Every rest stop in North Carolina

Yesterday, at the end of a rather long drive that Google maps said would be five hours but could only actually be five hours if I drove about 110 miles per hour I pulled in next to Kristin's car:



Not my best parking job, but I'm in the lines, ok?

Thank God I have a small car.

I stopped at every rest stop on Interstate 40 East, once I crossed into North Carolina:



I realize I've stopped at that particular one before:



when we went to Asheville for a day trip, but I stopped at every rest stop but one this time for two reasons: first, that I was drinking a lot of diet Mountain Dew in the car to stay constantly alert, so I had to pee a lot, and second because I was trying to figure out how to get 10,000 steps for the day in while spending most of the day in the car. To do that, I walked a couple of laps of the rest area each time I stopped the car, reading plaques:



checking out vending areas even though I didn't want any snacks (I packed my own):



and walking down to see scenic views:





and dead bugs:



On my way back up from the scenic view a pair of ladies stopped me to ask about it.

"Is it worth the walk?"

I shrugged. "There's a little valley. It's only a minute's walk either way."

They didn't look particularly enthused after they walked down there, so I got in my car and drove away before they could walk back up, just in case they wanted to blame me for ruining their day by tricking them into gazing upon boring, unfulfilling mountains. At 249 steps, it was worth it to me, ladies.

Most of the drive was uneventful, with four exceptions:

1) At one rest stop, a man kept talking on his phone through his entire pee and poop, and didn't wash his hands when he was done. Mister, your caller can hear you. They can hear everything.

Everything.

2) Beeping horns in tunnels almost got me into an accident.

I don't know if it's a tradition everywhere, but whenever I've driven through a tunnel in the Smokies:



people always beep their horns through the tunnel. I even explained this to my parents when they came to visit, to their amusement, and insisted that they do it as well. Yesterday I found out that everyone doesn't share this tradition. As we started going through a tunnel, I got ready to beep my horn, the semi truck behind me and to the side of me started wailing on theirs (which is really, really loud in a tunnel)... and the car in front of me freaked out, slammed on their brakes, and almost swerved into the tunnel wall.

Ooops.

Good thing I didn't beep.

Also a good thing that I was following at a safe distance (because I am a very safe driver; please remember that as I move on to the next point) and my normally good driving reflexes were supersensitively heightened by a 20 ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew.

3) At one point, I accidentally drove 85 miles per hour in a 65 zone.

I know, right? I broke a law.

Most of the way I was doing 70 mph to 80 mph, well within the flow of traffic, but at one point Green Day's "Fuck Time" (sorry for swearing, gentle readers) came on the iPod and I was rocking out and singing along and all of a sudden I was like, "Ooops, I'm doing 85," which is not an acceptable excuse if I should happen to get pulled over.

Nobody's going to pull you over, my inner voice chided. Do 85 for a while. Live a little. Grab life by the balls, dude. YOLO!

Maybe my inner voice is right, I thought, in my other inner voice. Maybe I should do 85 for a while.

Just as I thought this, I drove past a 40 foot tall cross by the roadside.

On the other hand, you're gay, and driving a Beetle, which is like being kind of supergay in the part of the country where they erect giant crosses by the roadside. Do you really want to deal with the kind of cops who work in a place like this?

Suddenly now my inner voice is the voice of reason? What an awful thing to think, full of stereotypes and assumptions and fear of authority.

Why, I should keep going at this speed, just to prove that the police here are good and sweet and kind.

Enjoy getting tazed, bro, voice of reason countered.

I slowed back down to 80.

4) The good people of the Raleigh-Durham area have no idea how merging works. Seriously, is this not covered in Driver's Ed in North Carolina? There's a stretch of road there were there are over a dozen roads merging in from the right. When this happens to you, there are a few different options:

1) Move into the open lane to your left.
2) Maintain a basically constant rate of speed, so that the cars merging in from the right can work around you.
3) If traffic is moving slowly, allow zippering.
4) Slam on your brakes every single time you're approaching one because Jesus Christ, there's a merge up ahead!

If you selected #4, congratulations.

You live in North Carolina.

