The Dreaded Vacation Post
Jan. 10th, 2009 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherynscaleSooo.
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triadruid left at the inhospitable hour of noon on New Year's Day (having been at agrnmn's poker, singing, and silly hats party the night before), on the road to Florida. We drove across Missouri to St. Louis, a trip that is interminable on the way out to anywhere, but somehow seems quick and refreshing on the way back. Southbound on I-55, we discovered Callahan's Place, and then headed into deepest, darkest Arkansas. In Arkansas, we were greeted by an amazing variety of small towns just off of 55, and made up stories about them to alleviate the sheer, butt-numbing boredom of the trip. We imagined a circus: Victoria Luxora, the high-wire artist, twirling a flaming baton while crossing the highway at the towering height of 100 feet; Keiser Wilson, the ringmaster who speaks only gibberish, communicating more clearly with gesture and the occasional shot from an incendiary flare pistol; Marie Lepanto, the delicate, harlequin-painted dog trainer, parading about with her fuzzy charges; and Joiner Tyronza, the strong man with a heart of iron. Thankfully, we soon passed into Tennessee, and then Mississippi, where we stopped for the night.
The next day, on to the Florida panhandle, by way of Mississippi and Alabama. We had prepared the car with four new tires, a new power steering pump, and the removal of the bumper-stickers espousing non-Christian religion, so we traveled with only a minimal amount of fear of Red State Cops. We still hugged the speed limit tightly. In Mississippi, we drove through the town of Seminary, but elected not to visit Sanatorium. In Alabama, we got fresh seafood at a place called Felix's on the causeway; despite the place's designer shoddiness, they make a damned good crab cake.
In Navarre, Florida, we visitedtriadruid's step-dad and siblings. We had planned to stay the night there, but conditions were inhospitable, so we pressed on. I talked triadruid into taking the coastal highway instead of going up to I-10 to get us to our next destination, which was fun until we ran into Destin's Stupid Beach Traffic. We turned off into the unknown, following a sign that read "To 10". It was, indeed, to 10, but to 10 by way of a startling array of tiny, twisting backroads, and a good helping of horror-movie fog. Eventually, just when our heroes were on the verge of giving up, and really feeling the need to pee, we discovered the highway and headed on.
The next day, following Scary Hotel Stay Part One, we drove into Tallahassee.triadruid's aunt and uncle live there, along with a group of cousins, and the best small dog in the world. We hung out, had lunch, looked at family photos, and were just getting ready to leave, when, surprise, a lost dog came to the door. We are a magnet for lost dogs at home, so I suppose it should be no surprise that they follow us when we travel, too. Several cousins set out to find the home of the lost dog, and we went on to Jacksonville, for more food with more cousins, aunts, uncles, and dogs.
The following day, we met up with my relatives. They were cheerful and personable (shock!), perhaps because my grandparents weren't in residence. We got to see the latest round of renovations to the Painted Lady they live in (they have now applied the requisite seven colors of paint to the place to obtain full Painted Lady status - there is apparently an unknown link between Celtic chieftains and Victorian houses, but I digress). We had a tasty lunch at the fish camp, it being my goal to ingest as much seafood as possible, and drove some more, down to visit my grandparents at their trailer in Central Florida.
Now, I could go on about my grandparents, and how they make everyone crazy, and how they totally can't manage themselves anymore, but won't admit to it, but I won't. Instead, I'll tell you that my grandfather recently saw a 14-foot alligator sunning itself on the road in their little senior living park. This is as good an argument as any for the park's no-pets policy, says I. We almost had a pleasant visit, which was marred at the last possible moment by my grandmother's insistence that I should converttriadruid to Christianity by having him join in my Bible study. My grandfather had to physically pull her out of my car so that we could leave. Also, it seemed to be offensive that I was driving. But I said I wasn't going to go into all that.
So. We arrived in Orlando, some time after all of this, and met up with my parents again, for the fell purpose of eating dinner and drinking rum. The next day, we went to EPCOT.triadruid had not ever been to a Disney park before, and I hadn't been to EPCOT since I was in high school, so that was all very exciting and practically new. It's also a genuinely interesting and beautiful park, and we had a fine time. My dad, who is profoundly afraid of heights, missed out on the best attractions, but was probably just as happy about that, as they were both simulators that gave the impression of being in flight in various ways. We also enjoyed a bit of the park where you get to go through their greenhouses and see the experimental crop-growing techniques and the giant vegetables and suchlike. Apropos of nothing, I bought a pair of sparkly mouse ears for my Rocky Horror Picture Show costume. All was generally well.
