hand Tucker Carlson’s and Paul Begala’s asses to them on a platter? I do so love the Jon Stewart. I’ve loved him since his MTV days and have loved him all these years and I called dibs on him years and years ago, so y’all just quit it with trying to claim him as your boyfriend. He is my secret boyfriend and has been for years.
Even Fred approves.
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Let’s see… where to begin? First of all, I decided that if I was going to drive to Myrtle Beach and back, I needed to rent a car rather than drive my Jeep, because I wasn’t completely certain that my Jeep would make it. So I reserved a compact car, and when I showed up at Enterprise Saturday afternoon, they asked if it was okay if they gave me a free upgrade.
“Sure!” I said, because I am flexible and kind and to get a bigger car for free? What am I going to say? “NO! I MUST have the Ford Focus!”? Please. So I expected they’d upgrade me to something like a Saturn or Ford Tempo.
Not quite. What I got upgraded to was a brand-spankin-new Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo in dark red. For an entire week it cost me about $150. You just can’t beat that with a stick. Not only did it have a decent stereo and CD player, it also had cruise control, and if you’re driving long distances on interstate roads, cruise control is an absolute life saver.
The spud and I left Madison at 6 am Sunday morning. She pretty much slept for the first few hours until I had to stop to pee and get something to drink, and then she… slept for another hour until it was time to stop for breakfast. We had egg mcmuffins for breakfast, stopped a few hours later for gas and snacks, drove a few more hours, stopped to pee, drove a few more hours, stopped for lunch, drove a few more hours, stopped to pee and gas up, and drove for a few more hours.
You get the idea.
Mapblast and Mapquest both said that the drive would take about 10 hours, but I scoffed and guffawed, because SURELY they were talking about people who would drive the speed limit and I intended to drive exactly 10 miles over the speed limit whenever possible (digression: I’ve never ever been stopped when going 10 miles over the speed limit – I’ve always understood cops “allow” you that much before they bother to stop you – and so I am usually mostly careful (when on interstate roads, mind you) to keep it to 10 miles over the speed limit. But coming back on Thursday I was going around Atlanta at 85 in a 65 mph zone, and people were blowing by me like I was standing still, including at least three cops. Maybe my silly little 10-miles-over rule is outdated?). So I did some math – some of that fuzzy math – in my head, and decided I could probably do the trip in 9 hours.
Try 10 hours and 15 minutes. I guess I hadn’t factored in the fact that all those stops took time. But I will say that as much as I was dreading the drive itself, the drive really and truly wasn’t bad at ALL. I never had to look too far to find a station playing country music, I brought plenty of CDs with me, and the spud didn’t do a whole lot of chattering, thus my brain didn’t leak out of my eyes.
Anyway, we got to Myrtle Beach after 5, Eastern time. The place we were headed for was
Ocean Forest Colony on North Ocean Blvd, so when I got on that street I called my father to tell him that we were nearby. The spud watched the street numbers while I talked to my father, and then my father said “Wait! Stop! You just passed it!” So I had to drive up and turn around, and by the time I got back to the place, my mother was standing in the parking lot waving us in.
It was a small building – three floors, four apartments on each floor – and we had to climb two flights of stairs to the second floor (though now that I think about it, if you consider the ground floor the first floor, we were really on the third floor, but there were no apartments on the bottom floor). The spud and I unpacked in about five minutes flat –
this is what the floor plan looked like; we were sharing the room with two twin beds on the non-ocean side of the apartment – then we went out on the balcony and looked at the ocean, and I finally said “Let’s go down to the beach!” Which we did. We walked along the beach and my mother and I talked and the spud and my father collected shells. There were tons of shells everywhere, and it took the spud about two minutes to get a huge plastic cup full of perfect, unbroken shells.
(click on image to see the full-sized version)
(click on image to see the full-sized version)
After half an hour or so of walking on the beach, we headed back to the apartment to get ready to go out for dinner. We sat around and talked about where we were going to go, and my father finally proclaimed that we were going to go to “the buffet place”, and we headed out in their rental Ford something-or-other car. We ended up at The
Great American Steak & Buffet Company, which I’ve seen before, but never been in. I do love me a buffet, and this was an awesome buffet with anything you could ever want. I had an excellent piece of fried chicken, some seafood salad, and a bunch of other stuff which I can’t recall at the moment. I’d definitely recommend it.
After dinner we drove around Myrtle Beach for a little while. It was dark, so we drove verrrry slowly past some of the houses across the street from the beach. A lot of people in Myrtle Beach apparently don’t really think to close their blinds, so we had a good time peering into lit rooms and seeing how they had their houses set up.
When our sightseeing tour was over, we headed back to the apartment and sat around reading and watching TV. I had to wait until 10 to call Fred, since I was on Eastern time and he was still on Central time, so I talked to him for half an hour or so, then went straight to bed.
At home, I sleep in a queen-size bed, so the twin bed I slept in while in Myrtle Beach took some getting used to. Plus, it was too soft (I prefer a firm mattress) and I kept hearing an annoying humming noise all night long. At 5 am I finally realized that the humming noise that was making my brain vibrate was the ceiling fan which I’d turned on the night before. I turned it off and the humming stopped, but without any air circulating I had to kick all my covers off because I started sweating almost immediately.
(Good thing for the spud I was sleeping in shorts and a t-shirt instead of nekkid like I do at home, eh?)
When I stumbled out of bed at about 7:45 the spud had just gotten up and she and my father were out on the balcony looking down at the beach. It was warming up, the sun was shining, the seagulls were screeching, and it looked like we had a beautiful day ahead of us.
(click on image to see the full-sized version)
This is getting long, so more Myrtle Beach recap tomorrow, mm’kay?
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Licky McLickerson.
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(click on image to see the full-sized version)
(click on image to see the full-sized version)
(click on image to see the full-sized version)