Distance is a constant, Virginia

Yesterday morning I hopped in my car and drove northeast for hours and hours and hours (actually, fourteen and a half, but there was some heavy construction in Pennsylvania and I stopped every hour for five to ten minutes to stretch, so it probably should have only been twelve hours, if that), leaving behind autumn in Tennessee:



for autumn in Virginia:



(because nothing says "autumn" like a rest stop dedicated to a smallpox mass grave), West Virginia:



Pennsylvania:



and New York, which I haven't taken any pictures of because by the time I crossed the state line I was in full "must get to hotel tired of being in car" mode. I'll get some pictures here later, I'm sure.

I've made this drive a few times now. In fact, the picture I took at the Virginia Welcome Center yesterday:



is almost identical to the one I took in 2008, the last time I drove this instead of flying:



The only real difference is that I drove all of Tennessee in complete darkness this time, and the sun did not come up until I was well past the Virginia state line. That's the difference between a summer drive and one at the start of winter, I guess. Shorter days and daylight savings time playing havoc with your system, the same way that Virginia decided to play havoc with my bladder.

I started out kind of charmed by Virginia, even though it's a hateful place where the state attorney general stripped all protections for LGBT people from their state laws last year. I stopped for gas at Natural Bridge, and discovered this life sized concrete tiger at the gas station:





I had no idea what the Enchanted Castle was, but it kind of made me want to go back to Natural Bridge someday, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy toward Virginia for a while, until the thing with the bathroom happened.

In order to propel myself through these drives, I get myself good and wired on Diet Mountain Dew, which means that I tend to stop fairly regularly along the way for bathroom breaks. I was cruising through Virgina yesterday morning, monitoring my progress, when I passed a sign that said, "Next Rest Area 68 miles" and thought, "Oh, well, I'm doing 70, so I can be at that in an hour. That should be fine." Part of the way through that hour, I started to get that "have to pee" feeling, but I knew that somewhere, a half hour ahead, there was a rest stop available, and I continued blissfully chugging Diet Mountain Dew and singing along to the iPod.

Eventually, I saw another sign, right on schedule: "Rest Area 6 Miles". I thought, "Well, I'm doing seventy miles and hour. If I were doing sixty miles an hour, I'd be going a mile a minute, and I would be at the rest stop in six minutes. Since I'm doing seventy miles an hour, I'll be at the rest stop in... somewhere under six minutes." I'm not good at word problems, but I figured six minutes was welcome news, because "Hey, I have to pee sometime in the future" had transformed in the last half hour to "Now! Now! OH GOD PLEASE FIND A BATHROOM OR ELSE JUST JERK THE CAR OFF THE ROAD AND RUN INTO THE BUSHES AND I DON'T CARE WHO'S LOOKING OR IF THEY HAVE SNAKES HERE!"

I was feeling more cooped up than a truck full of chickens:



and I was ready to go, especially when random shuffle on the iPod produced "Champagne Supernova" with its intro of rustling water. After six minutes of frantic clock watching, there was still no rest area, and I started to wonder if I had done the math wrong, but then ahead in the distance, at seven minutes, I saw a blue sign and felt immediate, happy relief.

Until I read the sign, and it said, "Rest Area 2 Miles".

It is because of moments like this, when I am suddenly filled with blinding rage, that God has chosen not to grant me dangerous brain powers like an angry teenage girl in a Stephen King book.

If the rest area was six miles ahead, seven minutes ago at seventy miles per hour, how could it still be two miles ahead? IT CAN'T. It is mathematically impossible. Unless somewhere in those alleged six miles I drove over the mid-Atlantic Ridge or the San Andreas Fault or piloted the car through a Goddamn wormhole, the distance between two fixed points on a straight line is a constant, and if a car is moving along that constant at a specific speed, it will always take the same amount of time to travel from point A to point B. If a train leaves New York going fifty miles an hour and a train leaves Baltimore going sixty miles per hour some kid will always be able to tell you on his SAT where they will cross each other because Baltimore doesn't suddenly relocate to Florida in the middle of the word problem.

