The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Day Eleven: Coming Home

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This is the twelfth and final installment of our travelogue, starring Artificially Sweetened (AS), Cupcake, and me, the Nittany Turkey.

We would have to get to my house before 5 PM on this, the final Tuesday of our journey, so we had to get up pretty doggone early in Rocky Mount. Coupled with the late night and the usual issues with trying to get to sleep when I know I have to do something early, I did not feel very refreshed when awakened by my cell phone’s alarm. Alas, there was no choice but to hit the road.

Checking out of the hotel, we clumsily threw “all our crap” into the weary Sienna for the homeward bound leg. Allowing an hour or so for lunch and assorted pit stops, I calculated that we should easily arrive home on schedule. We sleepily assumed our positions for takeoff.

Our routing was unfortunate, but necessary. We would be on Interstate 95 all the way to Daytona. I-95 is a boring, non-scenic highway, just what a sleepy driver doesn’t need.

After driving for roughly an hour, I began to feel as if I were too sleepy to drive. I pulled off at the next exit, parked in a sleazy motel parking lot, and told the girls to hang on while I took a walk in some fresh air. I did two laps around the motel and returned.

I figured that they would question me as to just what in the hell I was doing briskly walking around the Motel 6 a couple of times, but I think they were too tired to bother with the interrogation. That concerned me, because it meant that my co-pilot, AS, who I had kept in reserve for the entire trip to date, might also be too sleepy to drive. I felt better, so I thought I would wait a while before assessing the need for and viability of a driver swap.

Back on the road, I was thinking back to all the fun times we had enjoyed on this trip. There were so many of them: the whirlwind tour of the mountains of North Carolina; the three-city western and central Pennsylvania blitz; the fun times with the Tams; AS and I obsessively singing “Runaround Sue”; the Amish; the sarcasm from Cupcake; the fact that we all had bladders; and, last but not least, the famous Skynard’s of St. George, South Carolina. I smiled as I drifted through the happy reveries.

My mind turned to my 89 year-old mom, who had fallen while we were away. She lives in South Florida, and she had broken a couple of bones. I talked to her while we were at Tam Manor, and she insisted that she was all right. I had seen pictures of her that my brother had taken when she was in the emergency room, and she didn’t look good at all. I resolved to go to see her when I got back to Florida. I would wait until the weekend, so I could take AS along. Then, I realized that I was daydreaming while paying scant attention to driving. It was time to switch drivers. [Read more…]

Day Ten: Ten Cent Tour of D.C.

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This is the eleventh installment of our summer road trip travelogue, featuring Artificially Sweetened (AS), her daughter, Cupcake, and me, the Nittany Turkey.

My pre-season prognostication having been written and put to bed, I now have no excuses to delay this installment of the travelogue any longer. So, awayyyyyyyyyy we go!

This would be our Washington, D.C. day. At the appointed early morning hour and against the feeble protests of AS, I gathered my stuff together for departure. When I exited the guest facility to go to the bathroom, I was surprised to see Cupcake in the final stages of doing the same. Occasionally, she can be surprisingly sweet and self-reliant; I was happy to see that this was one of those times. So was AS.

I left AS upstairs to gather her stuff as I brought mine downstairs. Toejam and Judy were, of course, already up. Even in retirement, they maintain a first shift coal miner’s schedule.

Toejam and I were discussing my route. He prefaced his comments with, “I know you won’t listen to me, but…” Actually, I wound up listening to him. His idea of taking US 15 down to the Baltimore Beltway turned out to be perfect. I was surprised that my GPS software chose that same routing. But I’m getting ahead of unfolding events.

The plan was to hustle down to suburban Virginia and take the Metro into our nation’s capital, where we could do some sightseeing for a few hours. My hope was that we could avoid rush hours and after the sightseeing, hit the road reasonably early. Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where we would spend the night, would still be a long drive from the capital area.

On Our Way

We said our goodbyes to the Tams after loading the Siena. We will be seeing them again when they pay us a winter visit in January or February. Who knows? We might even see them sooner, if we decided to go to the homecoming game at Penn State this fall.

Over the hill and past Robert Shewokis’ fuel oil tanks we went and we were on our way out of the Skook. Most of the morning proceeded uneventfully, until it was time for lunch. By that time, we were approaching the Baltimore Beltway.