The next day, we visited all of my relatives in the world, which was mostly uneventful. I am thankful for that. We then drove up to Daytona Beach for Scary Hotel Stay Part Two. At some point on this trip, we discovered the joys of Hotwire, which allows you to book hotel rooms at the last minute for very cheap. Usually, our trips are so over-planned that it's not even funny, so we never have an occasion to use the service, but we were on a very vague schedule on this trip (triadruid did not even have a heart attack or a stroke or anything). So we had used Hotwire to great effect in Jacksonville, and thought we'd give it another go in Daytona Beach. We ended up at a hotel that Hotwire was of the opinion was a 3-star hotel, and indeed probably had been in 1980, or whenever the last AAA surveyor or whoever was there, but was now pretty ratty and gross, and had the least helpful desk clerk ever. But there we were, and it was ocean-front, and that was cool, and we survived.
We rode up A1A the next day to Jacksonville. En route, we snagged yet more seafood at O'Steen's, a culinary landmark from my youth. They serve fried seafood, and that's it, but damn, it's good. We made it to Atlanta by that night, obtaining another food win by successfully going to Ru-San's for sushi. We'd tried to go there, disastrously, at Dragon*Con this year, and it had been looming out there as an unfinished task. It turned out to be relatively close to the hotel we stayed at (Hotwire redeemed itself by booking us into a Westin for about $50 - the usual going rate is between $229 and $269), so was attainable on this trip. Sushi buffet, yay!
The next day we were supposed to go to Knoxville to meetleiandra and osh, but were planning on hitting town in time for dinner, so we turned out to have a few hours to kill in Atlanta. We found our way to Little 5 Points with the dubious assistance of a tourist boards map that displayed only about every tenth road. Fortunately, I have L33t Map Skillz. Anyway. I fear for your lives, you people who live in Atlanta. In the twenty minutes or so it took us to get from 285 to Moreland, we witnessed two drivers making right-hand turns from the left lane, and one making a left-hand turn from the right lane, for a total of six lanes traversed, three oncoming. We figure this maneuver is on the Georgia driving exam. Anyway. We visited A Capella, the best used bookstore in the known world, and bought a small stack of books to add to the large stack of books we haven't read yet, then headed out of town.
On the road to Knoxville, we encountered the biggest Whiskey Tango generator of the trip. On the side of the road, a billboard read "Three donkeys, two nails, and a secret passage". Plain text on a plain background, no other information given. We puzzled over it for a time, and resolved to look it up when we got home. Well, I did look it up, and nobody on the entire internet has a freaking clue what it means, but it has been reported in a number of locations, all in the South, over the past two years. I welcome all theories. (We made note of a number of oddities to research when we got home, most of which turned out to be very explicable after all. For example, mpix.com is not a porn site, despite advertising that made it look as if it were. On the other hand, The Pony is a strip bar, despite advertising that made it look like ... er... well, we didn't know. And so on.)
In Knoxville, we had dinner with the very lovelyleiandra and the very lovely osh at a very lovely Hooter's. Our waitress was quite fascinated with triadruid, and immediately adopted a strategy of talking only to him and ignoring the rest of the party, which we gave triadruid a great deal of crap about, and generally thought was freaking hilarious. In the ladies' room, I saw my first ever "For a good time, e-mail xxx@yyy.com" graffiti - time does move on, you know. There was also a good deal of graffiti exhorting the restroom user to look up REPO!, so that was fun. After dinner, we nearly succumbed to the Curse of Tennessee, which doesn't allow triadruid to see leiandra without car trouble resulting in a need to spend the night. Our car had run low on oil, and I was keen to add some before we went on to the next stop. Alas, the oil cap is virtually impossible to get off the block. Luckily, we were able to borrow a pair of channel locks and get the oil into the sad thirsty clicky car, and we made it to just past Nashville.
