THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30TH, 2010 – 11:12 a.m.

i’m sitting in a candlewood suites looking out at the rain.  mollie has been sleeping in bed ever since kevin put her up there early this morning – she didn’t even want any breakfast.  clearly, travel is quite exhausting for her. i’d like to post something right now, plus the photos i’ve taken already, but people keep saying DON’T POST ANYTHING WHILE YOU’RE GONE.  PEOPLE WILL BREAK INTO YOUR HOUSE AND ROB YOU.

really?  even with our killer guard cat, winnie?

so i’m writing now while i have the lovely wi-fi connection here and plenty of free time while kevin is out doing his shooting competition on this very very wet wednesday.  i’ll have to post all the saved posts when we get back.  who knows, i may be so busy after today that i won’t have any more time for the writing.

i wrote this in the car yesterday:

Wednesday September 29^th, 2010 11:07 a.m. Eastern Time

We’re nearing the eastern edge of Ohio now, about to dash through a little part of west virginia, into pennsylvania, back into west virginia, into maryland, west virginia again, and then to virginia.  I’m sitting here typing on my computer while kevin drives and mollie tries to sleep in the back sleep.  She’s sitting in her bed with her head resting on the back of the seat, and it looks incredibly uncomfortable.  I don’t know why she doesn’t just want to lie down.

earlier, before she got really tired –

she also tried to sleep with her paws on the cooler.

We left home yesterday morning at the crack of ten a.m.   we had hoped to leave by nine, but of course that didn’t happen.

I didn’t bring absolutely everything I own with me, but close enough.  Yesterday morning I was frantically grabbing any leftover things and stuffing them into backpacks and suitcases and plastic garbage bags. I brought along my giant purple suitcase, the one I took with me to scotland last summer.  We were gone for almost a month, and I had clothes for biking including my helmet and cold-weather biking gear, plus fancy dresses and stuff for the queen mary II, plus lots of jewelry and a swimming suit that I didn’t end up using.

I did use just about everything else, though. Right now I’m wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday.  There’s something nice about getting up and putting on the same clothes (CLEAN UNDERWEAR, of course).  When we got to a rest stop this morning and a huge tour bus pulled up and millions of old people poured out of it and I was standing in line in the bathroom, I realized that I hadn’t even brushed my hair yet.  The old ladeis were, of course, all derssed up.  One of them wore a sparkly halloween shirt and I told her I liked it.  She said she knew it was a little early for it, but you need to be sparkly for gambling, right?  A bus full of geriatric gamblers.

I brought four pairs of tennis shoes.  I was only going to bring three; one for wearing and two for wearing in muddy conditions, but then they were both packed away in the camper and I thought I’d need them before the camper was popped up.  So, four pairs of tennis shoes.

Way too many shirts, especially since I may just wear this one every day. Too many pants. Too many toiletries.  Will I really use the flat iron?  But we will be going out to dinner at least a coupla times, so I would want my bangs to be flat.

When there’s a whole lot of space for suitcases, I clearly have a problem with limiting the amount of stuff.

The one problem is that we forgot our folding chairs that we use while sitting around the camp fire.  Oops.  Problem is that they weren’t on a list, so we forgot them.  I also forgot the cheese for hamburgers, but I could live without the cheese plus of course it’s easier to get cheese on the road than it is to get chairs for camping.  But the last time kevin drove to VA, he found a huge cabela’s and stopped there, so we’ll go there and buy chairs and propane and probably a few other things too.

Yesterday we were debating about whether to stay in the campground or in a cabin at the dillon state park in ohio.  There was a good chance of rain, plus it looked like we were going to get there after dark, which would have made it challenging to put up the camper.  As we got closer to the park, near seven o’clock, we decided to stay in a cabin.

When we got to the park, though, everything looked shut down.  We found the cabins, but there was no office nearby.  We drove back to the campground entrance and a cop sitting in his car in the empty parking lot said all the people who could rent us a cabin had left at seven.  It was now 7:10. Oh well – the cabins didn’t look that nice, really, especially for the price – they were $125 a night.

We found a campsite and managed to get set up without too much trouble, except when the electric cord didn’t reach from the camper to the electric outlet, and so kevin had to hook the camper back up to the van and I had to guide him back and I’m not good at that at all.  Kevin said that when we get home he’s going to have me back up the van so I’ll see that you can’t just suddenly turn one way or the other when the person doing the guiding says TURN LEFT or STRAIGHTEN OUT NOW.

