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The Cast:

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Soldier, Scholar, Beer-Consumer

Jon, brother of Christine.  Here he ponders Bucky Balls.

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Farty Love?

Chris and Christine, my hosts.

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Me!

I slept in after getting a message from a friend that he wanted to be my valentine.  I showered, broke the curtain rod, kludged it up, where upon it promptly broke when Jon then showered.

Dinner was a full standard deviation better than most Thanksgivings I’ve had and the sweat potato casserole was hardly the emetic I expected; I normally hate sweet potatoes.  Christine told me that the casserole is a way to sneak a dessert into the main course by getting brown sugar and pecans into the human body as efficiently as possible.  I support this wisdom.

During grace, we each listed what we were thankful for, a ritual that is not totally alien to me but here I was thrown off as it was genuine with a patina of homespun simplicity Ralph Lauren would burn down a church to achieve.  A sample from a traditional Robinson family statement of thanks: I’m thankful that the IRS didn’t pick up on how ridiculous my vehicle expenses were, that I got away mailing so much stuff as media mail when it should have been parcel post, and that EZ-Pass prices have not increased.  Chris, Christine, and Jon listed the loved ones in their life where as I listed my car and giant printer as my key pieces of thanks.  Apparently one should mention material possessions at such times.  Not to say I am not thankful for my family,  good health, stable job, friends, coworkers, general inclination of humanity away from violence, etc but those things are givens to me in a way that neither printers nor especially cars have been.  Remember, I was abandoned at school for my first day of college when I could find the pair of pliers required to properly jump the station wagon I was driving, and that was the sixth car I had driven in the previous 18 months.

We retired to the couches, made things out of Bucky Balls while watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.  I felt antsy and asked Chris to go for a walk with me.  For next year, I will say I am thankful for friends that don’t tire easily as our “stroll around his apartment complex” covered 5.6 miles.  Oh, and I’m thankful for my Fitbit pedometer.

 

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I am an advocate of the idea that the biggest criterion in road trip partner selection is tolerability.  This may not seem like an insight of any worth but please do not conflate friendship with amicability as, for instance, Kyle is a good friend of mine but after seeing each other two days in a row there is a good chance blood will be spilled on the 3rd.  In comparison, Joe Naylor and I have had weeks where we spent 120 or more hours within 50 feet of one another and only after weeks of this am I hit with shoes.  Chris, Suzie, Mike, and I don’t appear to get on one another’s nerves and in cases where there’s tension, it’s usually my fault, often coupled with some sesquipedalian failure where I’m too clever by half.

I think breaking sleep synchrony was a genius move on Mike’s behalf, in that the first driver for the next day would call it a day early, and this may be the only mechanism for recovering from entering a road trip pre-fatigued.  This time, he graciously chose to call early nights; next time I need to volunteer.  Having Chris as a 3rd driver proved to be a blessing and I look forward to Suzie eventually getting her license should road trips still occur then.

This trip also marked I-95 losing its magic for me.  My first trip to Florida where I drove gave the road a grandness as a unifying force of the east coast, it is not.  Spurs and bypasses go around and back to major cities and enough of life is on some other corridor that the road no longer has the mental dominance in my internal US map that it once did.  There were stretches where I knew without signage where I was despite being four or five hundred miles from home and caught myself going “oh, this again”.  The only other stretch of road as far and as familiar is probably the stretch of I-35 between Dallas and Austin.  Maybe there’s a region beyond Boston where I-95 has majesty, but now it, like the PA Turnpike is another road that is as freeing as a straight jacket.

I think we were more human this trip.

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I told Mike that I wanted to leave at six AM.  We packed our bags, got into the car, looked at the clock and the clock showed six.  Yeah, bitches.  Driving to Cross Lanes, WV was slower and faster than I thought as Eastern PA received quite a bit of snow but central PA had enough time to clear it allowing us to do 9 MPH above the speed limit as I tend to like.  My biggest fear were deer, not because of limited visibility or difficulty breaking but because by the time we approached West Virginia I went from driving a car covered in salt to driving a salt lick with a gas motor.

