Well, weve enjoyed Laurens reporting on the New York City, DVC-trade portion of the trip, and now that her portion is done its time for me to jump back onto the keyboard and document the rest.
Judy and Lauren got back on Sunday afternoon, June 17th, and we wanted to get rolling as soon as practical on Monday morning. You can imagine the flurry of activity that occurred with them returning, telling us about their trip and showing us some pictures, and then trying to get ready to leave for two more weeks. They also had laundry to do
, and we took the dog
to Camp Kaiser (we always call his dog-sitting time Camp whoever-is-watching-him). Actually, Judy took him to the dog-sitters. I dont remember what I was doing at the time but Im sure it was some productive trip-preparation activity.
Since wed be spending one night in a hotel en-route to Vero Beach, we had everyone pack an overnight bag so that I wouldnt have to open the cartop carrier where the bigger luggage was, until we hit Vero. Everyone would just happily grab their overnight bag when we got to the hotel and theyd have everything they could possibly need to go to bed and get up the next morning and complete our trip to Vero. Stay tuned on that one.
I only took one photo on this day, and it was before we even left home. It was a side-by-side shot of the Crisco and Philly cream cheese packages that gave us such a good story back in the pre-trip report.
Link to the chapter with "the bagel story"!
Warning: Do NOT store your Crisco and cream cheese in the same refrigerator drawer. When they both look like this they can be confused for one another, with disastrous, albeit hilarious, results.
Crisco on the left. Philly cream cheese on the right.
With that important piece of history documented, we were able to pull out of our driveway at 8 am. It wasnt your classic oh-dark-thirty timing, but considering the turnaround that Judy and Lauren needed to accomplish after their NYC trip, we were happy with it.
I hadnt thought too much about the route I wanted to take (most of it would be down I-95), but we wanted to take 301 to go around D.C. on the eastern side and avoid some of the traffic. I had trouble getting the GPS to let go of its desire to take us immediately to I-95 and so had to pull over 2 minutes into the trip to try to get the GPS lined-up with the way I wanted to go. It was then that I made up my first joke of the trip. It goes like this:
My GPS asked me if I wanted to avoid tolls.
I pressed yes and it said, when you get to the toll plaza
gun it!
Ba-dum-bum.
Anyway, we started traveling through Delaware and the thought hit me that well soon be in the south
home to Hardees and their luscious sausage biscuits. Maybe I could get one at some point during the trip? I had just mentioned to Judy that I had a Hardees sausage biscuit floating in a thought-bubble over my head when not 5 minutes later we hit Middletown, DE (stomping ground of DISers MEK and Captain_Oblivious, by the way) and there was a Hardees! Who knew? (Probably MEK and Captain_Oblivious, but they were keeping that info. to themselves apparently.) So I pulled-up to their drive-through ordering microphone (imagine the voice of the teacher from Peanuts cartoons
wah wah, wah wah wah) and ordered 2 sausage biscuits for myself, and Marlene and James looked at the menu board and both decided on some kind of bacon-cheese covered french fry monstrosity. No one else wanted anything -- apparently Judy and Laurens arteries werent in need of clogging. Anyhow, we pulled away from the microphone and Judy said, Im surprised you didnt order a coffee. Doh! Then while contemplating that mistake, I proceeded to drive right by the window where you pay and get your food. Double-Doh! I tried to get around the building quick enough that I could beat the people behind me in line, but despite nearly putting the van up on 2 wheels while going around the corners, I didnt make it. So, I parked and went inside. Naturally, there was a customer at the register inside so I had trouble interrupting to shed light on why there confusion at the pick-up window. When I was finally able to explain what happened, one of the workers said No wonder they looked so confused when I told them that their fries would take a couple more minutes. Anyhow, since I was in there I ordered a coffee and picked up our order, and a couple of minutes later we were back on the road.
Im sorry there arent any pictures of us driving along, but it was just basically a day-long adventure of us cooped-up in a minivan and all that that entails. We had arguments about which DVD to watch, one set of headphones had sound coming out of only one side, and we had to ask James to turn down the volume on his Nintendo games. Can anyone relate?
Oh, we did have a rather lively debate about whether time machines could
ever possibly exist. James postulated, and I agreed, that they couldnt ever exist because time travelers would have visited our time and we would have learned about the machine. The girls both argued that if someone could invent such a machine, they could also visit us without our knowledge and resist the urge to tamper with the past
.kind of like Star Treks prime directive. Meanwhile, Judy time-traveled herself, by falling asleep at 9:30am and reanimating in our dimension sometime about an hour later.
Further along, Marlene asked what AM and PM stood for. I told her that AM meant it
am morning. She then correctly deduced that PM meant Past Morning.
We had lunch at a Chick Fil-A somewhere in Virginia. Then we got back in the van and Lauren did some of the driving.
I discovered that its really cool to look at Google Earth on an iPhone when youre heading down the highway at 65mph (do not attempt this while behind the wheel). The scenery whizzes by on the app (but with a birds-eye view), as it tries to keep up with your position, but as you go under bridges and other landmarks you can tell that theres about a second or so delay from real-life. You have to remind yourself that the satellite picture was taken who-knows-when and that youre not looking at an actual current feed from a helicopter camera. Hey, Im watching my own police chase! Woo hoo!
Later in the afternoon Marlene awoke from a nap in the backseat (the wayback!) and asked Judy, who was sleeping in the seat in front of her, can I open these pretzels?, which awoke her from a sound sleep. We had a good laugh over it, and suitably teased Marlene about it, but its probably one of those you had to be there things, isnt it? Yeah, I thought so.
Dinner was in South Carolina at a place that was part Wendys, part gas station, and part fruit-stand. So we ate up, fueled-up, and bought up some Georgia peaches. The guy selling the peaches yakked Judys ear off while I was filling the gas tank. Fortunately for her, I finished fueling so she had an excuse to leave.
Back on the road, we finally arrived at our nights accommodations in Brunswick, Georgia, at the Comfort Suites. We got there at 10:20pm, so it was quite a long day of travel, but we had around 2/3 of the trip behind us, so mentally, tomorrows journey should be easy in comparison. We had a little trouble finding the hotel because it was situated behind a gas station and my GPS didnt recognize the street that I got as its address. It wasnt much of a street, more like an access road. But anyway, once in the room we realized that it was going to be perfect it had two double beds
and a pull-out couch
so James, who usually gets stuck in a sleeping bag on the floor, would actually have a bed to sleep on.
Then came the words that I knew, I
knew, someone would utter. Marlene looked in her overnight bag and said, I forgot clothes for tomorrow. What, I got distracted!
Up next: Vero Beach arrival
hold on -- first we have a DISmeet
Link to next chapter