Now, we'd intended to spend the night in Nashville, it being the last big town on our route for a while. Somehow, though, we missed Nashville entirely, and ended up in the charming hamlet of Joelton, TN. Joelton is home to a Days Inn, a large church, a small restaurant, and not much else, as far as I can tell. But still, Days Inn, that's all right, right? No. Scary Hotel Stay Part Three! The room itself was not bad, except that it came with a standard Days Inn mirror bolted over a frame set in the wall so that you couldn't see what was behind the mirror, but could definitely tell that there was *something* behind the mirror. It also featured a small door set into the wall next to one of the beds, which you could open onto a patch of wall with different wallpaper than the rest of the room, so obviously the space behind the door had been walled over. If this is not some sort of weird Japanese horror movie waiting to happen, I don't know what is. I made sure we were awake until well after midnight, on the reasonable and sound assumption that if any sort of malevolent midget ghost clowns were going to come through that walled-over door, or if any mirror-demons were coming through the bolted-over mirror, midnight would be the time they would do it. As it happened, neither specter emerged, and we were able to sleep through the night unmolested by anything other than each other.
At this point, all that remained was the long drive home, and we made the last day from Joelton to Kansas City in a stretch. We rolled into KC in time to have dinner and a margarita in a familiar place, and arrive at a completely reasonable hour to the house. Where, of course, the fresh horrors of a week without email access awaited us, but that's another story for another day.
All right, hands up, who read this whole thing? I congratulate you on your endurance, and offer you another challenge: all the pictures are here.
triadruid left at the inhospitable hour of noon on New Year's Day (having been at agrnmn's poker, singing, and silly hats party the night before), on the road to Florida. We drove across Missouri to St. Louis, a trip that is interminable on the way out to anywhere, but somehow seems quick and refreshing on the way back. Southbound on I-55, we discovered Callahan's Place, and then headed into deepest, darkest Arkansas. In Arkansas, we were greeted by an amazing variety of small towns just off of 55, and made up stories about them to alleviate the sheer, butt-numbing boredom of the trip. We imagined a circus: Victoria Luxora, the high-wire artist, twirling a flaming baton while crossing the highway at the towering height of 100 feet; Keiser Wilson, the ringmaster who speaks only gibberish, communicating more clearly with gesture and the occasional shot from an incendiary flare pistol; Marie Lepanto, the delicate, harlequin-painted dog trainer, parading about with her fuzzy charges; and Joiner Tyronza, the strong man with a heart of iron. Thankfully, we soon passed into Tennessee, and then Mississippi, where we stopped for the night. The next day, on to the Florida panhandle, by way of Mississippi and Alabama. We had prepared the car with four new tires, a new power steering pump, and the removal of the bumper-stickers espousing non-Christian religion, so we traveled with only a minimal amount of fear of Red State Cops. We still hugged the speed limit tightly. In Mississippi, we drove through the town of Seminary, but elected not to visit Sanatorium. In Alabama, we got fresh seafood at a place called Felix's on the causeway; despite the place's designer shoddiness, they make a damned good crab cake.
In Navarre, Florida, we visited
triadruid's step-dad and siblings. We had planned to stay the night there, but conditions were inhospitable, so we pressed on. I talked triadruid into taking the coastal highway instead of going up to I-10 to get us to our next destination, which was fun until we ran into Destin's Stupid Beach Traffic. We turned off into the unknown, following a sign that read "To 10". It was, indeed, to 10, but to 10 by way of a startling array of tiny, twisting backroads, and a good helping of horror-movie fog. Eventually, just when our heroes were on the verge of giving up, and really feeling the need to pee, we discovered the highway and headed on. The next day, following Scary Hotel Stay Part One, we drove into Tallahassee.
triadruid's aunt and uncle live there, along with a group of cousins, and the best small dog in the world. We hung out, had lunch, looked at family photos, and were just getting ready to leave, when, surprise, a lost dog came to the door. We are a magnet for lost dogs at home, so I suppose it should be no surprise that they follow us when we travel, too. Several cousins set out to find the home of the lost dog, and we went on to Jacksonville, for more food with more cousins, aunts, uncles, and dogs. The following day, we met up with my relatives. They were cheerful and personable (shock!), perhaps because my grandparents weren't in residence. We got to see the latest round of renovations to the Painted Lady they live in (they have now applied the requisite seven colors of paint to the place to obtain full Painted Lady status - there is apparently an unknown link between Celtic chieftains and Victorian houses, but I digress). We had a tasty lunch at the fish camp, it being my goal to ingest as much seafood as possible, and drove some more, down to visit my grandparents at their trailer in Central Florida.
