truck Santa? He just sat there.

Finally, things started getting going when a 12 year-old boy started driving out tractors and lining them up in front of a sled we assumed they used to determine pulling power:

Antique Tractor Man mentioned something to the order that the first pull would be an exhibition. And so, as the first tractor dug in, it belched out an immense amount of diesel smoke and tore down the track, sled in tow:

It was actually pretty exciting! The rest, though, wasn’t up to that level. The actual competition tractors moved at a crawling pace, with the only bit worth seeing toward the end when they would finally lose traction and pull up on their back tires:

And the setup time? Gracious, don’t get me started. We thought this was going to be a sort of demolition-derby like display of rednecks hootin’ and hollerin’ around dangerous machines, but instead it was a carefully-measured competition that came down to inches of difference measured with scientific precision. Not exactly what we were expecting. And so we decided to call it quits after a half-dozen or so pulls revealed to offer much of the same. Perhaps as tractor pull greenhorns we just couldn’t savor the art form. But to us, the nearby petting zoo seemed to contain much more promise. And so it did:

Camels!

Pigs!

Kangaroos!

Wait… kangaroos? Yep, there was a lone kangaroo hopping around his enclosure in the center, where no one could reach him. Presumably kangaroos are too bitey or scratchey to be pet, but there he was anyway, complementing a second off-limits enclosure containing a pair of porcupines. At least it was evident why they could not be petted.

By that point it was getting dark and, furthermore, starting to look like it was getting ready for another bout of rain, and so we decided to head on back home. We stopped briefly at a grocery store along the way, where we seemed to have walked into the checkout woman mid-argument with her significant other, who was also there. Awkward. We high-tailed it out of there and got back to the house around about 9:45.

We decided to finish the evening by sitting on the couch, enjoying a couple of the local beers our hosts had picked up in anticipation of our arrival, petting several of the many dogs, and watching a few episodes of Pee Wee’s Playhouse on DVD. I don’t know why, but it really seemed to hit the spot just then in terms of relaxing and feeling like I was very much on vacation and no longer nominally at work.

We headed to bed on the air mattress in the office but later that night decided to shift back out to the couches as the mattress kept slowly losing air. Still, it was perfectly comfortable for us and we had no trouble dozing off after a long, very busy, and very good day.

Sunday, May 23 - I mentioned two things about Jenny’s house. One was that we slept on the couches, which were quite comfortable. The other was that she and her husband have some six dogs. What I didn’t mention is that they also have three cats. One is an outdoor cat and one more or less keeps to himself, but the third? The third decided that, starting around 4 or 5 in the morning, it should meow in 10-minute stretches every half-hour until we finally conceded to getting up around 8:30. The dogs, meanwhile, were perfect angels. I do not like cats.

So, anyway, we were up. We showered, got some coffee, and headed out with hour hosts to go get breakfast at a diner-type restaurant down the street:

Distance: 6 miles

It was called Honey’s and we got there just in time to beat the church rush. I got a good omelet with some grits to South-ify it up a bit. I ate it while tinkering with my car’s keyless entry, which had managed to become stuck on “unlock.” After a few minutes of futzing with it I was able to “fix” it, which was good, because I like it when my car locks, especially on a road trip.

After finishing breakfast, Jenny’s husband Richard went back home and the three of us went out to find our next attraction: Clyde’s Critter Crossing in Bynum, NC. Or… we tried to. We hit some snags on the way down. Clyde Jones is an outsider artist who makes wooden statues of animals with a chainsaw. Apparently his works are spread all over Bynum. The trouble for us wasn’t in finding Clyde, though, it was in finding Bynum. It wasn’t on any maps and my GPS only sort of tangentially recognized its existence via one “Bynum Road” that was near where it was supposed to be. Roadside America claimed it was right off of the highway, but we wound up driving all the way down to the nearest town to speak of, Pittsboro, without finding hide nor hair of it. Finally, we tried to shoot for that “Bynum Road” the GPS talked about. We found it and hit a snag relatively early on:

That’s the road from the highway across the Haw River leading to Bynum. Or, it used to be the road; it’s been downgraded to a walking path and concrete pillars prevented driving across it. We searched for other local roads, though, and managed to find our way across to the other side, whereupon we found a clue:

