3-20-08

In case you didn’t already read it on my Twitter, we’re home! We got here just before 9:00 last night. Rick had predicted the trip would take 13 hours – it took 14, but only because we stopped a couple of times to shop and about 15 times to pee.

I am a peeing machine.

We meant to leave the house at 5:00 yesterday morning, and I myself was ready to go, but other people (HELLO) were not. Which was okay, because it gave me time to post my entry and bond with the animals for a while longer. Maddy (for those of you who are newish or just want to see the old pictures, this is what Maddy looked like when she was my foster bebbe) allowed me to come close to her, and she allowed me to hold out my hand for sniffing, but she clearly did not want to be petted by me, and I respected her wishes.

Well.

I respected her wishes until I was standing by her a little while later. She had just eaten and was sitting and watching the goings-on, and her tail was near me, so I just reached out and touched her tail. You would have thought I’d picked her up and swung her around by the tail from her hysterical hissing reaction.

Maddy has no love for me, I tell you what. She’s gorgeous and she’s happy and she’s spoiled rotten, though, and that’s really all a foster mother can hope for.

(flickr)

(flickr)

(flickr)

We got on the road and stopped to fill the gas tank, and then had to go back to fetch Nance’s laptop (luckily, we hadn’t gone too far), and we stopped for breakfast, and then we were on the road for real a little before 7:00.

We were out of Pennsylvania and into West Virginia pretty quickly. We stopped at Cabela’s in West Virginia for a look around. I’d never been to a Cabela’s, and it reminded me of a cross between LL Bean and the Kittery Trading Post.

(flickr)

We were through West Virginia pretty quickly and then we got into Ohio, and I tell you what – we were in that state forever. At the point when I started thinking “SURELY we’re almost through here?”, Rick said “We’re about halfway through the state.” Lordy.

We stopped at the JC Penney outlet store in Columbus and did some shopping. I think we were there about an hour. There was a lot of good stuff (really low prices!) there, but I ended up not buying anything. We left there, stopped for lunch, and hit the road again.

The entire trip, Nance and I were Twittering like the dorks we are. Also, of the 14-hour trip, I think we talked 12 hours of it. We’d made sure to have plenty of Keith and the Girl podcasts to listen to on the way down, and then ended up listening to only a couple.

At some point in Ohio – or maybe Kentucky, at this point it’s all a blur – we stopped at a McDonald’s to pee and have our pictures taken with the Ronald McDonald statue in the parking lot, because we are dorks.

(flickr)

(flickr) Looks like I was giving Ronald hell about something.

We stopped at Cracker Barrel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky for dinner (I only knew where we were because Fred called while Nance and I were checking out the store, and I asked an employee where we were) and the guy who waited on us harassed the hell out of us. No kidding, that guy must have come back to check on us 10 times during the course of our meal. We finally fled in self-defense just so we didn’t have to keep reassuring him that everything was FINE THANKS. Talk about needy. (Actually, I think he was just new and determined to do a good job of it.)

(flickr)

(flickr)

We got a little lost in Nashville, but not for long, and after a few stops for gas and peeing, we got home and saw the cats and Fred dragged Rick out to admire the pigs, and then we all went to bed pretty early.

I slept like a baby.

Did I mention that I woke up Tuesday morning with a really bad sore throat and stuffy nose? All of a sudden the out-of-it feeling I’d had all day Monday and attributed to jet lag made sense. I started taking the Cold fx I’d just bought the day before at Big Lots (yes, it’s just ginseng, shaddup) and Nance gave me some cough drops. I hoped that by the time I woke up yesterday morning my sore throat would be gone, but it held on until about dinner time before it finally went away. Today, I’m coughing and snotty, but I feel pretty good, so maybe the Cold fx did its job!

Traveling with Nance and Rick, I have to say, is a blast. They are apparently familiar with every single town between their home and ours, because every time we stopped to pee Nance would say something like “Oh, this is where we stopped and bought that shirt, right?”, and Rick would say “Yeah, the Starbucks is right around this corner.” Or we’d be on the highway driving, and Nance would say “That’s the mall where we stopped and shopped. They have a good (insert store name here).” It cracked me up.

* * * * * * * * * *

(flickr) Miz Poo approves of the $7 cat beds from Big Lots.

* * * * * * * * * *

Previously
2007: That just screams “Monday”, doesn’t it?
2006: “I prefer ‘va-jay-jay’,” he said almost prissily.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: And why is it that I ALWAYS have my period when it’s time to leave on vacation? Why? Whyyyyyyyyy?
2002: I don’t want to have to think about Ozzy having a boner, thankyouverymuch.
2001: Fortunately, I have many more lazing-around-the-house-reading hours in the day than he does.
2000: I didn’t think cats did such things once they were fixed.