Now, I could go on about my grandparents, and how they make everyone crazy, and how they totally can't manage themselves anymore, but won't admit to it, but I won't. Instead, I'll tell you that my grandfather recently saw a 14-foot alligator sunning itself on the road in their little senior living park. This is as good an argument as any for the park's no-pets policy, says I. We almost had a pleasant visit, which was marred at the last possible moment by my grandmother's insistence that I should convert
triadruid to Christianity by having him join in my Bible study. My grandfather had to physically pull her out of my car so that we could leave. Also, it seemed to be offensive that I was driving. But I said I wasn't going to go into all that. So. We arrived in Orlando, some time after all of this, and met up with my parents again, for the fell purpose of eating dinner and drinking rum. The next day, we went to EPCOT.
triadruid had not ever been to a Disney park before, and I hadn't been to EPCOT since I was in high school, so that was all very exciting and practically new. It's also a genuinely interesting and beautiful park, and we had a fine time. My dad, who is profoundly afraid of heights, missed out on the best attractions, but was probably just as happy about that, as they were both simulators that gave the impression of being in flight in various ways. We also enjoyed a bit of the park where you get to go through their greenhouses and see the experimental crop-growing techniques and the giant vegetables and suchlike. Apropos of nothing, I bought a pair of sparkly mouse ears for my Rocky Horror Picture Show costume. All was generally well.The next day, we visited all of my relatives in the world, which was mostly uneventful. I am thankful for that. We then drove up to Daytona Beach for Scary Hotel Stay Part Two. At some point on this trip, we discovered the joys of Hotwire, which allows you to book hotel rooms at the last minute for very cheap. Usually, our trips are so over-planned that it's not even funny, so we never have an occasion to use the service, but we were on a very vague schedule on this trip (
triadruid did not even have a heart attack or a stroke or anything). So we had used Hotwire to great effect in Jacksonville, and thought we'd give it another go in Daytona Beach. We ended up at a hotel that Hotwire was of the opinion was a 3-star hotel, and indeed probably had been in 1980, or whenever the last AAA surveyor or whoever was there, but was now pretty ratty and gross, and had the least helpful desk clerk ever. But there we were, and it was ocean-front, and that was cool, and we survived. We rode up A1A the next day to Jacksonville. En route, we snagged yet more seafood at O'Steen's, a culinary landmark from my youth. They serve fried seafood, and that's it, but damn, it's good. We made it to Atlanta by that night, obtaining another food win by successfully going to Ru-San's for sushi. We'd tried to go there, disastrously, at Dragon*Con this year, and it had been looming out there as an unfinished task. It turned out to be relatively close to the hotel we stayed at (Hotwire redeemed itself by booking us into a Westin for about $50 - the usual going rate is between $229 and $269), so was attainable on this trip. Sushi buffet, yay!
The next day we were supposed to go to Knoxville to meet
leiandra and osh, but were planning on hitting town in time for dinner, so we turned out to have a few hours to kill in Atlanta. We found our way to Little 5 Points with the dubious assistance of a tourist boards map that displayed only about every tenth road. Fortunately, I have L33t Map Skillz. Anyway. I fear for your lives, you people who live in Atlanta. In the twenty minutes or so it took us to get from 285 to Moreland, we witnessed two drivers making right-hand turns from the left lane, and one making a left-hand turn from the right lane, for a total of six lanes traversed, three oncoming. We figure this maneuver is on the Georgia driving exam. Anyway. We visited A Capella, the best used bookstore in the known world, and bought a small stack of books to add to the large stack of books we haven't read yet, then headed out of town.On the road to Knoxville, we encountered the biggest Whiskey Tango generator of the trip. On the side of the road, a billboard read "Three donkeys, two nails, and a secret passage". Plain text on a plain background, no other information given. We puzzled over it for a time, and resolved to look it up when we got home. Well, I did look it up, and nobody on the entire internet has a freaking clue what it means, but it has been reported in a number of locations, all in the South, over the past two years. I welcome all theories. (We made note of a number of oddities to research when we got home, most of which turned out to be very explicable after all. For example, mpix.com is not a porn site, despite advertising that made it look as if it were. On the other hand, The Pony is a strip bar, despite advertising that made it look like ... er... well, we didn't know. And so on.)