You can't just arbitrarily place that sign wherever you feel like six miles away might be, Virginia. People are counting on you, people who are full of Diet Mountain Dew and rage. You can't just play games with their lives and bladders and mount your signs wherever one happens to fall off the back of the sign truck.

At least in Tennessee our bathrooms are where we say they are.

Road Trip 2009: Day One

My vacation has officially started, and it's a real vacation where I leave the county, not a staycation like the one I took in the spring. Staycation was fun and all, but it's nice to be really, really away when you're away. This year's plan was to meet up with college friends in Florida, and since it's only eleven hours and driving is cheap while flying is expensive, I had to get up before dawn to get on the road:



It's not quite as early as last year, but still, that's a time of day that I rarely, if ever, see. As with last year's trip, I brought a copious supply of Mountain Dew for fuel, but this led to an unanticipated problem: Georgia would rather that you did not go to the bathroom in their state.

At first I thought this might just be because it was early. When I stopped at Georgia's Welcome Center, the lights were on but it was still locked up since it was before dawn:



I didn't really have to pee yet, but was just thinking that I might as well when I was finished with my breakfast bar. OK, the welcome center was locked and not very welcoming, but at least they had one, unlike, say, Maryland, which welcomes no one and only has a sign. I figured I'd just move on to the next rest area, and everything would be fine.

Except there wasn't a next rest area.

In the whole state, there only seem to be like three, total. I went zipping through Atlanta, still swilling Mountain Dew, and down into south Georgia, which I have never visited but have seen in a number of disturbing movies, and still... nothing. Maybe people in Georgia don't need rest? Or they have family all along the highway and can just stop in at their houses? I thought I might find a restroom when I stopped to get gas, but the gas station was kind of sketchy and all by itself out in the middle of nowhere, and I figured if I went into the bathroom alone I'd just end up feeding the clerk's family of inbred cannibals. Somehow these are the only kind of gas stations I ever manage to stop at on vacation.

In the back of my mind I still somehow believed that a rest area would appear, so I left the gas station, got back on the highway, saw a sign for a rest stop, and then this happened:



Someone got in an accident, and we sat for 45 minutes at a complete stop while they cleared the highway. When we finally got moving again, everybody pulled off at the rest stop, to the point that there was a line of cars going out to the highway, and somehow I thought it would be a good idea to skip this and just go to the next one with no guarantee that there would even be a next one, but eventually there was:



And I peed and all was right with the world.

Before I leave the subject of Georgia and I-75, though, I do want to say that I was greatly surprised that there was only one major accident along the way. When I called my friend Sandy, who lives in Georgia, to tell her to write her congresspeople to demand more rest stops I also told her about the accident and traffic jam and she said, "Oh, yeah, that always happens."

That always happens because people in Georgia are bad drivers. Given the option of passing on the left or on the right, they pick the right every time. A turn signal might mean that they are switching from one lane to the next, but it might also mean that they are cutting across five lines. A consistent rate of speed is frowned upon, but random tapping of brakes is not. If, for whatever reason, you are unable to pass someone on the right, you are apparently taught to get right up on their bumper and flash them with your high beams so that they can attempt to get out of your way, even though there is nowhere to go or you would have already pulled into that space to pass them. It's like everyone in Georgia sits in their driveway in the morning and thinks, "How can I make driving more dangerous? OK, I'll do that," and then, while doing it, thinks, "This thing that I'm doing now (applying makeup, swerving, reducing speed without braking and then speeding up again), would it be even more dangerous if I did it in another lane? OK, I'll switch to that lane and do it there."

Eagerly leaving Georgia, Florida welcomed me:



That sign is a crock, but I didn't think about it at first since they were busy handing me free juice:



I'd guess that they give away five times as much OJ as grapefruit. Given the choice, do you want sunshine in a cup, or something that tastes like soil? I sipped my juice, wandered back outside, and thought, "Why is the Sunshine State so cloudy?"



It rained the rest of the trip. Winds, thunder, sheeting downpour. Sunshine State, my ass. I finally got to Sean's, though, and as I pulled in the clouds miraculously parted, and we went to dinner, where I had delicious beef pot stickers:



and there was a classic car show wrapping up outside:



Today I think we're going to baseball and maybe to see "Star Trek".