Not really a critter, per se, but definitely a calling sign from Clyde. We seemed to be getting closer. Next to the road-turned-footbridge we saw that, apparently, bridges in disrepair was a bit of a thing in Bynum:

We parked and decided to walk around a bit to see if we could find any more clues as to Clyde’s whereabouts. Instead we found these:

A bit of googling on Becky’s iPhone revealed that they were helmeted guineafowl, which was a bit of a let-down as it meant they were almost certainly domesticated and not some sort of indigenous North Carolina wildlife. Apparently farmers will sometimes keep them to eat ticks to stop the spread of Lyme disease. Wild or not, though, they were extraordinarily friendly and started following us around everywhere. We had to jog a bit to give them the slip before getting back in the car for fear of running them over.

Before that, though, some more clues kept leading us closer to Clyde. First, Jenny found a pair of stylin’ glasses on the ground:

That led us to discover an old, run-down but elaborately-painted building halfway-consumed by the overgrowth:

It looked like Clyde might have been there at some point – it had a white tin roof that Roadside America said was a hallmark of the Critter Crossing – but he wasn’t there now.

We started to worry that perhaps Clyde had passed on in the several years since the last visitor to the Critter Crossing wrote about it on Roadside America and that it was no longer there. But then we found a small sign indicating that the Haw River Assembly had moved to an address on Bynum Hill Road. We were then on Bynum Road. The people of Bynum enjoy simple, utilitarian names.

We drove a short while and found Bynum Hill Road. After a few hundred more yards we saw a sign:

And then…

We found him! Well, we found the Critter Crossing. If Clyde himself was there he did not come out to greet us nor the small group of other people there walking about his sculptures in the hot North Carolina sun. Still, after all that effort, we were happy to have found our destination!

Total distance: 40 miles

We parked the car and set about touring the statues without any further delay:

By that point it was getting close to 1 PM and Jenny had to get back to prepare for her band practice and so we bade farewell to Clyde’s Critter Crossing and headed back to Durham.

When we returned we had the rest the afternoon to ourselves as Jenny packed up her keyboard and went off to practice with her band for the next several hours. We first took care of our laundry using our hosts’ washer and dryer, as we were a week into our trip, almost, and would be on the road for another week before we’d have another shot at a laundry machine. Around 2 we decided to head out again. On our way out I noticed how lovely the early afternoon sun looked coming through the trees and snapped a couple of shots of our home for the weekend:

Man, we have to move some place to have a house with a yard some day.

Our next destination was just a few miles up the road in Durham: the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science.

Distance: 6 miles

What did this museum have to offer? Well, the usual.

Windchimes.

Sad donkeys, curious pigs and uncleverly-nicknamed ducks.

Vaguely suggestive signs about compost.

The usual, in other words. But they also had… a dino trail!

Some of the dinosaurs were invisible, it seems:

Others, though, were quite visible and roaming about!

That last one there was guarding her eggs. Though apparently she’d been doing so for so long that a small amount of standing water was building up in her mouth:

It’s how the species gets its name: Mosquitolarvaemouthosaurus. It’s one of the lesser-known dinosaurs. Sort of like the Boringosaurus we also encountered:

Careful readers might recall that we also found a Boringosaurus in South Dakota:

This one in North Carolina was a juvenile, but was still every bit as boring as an adult. Still, this nosy Sauropod tried to look over my shoulder to see the pictures I took of it:

We wound our way down through the dino park, content that we had found only gentle giants without any real dang-oh no!

Clever girl! She totally sneaked up on us! We didn’t hear her coming because we didn’t have a glass of water in which to observe ripples! And other Jurassic Park references!

We narrowly escaped with our lives and wandered into a wildlife preserve full of animals after which 90% of all indie rock bands derive their names:

Those last two are a pair of red wolves. Critically endangered due to over-hunting and interbreeding with the more-common gray wolf, red wolves are nearly extinct in the wild. These two were obviously intended as a breeding pair, but in the hot sun (it was a sort of zoo trip, after all) they didn’t seem interested in much but lying in the shade. That or maybe they were too weirded out to think that this guy was watching:

Nobody likes it when the wolferfly (or lepidolupus) ruins the mood.