In Knoxville, we had dinner with the very lovely
leiandra and the very lovely osh at a very lovely Hooter's. Our waitress was quite fascinated with triadruid, and immediately adopted a strategy of talking only to him and ignoring the rest of the party, which we gave triadruid a great deal of crap about, and generally thought was freaking hilarious. In the ladies' room, I saw my first ever "For a good time, e-mail xxx@yyy.com" graffiti - time does move on, you know. There was also a good deal of graffiti exhorting the restroom user to look up REPO!, so that was fun. After dinner, we nearly succumbed to the Curse of Tennessee, which doesn't allow triadruid to see leiandra without car trouble resulting in a need to spend the night. Our car had run low on oil, and I was keen to add some before we went on to the next stop. Alas, the oil cap is virtually impossible to get off the block. Luckily, we were able to borrow a pair of channel locks and get the oil into the sad thirsty clicky car, and we made it to just past Nashville.Now, we'd intended to spend the night in Nashville, it being the last big town on our route for a while. Somehow, though, we missed Nashville entirely, and ended up in the charming hamlet of Joelton, TN. Joelton is home to a Days Inn, a large church, a small restaurant, and not much else, as far as I can tell. But still, Days Inn, that's all right, right? No. Scary Hotel Stay Part Three! The room itself was not bad, except that it came with a standard Days Inn mirror bolted over a frame set in the wall so that you couldn't see what was behind the mirror, but could definitely tell that there was *something* behind the mirror. It also featured a small door set into the wall next to one of the beds, which you could open onto a patch of wall with different wallpaper than the rest of the room, so obviously the space behind the door had been walled over. If this is not some sort of weird Japanese horror movie waiting to happen, I don't know what is. I made sure we were awake until well after midnight, on the reasonable and sound assumption that if any sort of malevolent midget ghost clowns were going to come through that walled-over door, or if any mirror-demons were coming through the bolted-over mirror, midnight would be the time they would do it. As it happened, neither specter emerged, and we were able to sleep through the night unmolested by anything other than each other.
At this point, all that remained was the long drive home, and we made the last day from Joelton to Kansas City in a stretch. We rolled into KC in time to have dinner and a margarita in a familiar place, and arrive at a completely reasonable hour to the house. Where, of course, the fresh horrors of a week without email access awaited us, but that's another story for another day.
All right, hands up, who read this whole thing? I congratulate you on your endurance, and offer you another challenge: all the pictures are here.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 03:23 am (UTC)Atlanta drivers must step it up a bit, tho. Its like they compete for titles in stupidity on the (rather poorly marked) higways at high speeds... I only lived in Atlanta for a few months - but have had the pleasure of driving there enough to love midwesterner's use of turn signals!
Glad your home safe and sound.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 03:47 am (UTC)2) You forgot the part where I got to pet your lemur in Borders. Your lemur rules, btw.
3) Joelton, TN is exit 35. Yes, I know that by heart. It's also the home of a post office, a very small grocery store, and a funeral home. Joelton is within rock throwing distance of my old stomping grounds (exit 24) and 4 miles from the exit for The Frog's old house (exit 31). I find it HILARIOUS that you guys wound up there.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 03:47 am (UTC)We found a Waffle House and spent an hour getting breakfast. After that, we found that we had moved back in the parking lot only about six spaces....
When we finally got far enough along that the commuters had crawled off on their exits, we picked up the pace to where Curly could no longer walk alongside the car. Shortly thereafter, things got real scary.
Going out the other side of the city, traffic picked up a bit. OK...quite a bit..um, a lot...oh, hell it got scary fast! I found myself driving 70 in a 55 zone, and that only qualified me to be the back marker in that race! Seven lanes of road in the direction we were going and all of the other drivers seemed determined to drive in at least three of them at a time at speeds in excess of 80 mph.
I've driven a truck in New York City and wasn't anywhere near as stressed as I was making that drive out of Atlanta. I'd drive in NYC again--I won't drive in Atlanta. I mean, I've ridden in a bus in Puerto Rico after 6 pm, when the speed limits are no longer in effect, and that wasn't as harrowing as driving in Atlanta.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 04:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-13 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 03:07 am (UTC)Did I ever tell you my dad knows the family that owns O'Steens? Their family and my family go way back - I had my first ever fried shrimp at O'Steen's, in fact...and my dad still to this day does painting for them occasionally.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 08:04 pm (UTC)And did