Test Dirt: Please do not wash

Mike and I stopped for lunch at a very depressing Hardee’s with some of the fattest pigeons I’ve seen and service staff dropping awesome lines like “He can see the kids again once he shows he can stop drinking for two days”.  Pigeon obesity seems to be defined by simply walking away when someone attempts to kick you rather than flying.

Once we picked up Chris, I had a novel experience: I sat in the back seat and didn’t drive.  I tried such things as lying down, browsing the web on my laptop in a moving vehicle, and my personal favorite, riding with my leg out the window which was invigorating but very chilling:

Look at them gams.

I also got to take pictures of traffic control devices and other novel road phenomenon like “MacCorkle Drive”, and what looked like very angry red light:

ANGRY TRAFFIC LIGHT

We originally sighted these in WV, but they continued in other places.

I had built quite a nice fort out of people’s bags when we approached Cincinnati which was a traffic clusterf#ck that I later learned was unrelated to the snow.  The roads were icy and hills required a bit of weaving to get up and I think stopping distances were measured in light-years.  At one point, Mike approached an intersection slowly but going from 5 MPH to 0 proved difficult as the ABS went nuts.  The car began to fishtail and Mike applied the e-brake, which was exactly the right thing to do but, as we were going 3 MPH, a more effective breaking method would have been to get out of the car, walk in front of it, and push in the other direction.  Me screaming “NOOOOOOOOO” the whole time probably didn’t help and I’ve come to the conclusion that just as we have drivers’ ed, I need to take passengers’ ed.   This course would probably ask you not to do other awesome things I do as a passenger like suddenly touch the driver’s neck and rest my hand on the shifter when I fall asleep.

The rest of the drive to Chicago was uneventful but we noticed that you could make out where you were in Chicago by determining what store was excessively prevalent whether it be barbershops, hair salons, butcher shops, laundromats, or Starbucks.

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Virginia’s road signage is a strange beast.  When crossing through more rural areas there seem to be a lot of reminder signs like “two way traffic on this road” and a secondary set of “No Passing Zone” signs in areas without dashed center lines.  Additionally, there seemed to be a lot of signs warning about upcoming traffic control devices like warning signs for stop signs as well as signs for traffic lights even when the sign and the control device were both say on the downward side of hill.  This may be an attempt to keep the department of Public Works busy, but I hear that’s done by planting poppies in the median and then tilling and replanting them each year.

Entering West Virginia proved much more aesthetically pleasing than I thought.  Having seen Pennsylvania’s coal regions, I thought West Virginia’s would be the same but there was a marked lack of windblast hellscape.  Turns out that West Virginia merely does a better job of hiding it.  My host in WV was Chris Dodds/LiquidChicken and I got to meet his wife who sadly was not the chosen subject of the only well-lit, reasonably composed picture I got of her.

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Apparently the cup is more compelling than I thought.

Chris was the first person I met that I didn’t really know much about except for rough information about his past.

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LiquidChicken

I’d never heard him talk and the combination of intelligence and an Oklahoma accent was new to me.  But, as I learned in college, class is a far bigger determiner of mannerisms than region or ethnicity.  Proof:

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iPhones: Bringing 20 somethings together since 2007.

We ate dinner at O’Charlies, a presentable chain that was the first of many locations I found to have Diet Mountain Dew on tap.  I’ve almost never encountered this in a restaurant setting and failed to pace myself for the fact that I’d eventually need to use a bathroom that wasn’t mine.  Chris’s has three entrances so I felt like I was going into lockdown in a panic room.  The urgency was exacerbated by him initially giving me directions to his bathroom that ended in a coat closet.  He nearly became the owner of a brown coat.

My next stop was in Florida which was a bit more than I could safely drive in a night and since few of the hotel billboards in the Carolina’s seem to list price, I had to do the safest thing I could: Drive past a sign for an upcoming hotel complex, go to the mobile version of hotels.com to check prices and stop at the first one under 50 dollars that offered free wifi.  I went through this cycle three times before stopping at 1 AM at a Rodeway Inn which was staffed entirely by Indian Americans and a slightly more presentable version of the Simpson’s crazy cat lady.  The web access was insufferable; 300kbps should not qualify as “High Speed”.