As we needed to take a break from the heat, we decided to head indoors for a bit and walk through the museum’s butterfly garden, whereupon I figured out why every camera ever uses a picture of a butterfly as a demo:

Because of that. Makes it look like I know what I’m doing, right?

Butterflies weren’t the only sort of bugs the museum had, though. They also had this big ol’ beetle:

He was probably a solid 4 inches from the tip of his horns to the base of his thorax. He was also fairly clumsy and, after we’d wandered around for several minutes, was lying on his back, flailing to get back up. When another patron informed the guy working the desk at the gift shop that the beetle was in a prone position, he sort of sighed and said, “okay, thanks.” We surmised that he must hear that 4 times a day every day and wishes the damned beetle could stay upright for once.

The beetle was housed adjacent to some stick bugs the size of my entire forearm. Down the aisle there was also everyone’s favorite display, a big ol’ pile of roaches!

And a deadly spider!

Hooray! They also had smaller, slightly less-lethal bugs on which one could do Science!

As you can plainly see, Becky is placing them there under the Scienceoscope.

Finally, they had a tank full of tiny, brightly-colored tree frogs which, while not bugs, were sort of bug-like in their size and panache for eating other bugs:

By that point it was nearly 4 and we were getting quite tired and so we decided to head back home and try to take a nap to catch up on the sleep we’d missed the previous night. After dozing for a while we folded the rest of our now-clean laundry and put it back into the suitcases and then played with the dogs a bit until Jenny came home around 6. After she got herself and the menagerie of pets all situated we decided to go get some dinner at this Mexican place called Las Palmas just down the road:

Distance: 2 miles

It was a pretty good little Mexican joint. I had a chimichanga and a couple of Dos Equis, always a good combination. Jenny had a gigantic margarita:

We enjoyed the food and overhearing a group of middle-aged folks with heavy accents a couple of tables down from us talking about getting on “the Facebooks.” Please note that this is very close to the precise reason why I barely touch “the Facebooks.”

When we got home we settled down in front of the TV. Becky and Jenny made some crafts while I tried to catch up on my Google Reader with one eye while watching Sherlock Holmes along with Rich with the other. And petting dogs. Everything done in that house is accompanied by petting dogs.

Around 11:00 we decided to call it a night. Our hosts needed to work the next day and we had to hit the road again. We were very grateful for their hospitality and had a wonderful couple of days in their neck of the woods. And so, along with a few dogs who had decided to join us in the living room until we got too boring, we went off to sleep. And this time the cat didn’t wake us up.

Monday, May 24 - we got a pretty good night’s sleep and awoke a bit after 7 as Jenny left for work. We showered, packed our things back up into the car, and left around 8:30 as her husband left for work himself. We headed down US-70 East to I-540 East around Raleigh and got onto US-264 East toward I-95 South. Before we got there, though, we had to make a quick stop nearby in Kenly, NC:

Daily total distance: 78 miles

We were there to view the picturesque Goon with a Top Hat:

Clearly the Goon – not to mention the Corvette repair shop that owns him – has seen better days, but Becky decided to say hello to him anyway, since he probably doesn’t get very many visitors.

We pressed on, hitting I-95 South around 10. From there we continued down toward the South Carolina border and, of course, South of the Border. At least half of the fun of South of the Border is the signs on the way down on I-95:

South of the Border is sort of the Wall Drug of the South in that it’s an overgrown tourist trap. Except a lot tackier. And with a theme that’s based on a Mexican stereotype at best and outright racist at worst. And a lot tackier. Did I mention that part? We could see it on the horizon as we approached the South Carolina border:

There’s Pedro, the mascot for South of the Border. We pulled in around 11:30:

Daily total distance: 185 miles

From there we saw Pedro all over the place!

