Radically Different Outfits
I’m writing this somewhere in the middle of Virginia.
This past weekend, the Firecracker, her kid, my kid, and I all piled into a car so I could meet her mom, who’s from the south.
Well, that’s not quite what happened. We got into our rental car and promptly got out because it reeked of cigarette smoke.
That ate up a lotta time for us and we also found out that the day we left, Obama, Clinton, and Biden were in town.
Getting outta the city’s always a bear but the visiting presidents and alla the rain made everything worse.
My son didn’t come with us down south as he wanted to stay at his grandparents, so we drove him out to NJ first to drop him off.
MIL: You want some coffee before you go?
Firecracker: Oh, I already have some in the car, thank you.
Me: I’d love some, but I go to the bathroom enough when I travel.
This turned out to be pretty true when I asked her a few hours later if she wanted to pull over to get a quick break.
Her: Nope – I’m gonna be a taskmaster here.
Me: Can I at least borrow your sunglasses to try and sleep a bit?
Her: (laughing) You’re gonna look great in my sunglasses.
She was wrong.
Tried to get some sleep in the car but that was pretty much impossible.
Somewhere in West Viginia, her kid got hungry so she finally pulled over and we searched around for a place to eat.
Her: I love seeing the country. Isn’t it beautiful and peaceful?
Me: It’s like when I went to college [in Cornell]. I gotta, say, though, this place is less bucolic and more like the land of strip malls.
I had a chicken sammie animal style at Chick-fil-A.
The next four hours or so were just like this.
We were making good time so for dinner, we ended up stopping by a joint called Holly Jo’s Creekside Grill.
The food was only ok but everyone was super nice and I can’t remember the last time I ate with Darth Vader.
The problem was probably that I ordered a salad. It was not a good salad.
Everything else was good, though.
It was pretty late when we pulled into our hotel in Winston-Salem – some 12 hours after we left that morning.
The hotel itself was pretty nice.
Me: Man, look at the size of this place! Real estate’s gotta be lot cheaper out here if this is just the lobby.
Her: Yup, Winston-Salem only has about 250,000 people.
Me: That’s not even as big as my family’s neighborhood in Queens.
The hotel room was pretty nice too.
When we got up the next morning, we were pretty amused to find that there were two conventions happening in the convention hall just a block from our hotel room:
The first was the Triad Anime Convention while the second was the North Carolina Youth & Hyphen Convention 2024.
Shall we say that the attendees of the respective events wore radically different outfits?
Firecracker: (talking about the Youth Convention ladies) Do you notice that they’re all wearing skirts down to their ankles?
Me: I do now. (pointing over at an anime convention girl in hot pants) They’re dressed pretty differently.
Her: Very. (shaking head) They should probably wear a little more.
Me: Nah, it’s America. People should dress how they want.
Her: It’s cold!
Me: This is true.
I didn’t take any pics of the latter but did of the former.
There’s more but I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.
Location: my room, getting ready for a trip down south
Mood: injured
Music: Won’t you roll with me, go with me, waste some time? (Spotify)
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