At Cracker Barrel
At Cracker Barrel

“What do you girls feel like for lunch?” I asked.

“Cracker Barrel is a chain, but it’s good enough,” responded AS.

“Ew!” I croaked.

“Cracker Barrel is good!” asserted Cupcake.

“Cracker Barrel is an old lady restaurant!” I protested.

“You’re mean!”

Yes, I am.

But my protests were too feeble. Somehow, we managed to decide on Cracker Barrel. It was 2-1. It just so happened that there was a Cracker Barrel about 15 minutes away, right off a beltway exit in Frederick, Maryland. So, that’s where we went.

Cupcake ordered bacon and eggs, as she wanted breakfast. AS and I had lunch, a reuben for AS and a hamburger for me.

Hostess Trainee
Hostess Trainee

Well, the food turned out to be acceptable, while the service was diner quality without the friendliness. The waitress dumped a steak fry in my lap when she delivered my burger, and didn’t even notice. Nevertheless, I was amused by the fireplug shaped midget hostess apprentice, who looked like she didn’t quite know why she was there. Her function seemed to be to shadow the “real” hostess, whom I nicknamed “mama.” The little one looked like Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson proceeding to her next event when she tailed a party being seated; when “mama” finally gave her a party of her own to seat, presumably because two parties showed up at the door simultaneously, she perked up and returned from her initial mission all smiles, hands on hips, and generally proud of her consummate achievement. It was way cool. Of course, Cupcake was on my case about my obsession with waitresses and hostesses; that made it even more fun. But I digress.

Having finished what turned out to be a redeeming lunch that will actually bring me back to Cracker Barrel someday when I’m desperate enough on the road, we exited via the Cracker Barrel country store. Well, we took a while to exit. Being the consummate shoppers, we had to look at everything in the store. Finally, I advised the ladies that we had work to do, for there was a Geocache search awaiting us outside.

Off Your Rocker
Off Your Rocker

A nationwide series of Geocaches called “Off Your Rocker” sprang up at Cracker Barrel stores. In case you’ve never seen a Cracker Barrel store, they all have a porch with a couple dozen rocking chairs and antique stuff. You can just sit there as long as you wish, or buy a rocking chair if you want. Or you can hunt for the ubiquitous “Off Your Rocker” cache in front of all the rockers, which requires stealth and cunning to avoid detection, scorn, or ridicule. ???? bingo

We found the cache after a brief search. I say “we”, but AS actually made the grab. Nothing new about that. As for “muggles” (a term borrowed from Harry Potter by Geocachers meaning uninitiated onlookers), there was only one group of four bikers on the porch. AS  was sorta right about lunch and she was right about the cache location.

After signing the log, we re-entered the Cracker Barrel and used the respective gender specific rest rooms for their intended purpose. Shortly, we were back on our way to D.C. [Read more…]

Day Six: Hexology, Amish Country, and Intercourse

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This is the seventh in the series of posts chronicling our summer road trip, starring Artificially Sweetened (AS), her daughter Cupcake, and me, the Nittany Turkey.

This won’t be as lengthy as the preceding days’ posts have been, inasmuch as we got a late start,  drove around Pennsylvania Dutch country, and then went out to dinner. Nevertheless, it was lots of fun for the three of us in the minivan.

AS and I were discussing our forthcoming plans well into the wee hours, so we compensated by sleeping late. We decided that we’d do Hawk Mountain Sanctuary on Friday, and subject to Toejam’s approval, as he wanted to be a part of this one, Ricketts Glen State Park on Saturday. That would leave Sunday open for a coal mine tour or whatever we decided to fit into the one remaining day with the Tams. We would be leaving early on Monday morning, possibly visiting Washington, D.C. on the way, and doing our final layover in Rocky Mount, N.C.

Amish Country
Amish Country

So, we showed up in the TV/patio area just in time to see President Obama chatting it up with the ladies on The View. I didn’t watch much of it, as I knew what to expect: Barbara Walters tossing out softball questions, Whoopi Goldberg fawning over the president, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck throttled back so she couldn’t say what she wanted to say. Toejam and JudyT weren’t very interested in it, either. They had other things to do. Besides, they hadn’t voted for Obama. However, when I mentioned to Toejam that I would pick up a pie from one of the baked goods stores in Amish country, he perked up, expressing his preference for shoo fly pie, the wet kind, with plenty of gooey molasses on the bottom.

Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Sign
Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Sign

AS, Cupcake, and I would be taking off on our own on this beautiful Thursday in Eastern Pennsylvania. The Cupcake was on a mission to photograph hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, which are all different and some quite beautiful. I had brought a book along that had a set of instructions for a back roads tour that would take us by a dozen or so barns with impressive hex signs. The only problem was that the book was 10 years old; hence, we thought there would be a chance that we would see condos where barns once stood. Fortunately, this turned out not to be the case. Rural Pennsylvania is much more stable than Florida, our transplant home.

Hex Sign
Hex Sign

The tour seemed to center around Hamburg, north of Reading (pronounced RED-ing, thankyouverymuch), so we shot down busy Pennsylvania Route 61 toward those communities. When we got to the congested intersection just north of the I-78 interchange, I asked the ladies if they would like to do some shopping in Cabela’s, the large outfitter chain store that occupies several acres on top of the hill. I did this with the full knowledge that I could be getting myself into a shopping trap, but what the hell. It’s all about altruism. You see, the Cupcake’s younger sister, BCH (I cannot spell out the nickname given to her by the lovely Cupcake for fear of offending my audience), and her little brother, Shark Bite, had just shopped at Cabela’s in Chicago the previous day, so I wanted to afford Cupcake the opportunity to destroy their bragging rights. However, being around noon, it must have been too early for the vacationing Cupcake, for she expressed no interest. Nor did AS, although she said that being in the parking lot was good enough. Thus, I did a loop around Cabela’s parking lot. I think we might have stopped briefly for a picture as proof of having been there.

Hex Sign
Hex Sign

We needed to get some gas, and I could detect some hunger growls from the humans as well as the car. So, we espied the very familiar Utility Saving Expert sign and pulled into a gas station across from Cabela’s that had a convenience store with a SubWay. I sent the ladies into the store to get some grub, while I fed the Sienna with 87-octane petrol that was nearly as expensive as bottled water. I finished before they did, so I pulled over into a parking spot by the store. They came out empty handed. The explanation from AS was that she could recognize a 45-minute SubWay line when she saw one, and we’d just have to rough it.

Hex Sign on a Covered Bridge
Hex Sign on a Covered Bridge

One of the issues with our tour, hunger aside, was with the abundant detours, courtesy of Penndot, which neither my GPS unit nor the book tour took into account. We had to improvise a bit, but remarkably, we managed to make most of the listed stops in the book tour. Cupcake declared that she had more than enough pictures, many of them lazily snapped through the dirty windows of the minivan. I still haven’t seen them; however, this task was assigned to her by her dad, so at least he got to enjoy them. (Possibly.)

Sneaky Picture of Amish "18-Wheeler"
Sneaky Picture of Amish “18-Wheeler”

As we completed the tour, we set sail for Intercourse, PA, the overcommercialized and touristy nexus of Amish business interaction with us more modern “English”. Other towns in this area have equally colorful names, including Bird in Hand, Paradise, Blue Ball, and Ephrata. On the way, we spotted what AS characterized as the Amish equivalent of an 18-wheeler, a very large horse cart pulled by three horses and driven by an Amish lad so young that AS intoned, “He’s just a boy!” Actually, the Amish educate children only through eighth grade. Beyond that, they learn to work for the family. I think she also told Cupcake that the old order Amish don’t like to have their pictures taken, but I might have been hallucinating. In any case, it is possible that we do not have any photos of this impressive rig. (Update: I found a sneaky picture in AS’s photos.)

Once we had gotten to Intercourse, it wasn’t hard to get what we came for. (That was crudely gratuitous double entendre. Ignore it.) Moving right along, we parked in a large lot by the shopping area. AS remarked, “This is Amish World!” In the true Central Florida spirit, where everything is named something World, she rechristened Intercourse with a rather appropriate moniker. Now that we had our heads on straight with AS’s characterization, we commenced to visit every shop in the plaza. [Read more…]