It was pretty clear when we arrived that South of the Border had seen better days. I mean, given it was 11:30 on a Monday, but the place was pretty abandoned:

My mom and dad recall passing by there in the 60s and remember it as little more than a gas station turned into a glorified tourist stop. Even in my memories of it in the late 80s and early 90s from trips down South it seemed smaller than the sprawling mess we found. It was clear to me that some time between then – roughly 20 years back – and now it had peaked and has since been in decline. Certainly the recent economic troubles didn’t help any. As for our impression of it, the threatening skies didn’t help much to make us feel welcome, either:

The whole place seemed semi-abandoned: some building seemed completely closed, some seemed like they might be open sometime but not then, and some seemed nominally open. We walked into one of several greasy-spoon grills along the stretch that all seemed to serve the same thing and got some hot dogs and fries. It didn’t occur to me then, but we also got hot dogs at Wall Drug while we were there. The Wall Drug ones were better, I think.

After eating there in the otherwise-empty cafeteria, we decided to brave the cloudy skies and light rain to see if we could walk the length of South of the Border to see what was there. We first encountered a rather blue gorilla:

He seemed to be weathering the years of tourism better than much of the rest of South of the Border, though. We decided to stick to one side of the road, since the other side seemed to be much of the same.

Pedro’s Ice Cream Fiesta did not appear to be open. We did not enter Pedro’s Leather Shop for reasons I hope I don’t need to explain. We did, however, make another buffalo friend outside:

You might recall we also made a buffalo friend at Wall Drug:

…as well as one in Denver:

…and one in Nebraska:

That’s buffalo friends in four states! Not bad, huh?

After that we went through one of their massive shops packed with tons of under-priced and yet incredibly useless crap:

Outside they had one really hot dog!

Get it? Get it? Bah. Pearls amongst swine, I tell you.

Inside it was everything we hoped it would be. Which it to say, crammed with junk no one needs:

Though we didn’t get any risque towels, we did get a coffee mug, a shot glass and a couple other touristy pieces of plastic by which to commemorate our trip to South of the Border. After a check-out process that took interminably long as their credit card system seemed to be from 1978, we continued on down the road. It’s then that we discovered that, much like the Las Vegas strip has a “good” end and a “bad” end, South of the Border’s foothold seemed stronger toward the highway on-ramp and tapered off sharply after that:

The sign on the laundrette reads “this facility CLOSED due to public abuse and vandalism.” Given the sad state of everything else we had trouble imagining just how bad it must have gotten in there to require the sign.

It was on the other side of the road from us. Stuff on our side, though, didn’t make much more sense:

The Cerberus Giraffe seemed to be a tunnel under which a children’s train must have run some years ago. It would have come from the especially-sad-looking carnival at the tail end of South of the Border:

It was hard to say whether it was totally abandoned or simply in disuse, but, either way, poor One-Eyed Pedro looked lonely:

As getting encephalitis and hepatitis wasn’t on our to-do list for the day we didn’t decide to venture into the carnival that was assuredly full of puddles of stagnant water and decided to head on back to the car. On our way we saw an even bigger, shirted gorilla:

We also found a Becky-sized jackalope:

You might recall that this is yet one more parallel with Wall Drug:

The one in Wall Drug, though, was a bit better-looking. And not to mention a great deal more geographically appropriate, being in South Dakota instead of South Carolina. Still, South of the Border had its own unique attraction:

Having ridden the mighty Sombrerosaurus there was nothing left for us to do at South of the Border. That, and it was starting to rain in earnest, so we decided we had best be on our way. Becky took the wheel and we pressed on through South Carolina. Through intermittent heavy rain we made it down to the Lowcountry around 3:15. We drove off the highway and onto a small, unpaved road to our next destination:

Daily total distance: 360 miles

Where were we headed that required going so far off the beaten path in a car that can barely handle gravel let alone a dirt road? The Oyotunji African Village in Sheldon.

Oyotunji is sort of a living historical recreational village, like Sturbridge Village here in Massachusetts or Historical Williamsburg in Virginia, except that people really live there. And it’s African. That, too.

Oyotunji was founded in 1970 by a man who referred to himself as King (Oba) Ofuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I.

The people of Oyotunji – the vast majority of which are African-Americans born throughout the country – practice what’s known as New World Yoruba, a cobbling together of shamanistic Earth-worshiping native to Africa with smatterings of Islam and Christianity thrown in for good measure; a sort of creole religion like Louisiana Voodoo with more of a polytheistic bent. Though Ofuntola died in 2005, Oyontunji has gone on under the leadership of a new, younger king since and continues to exist 40 years after its founding.

