December 17, 2004
Day 2
The people I met in Kentucky, while friendly, were a little, well, clueless. I walked out to the official DCSOB Road Trip Mobile Party Lounge to find it completely caked in ice. The lady at the front desk apologized for not having an ice scraper to offer, but pulled out a set of AOL discs from behind the desk and told me that they work well for removing ice from car windows.
For the first time in several years, I thought back to Mr. Berman, my slightly eccentric high school geometry teacher. When a circle meets a straight line and that line does not go through the circle, they meet at exactly one point. That doesn’t make for efficient window scraping.
I eventually got the windows cleared and we high-tailed it out of Kentucky. As it turns out, the state has a wonderful parkway system with four-lane limited-access roads that is more or less invisible to Mapquest. Some more lessons learned after 600 miles of driving:
- There is nothing in Western Kentucky. Few cars or trucks on the road, nothing to look at – just set the cruise control to 80 and pop in some Von Bondies;
- If you think Western Kentucky is empty, check out the bootheel of Missouri;
- The whole concept of stopping to gawk at a strange roadside attraction was once foreign to me, it isn’t any more. Once you’ve been staring at the back of a big rig for two hours while scanning between Christian talk radio stations, it is very easy to go into a fit of joy and excitement upon seeing a sign marking the beginning of the Central Time Zone or a power plant of modest size. A.G. was particularly overstimulated by Missouri’s non-numerical county road designations “Route U? What the f*ck?”
- Products with Jesus’ likeness are available at stores other than Urban Outfitters. This is probably due to the lack of Urban Outfitters location in rural Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas;
- The nations’ most intense political debates are not on Crossfire or the floor of the Senate, they can be found above the urinals in truck-stop bathrooms;
Following about 9 hours of learning lessons, we arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas. Following a short trolley ride, we proceeded to get smashed, as per Jeff’s directions, at the Flying Saucer (where the hot waitress said she would be leaving for L.A. next week, poor thing), Sticky Fingerz (where A.G. and I beat the entire bar in video trivia) and the Midtown Billiards Club (which can stay open past the official 1 a.m. closing time because it charges a nominal fee and has 75 cent PBRs). Eight beers each later, we took a cab back to the hotel and had a deep and technical conversation about barbecue with the cabdriver, who gave us a very good recommendation for lunch the next day.
Posted by rj3 at December 17, 2004 1:08 PM
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Comments
i am so unbelievably jealous of you boys right now. and that's not sarcasm, either.
Posted by: nm at December 17, 2004 3:23 PM
Ditto that.
Posted by: Michael at December 17, 2004 5:32 PM