Virginia Road Trip: Not the Reader's Digest Version

We left Salem at 6:00 AM. That's right. We intentionally left at the crack of dawn. We saw 2 interesting things before we zipped on to 128. First, we spied a very large rodent running across the Dunkin Donuts parking lot. Mo convinced me that it was a kitty cat, although I seriously doubted it. Second, we saw a rather tired-looking older gentleman stumbling along the side of the road, pointing vigorously in what appeared to be perfect synch with "The Power of Love" which was on in the car. I had purchased an auto adapter for my iPod so that we could rock out to some decent tunage, but soon discovered that I was missing a critical component (something called an FM transmitter), so it was the radio for the next 14 hours (or as Mo calls it: the element of surprise).

Mo's car is great - it's a little black civic with Hawaiian-inspired car seat covers and a Hello Kitty air freshener. We also took Wally on the road with us. Unfortunately, there was no A/C, so the atmosphere was much like a sweat lodge. This was okay, though, because it gave us plenty of reason to take in our daily recommended number of ounces of water. And then some.

New Jersey. One minute it smells like ass, and then suddenly, you're getting intense aromas of grape soda or grape bubble gum or something. I can't explain what I experience driving through the Garden State - olfactory-wise - better than this.

Virginia. Painful traffic. It took 2 hours to move about 30 miles.

Lyn's place was pretty neat. She and Pete live in a ranch-style house in a very rural area. Corn fields, hummingbirds, butterflies, ferrule cats, that sort of thing. Here's a shot of the land from the back of her house:



They showed us the future space bar location in basement. I'm pretty excited about that project - especially the illuminated glass bar that Peter described.

On Saturday, I purchased some interesting books from a local used book store. Here's a pic of Lyn's cool friend Liz, holding up one of the purchases (since there were duplicates, we each picked one up). Psychic Powers - one in a series of Time Life books from 1987. Not as good as the western series (where some gunslinger shoots a man for snoring too loud), but still, a rare find.



Look closely at the cover. A bald man wearing a sleeping mask, neon squigglies pasted on to his head. Sort of reminiscent of the old Halls Mentho-Lyptus commercials, huh?

Other books worth a mention: JAWS 2 (a book based on the screenplay - sure to be just horrible), TV Superstars 1979 (cover has pictures of Shaun Cassidy, Marie Osmond and Parker Stevenson), Starsky and Hutch novel (Two tough street-wise cops with a knack for finding trouble - and outsmarting it!).

The TV book purchases ignited conversation about catch phrases and their respective TV shows. I will soon create a blog entry in the form of a quiz. I'll list the catch phrases we came up with and you all identify the shows. Teaser: "Stow it, Dingy!"

Here's an adorable pic of Lyn in the car:



The ride home was much more pleasant. The weather was not oppressive and I bought the FM transmitter in Virginia, so the iPod was a' rockin all the way back to Massachusetts.

Hey, Kevin Mench is from Delaware.