We arrived toward the tail-end of another fit of downpour and consequently didn’t see anyone outside. When Becky honked the horn as per the instructions at the gate, a thin, shirtless man came out and asked if we wanted to do a tour. One presumes the two white people in a Prius with Massachusetts plates were a pretty dead giveaway for not much else. He said that the tour guide was not there at the moment but that he would arrive shortly if we would wait inside. A woman wearing a head dress came to greet us and took us into her shop where we waited on our tour guide and avoided the intermittent splatters of rain as the storm finished passing overhead.

Before long our tour guide – a 60-something man local to the Lowcountry with a cane and a very slow, very Southern way of talking and moving – sauntered to meet us and, after we paid him $10 per person, began our tour.

As we walked on and he started to explain their religion, the man who first greeted us came up and insisted on taking some pictures with us:

Our tour guide was easygoing but still very solemn and had a great respect for his culture as he explained it to us. The other guy, though, was a bit more of a ham. Still, it helped us to feel a bit more at ease in what was a very different environment for us.

As our tour continued he showed us some tombs of elders of the village who had passed on:

…as well as the classroom where the children of the village are taught:

We continued out of the public courtyard and into the village proper, where there were other altars to natural element-based deities:

And they also had goats!

Our tour guide said that feral dogs had managed to pick off many of their goats over the years and that they were careful to bring them inside pens at night now. The goats were primarily involved in worshiping at the final altar we saw, to the goddess of death and the underworld:

…where they were used for sacrifices:

That gruesome-looking white stuff on the goat head is a mixture of flour and honey that the locals use to attract fire ants to eat away the flesh. Our tour guide proudly pointed that out as a way they live in harmony with nature and don’t use any artificial processes for what can be done naturally. For what it’s worth.

And with that our tour finished. We said goodbye to our guide and the people of the village and then continued on our way. As it was only 4:30 by that point and we didn’t have very far left to drive I decided to take us on a little diversion down onto Hilton Head so I could show Becky a lot of the places where many of my fond childhood memories are held:

Daily total distance: 420 miles

Though we didn’t spend much time there at all – I basically just drove down William Hilton Parkway and pointed out things along side the road – we did make one quick stop at the Neptune sun dial in Shelter Cove to hop out to take a quick picture:

And that was enough for then. We’ll be back there for several days in August, but since we had time then I figured that giving a brief tour wouldn’t hurt. That accomplished, we hit the highway again and then took back roads into Savannah, GA, arriving at our hotel a bit after 7 following a slight detour due to construction:

Daily total distance: 470 miles

It was hard to believe that we were a week into our road trip and yet this – the Baymont Inn on the northwest edge of town – was the first hotel we would pay for ourselves. But hey, whatever works, right? It was a perfectly decent hotel, too, and we got a perfectly decent room very close to the lobby. Good, as, thanks to the passing rains the road was producing enough steam to cook lobsters on the asphalt and therefore the humidity outside was positively stifling. So, the less hauling of suitcases, the better. We got settled into our room and finished with our major driving for the day in practically no time:

Cumulative total distance: 1410 miles

As we were then in the deep South we decided we needed some Southern cooking for dinner. A quick consult of the Yelp app on Becky’s iPhone (far more useful than Yelp itself, by the way) revealed that there was a place called Carey Hilliard’s just a short drive from our hotel and so we popped on over there and stuffed ourselves with some delicious ribs and onion rings. As if on queue to celebrate our arrival in the gen-u-ine South, our waitress was exceptionally genial and chatty, too, and was more than happy to ask all about us. I sort of felt immediately vindicated as I’d been telling Becky all along that people in the South just do that and it’s totally part of the culture, so I wasn’t left having to make excuses as to why the behavior I predicted was not experienced.

We rolled ourselves out of the restaurant and back to our hotel around 8:30, in too much of a food coma to head back out. We watched TV, relaxed some and read for about another 2 hours before turning off the lights and heading to sleep, with a big couple of days ahead of us. All in all, it was a very good day. Better than I was expecting, really. The next couple of days would be exhausting but also quite excellent. We were looking forward to them.