We didn’t need the chairs, either, because it was late and we were tired plus there was no firewood anywhere around to be seen.  Instead, kevin set up the little cook stove inside and we heated up some soup and had that with a glass of whiskey. Aah, camping at its finest…

i don’t know about the popup – it seems very small to me.  the advantage is that kevin could sit at the table and lean over and cook our dinner.  the bad thing is that i couldn’t get past him to get  to the back of the trailer.  it’s a little bit crowded, especially with all our tons of stuff in it.

kevin was enjoying the whiskey he brought in his little brown jug.  when he was filling the jug at home before we left, he sang the little brown jug song to me.  i didn’t know all the words; it’s pretty funny.

here are the lyrics, because i know you’re dying to know what they are.  on wikipedia it says this was originally a song about “a man and his wife and their hard life due to alcoholism.”  then they changed the lyrics and made it into a children’s song.  glenn miller made a famous recording of it.

Me and my wife live all alone

In a little log hut we call our own;

She loves gin and I love rum,

And don’t we have a lot of fun!

Chorus

Ha, ha, ha, you and me,

Little brown jug, don’t I love thee!

Ha, ha, ha, you and me,

Little brown jug, don’t I love thee!

When I go toiling on the farm

I take the little jug under my arm;

Place it under a shady tree,

Little brown jug, ’tis you and me.

(Chorus)

’Tis you that makes me friends and foes,

’Tis you that makes me wear old clothes;

But, seeing you’re so near my nose,

Tip her up and down she goes.

(Chorus)

If all the folks in Adam’s race

Were gathered together in one place,

I’d let them go without a tear

Before I’d part from you, my dear.

(Chorus)

If I’d a cow that gave such milk,

I’d dress her in the finest silk;

Feed her up on oats and hay,

And milk her twenty times a day.

(Chorus)

I bought a cow from Farmer Jones,

And she was nothing but skin and bones;

I fed her up as fine as silk,

She jumped the fence and strained her milk.

(Chorus)

And when I die don’t bury me at all,

Just pickle my bones in alcohol;

Put a bottle o’ booze at my head and feet

And then I know that I will keep.

(Chorus)

The rose is red, my nose is too,

The violet’s blue and so are you;

And yet, I guess, before I stop,

We’d better take another drop.

(Chorus)

BACK TO THURSDAY SEPT. 30TH, 11:22 a.m. last night we were going to camp at a campground not far from kevin’s shooting competition, but i called dad and had him look up the weather in winchester VA and there was LOTS AND LOTS OF HEAVY RAIN in the forecast for all day today, plus a flood watch.  very bad – it’s the remnants of tropical storm nicole. we decided to stay in a hotel instead, and luckily i obsessively looked up all the dog-friendly hotels in all the places we’ll be on the whole trip, so i was able to call candlewood and reserve a room. it’s a great room, too, with a full-sized fridge, dishwasher, hot plate, microwave, flat-screen TV.  king-sized bed which mollie will probably enjoy for most of the day.

here are rest of the photos i’ve taken thus far.

there were lots of cool spider webs all over the place yesterday morning.  instead of STOMPING ALL OVER THEM like bev would have done because she REALLY REALLY HATES spiders, instead i took a photo.

it was so foggy when we got up yesterday morning, but mollie was eager to explore even though DOGS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ON THE LEASH AT ALL TIMES.

i tried to get her to come to me but instead she disappeared into the underbrush.

this is how foggy it was.  see that really short electric cord?  when we were packing up to leave, kevin realized that there was lots more cord under the seat.  that makes sense, but at night when we were tired we didn’t think of that.

we headed out at the crack of 9:45, and after a coupla hours we reached the giantic cabela’s.  you can see here that kevin is very happy to be going in.

crazy.  what a crazy huge vast place filled with more hunting-type stuff than i’ve ever seen, plus lots and lots of other things including two snazzy camping chairs we bought.

yeah, those are polar bears down there on the left.  and on the right, a vast sea of hunting clothes, including this awesome camouflage suit thing that i wish i’d taken a picture of, or better yet, bought.  it was this hairy-looking thing with big green ropes of hair all over it; i guess the idea is that deer would think you were a…long green-haired abominable snowman?  it was really really funny.

after our cabela’s excitement, i noticed that there was a state park that was supposed to have a great overlook.  kevin wasn’t enthusiastic about stopping and i didn’t know how far off the highway it was, so i thought we weren’t going to stop, but then we did.

it was called cooper’s rock state forest overlook, and it wasn’t far off the highway, and it was, indeed, very cool.

there were initials carved into the rock – this one is from 1943.  i wonder if they stayed together?

kevin bought some beef jerky at cabela’s and mollie was pretty frantic to take part in the eating of it.  here she is, conked out after her excitement about jerky and walking around in the state forest.

here’s kevin, ready to go shoot in the rain.

that’s all for today…

ok then,

thursday virginia grace.