The Cedar Point Story
Even if you usually do not read my long entries, you really should read this one. It is the most entertaining thing that has happened to me in a really long time. Or, at least read it if you'll be seeing me in person any time and asking "So how was Cedar Point?" because I'm sure you don't really want me to go on for a few years about the trip, really.
The Cast
Deanna - the heroine, or, at least, the one writing this entry.
Nick - who some of you know from Claritech, some of you know from the cslounge, some of you know from Kiltie, and who has a car and drove most of the way there and back. Nick is a great guy. That's all that needs to be said.
Jason - (aka![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jcreed), the smartest person I know, also a great guy, and who made it much easier for me to wimp out on rides by being a bigger wimp.
Martin - (akacombinator), whose idea it was to go to Cedar Point in the first place, and who was my co-conspirator in arranging trips for it, and who is graduating and leaving Pittsburgh forever on Sunday, which makes me very very sad. :( I mean, the other guys are graduating too, but at least they'll be here this summer. Anyway...
The trip there
Nick overslept a little, but we managed to get on the road around 8ish. We took the wormhole to 376 East, got on the Turnpike, got off at Cranberry and had Burger King for breakfast and bought a dozen Krispy Kremes for the ride. Got back on the turnpike. Hit Sandusky pretty uneventfully, really... we listened to a lot of Martin's weirdo electronic music CDs for most of the trip because nobody else brought any music. Oops. I am exaggerating, I think for electronic stuff it was probably pretty good, but I can't tell the difference really. We got to Cedar Point around noon. Pulled into the parking lot, accidentally going up on the curb of the parking booth. This is an important detail that I will mention again later.
The Park Itself
DUDE! Cedar point is waaaaaaaay cool. It has a ton of roller coasters, rides, neat stuff, arcades, etc... everything you want in an amusement park for maximum amusement. Even better, it is on Lake Erie, so when you go up to the top of roller coasters and other such rides, you have this fantabulous view of the lake and the surrounding area. I managed to pick the best possible day for us to go - it was nice out, but not too hot or too cold, and not raining at all - and since it was the middle of the week in May, there were like no people there, so there were no lines for ANYTHING. It was great. We started out with a wimpy roller coaster or two. Jason was feeling kind of sick for a few hours so he didn't go on many of the rides with us, unfortunately. I think Martin and Nick actually managed to go on every single roller coaster in the park, although I skipped the really big ones. I went on the normal wooden ones, and the non-upside-down steel ones (well, I did go on the Corkscrew but I regretted it later). I went on one called the Iron Dragon two times in a row - it was one of those neat ones with a top rail instead of bottom, but no loops or anything silly like that. I also liked their Tower of Power - where you had the choice of being blasted 240 feet up and then bounced up and down like a human yo-yo, or were slowly raised 240 feet up and then shot downwards and got to bounce up and down like a human yo-yo. They also had a really cool indoor coaster that was cooler than Space Mountain because it was actually REALLY PITCH BLACK inside for big portions of it and damn was that scary. It had blacklights in the entryway and I found out that half of my braid beads glow under blacklights. Heh.
In addition to rides we did other fun things. There was an awesome arcade that had old old video games and pinball games (my god, they had Hercules!!) and of course they had Dance Dance Revolution!! It was only a crappy 1st mix machine, which had awful selection of songs and I didn't know any of the codes for it, but you know, people from the middle of Ohio and Michigan actually seem impressed by people like me "freestyling" Butterfly Basic and Brilliant2U Basic and all. So I guess I had fun anyway. Probably a good thing I couldn't play hard songs, come to think of it, because I would have really worn myself out doing so. In addition to fun games, I got to eat corn dogs, which is one of my favorite amusement park thingies to do. Whee! I took lots of pictures, hopefully many of them will come out. We'll see. If I think of more about rides I'll add it later. Maybe I'll talk about that pond with the huge carp and the geese and goslings and ducks and ducklings that were SOOOOO CUTE! I love ducklings! They were the most adorable thing ever.
Oh, and Nick says I have to mention the Millennium Force since he thinks it's the coolest roller coaster they have. It's this huge steel rollercoaster that has this like, 300-foot drop that is almost straight down. So your stomach tries to fall out through your nose, except then you are swooped back up. It's pretty damn intense. What really is annoying is that they take your picture inside one of the tunnels of it, except I didn't know this in advance (but Nick and Martin did). So they knew when to put their hands up and smile, but I didn't, so Nick bought this picture that has him with his arms up and smiling and me going "OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO DIE" and cowering in fear. The only justice is that the girl selling pictures asked Nick if he was gay "because you're from Pittsburgh" or something. Yeah. I bet if I keep telling that part of the story, Nick will scan in the picture to embarrass me, although he most likely will anyway, so it doesn't matter. So it was the last ride we went on of the day (although Martin and Nick had gone on it earlier). It was also one of the only rides with any appreciable wait, like half an hour or so. I think maybe the Raptor and the Magnum might have had waits as well, but that's about it. We went around a gift shop at the end of the day and Nick and I bought Millennium Force shirts, and we both ended up wearing them today (Thursday) to campus. Plplpl. Hmm, so I really do remember having a lot of fun hanging out with jcreed and going on the "wimpy" rides. We went on wimpy roller coasters, and the ferris wheel, and one of those "driving" rides where you get to drive a silly car, and the bumper cars as well, and other things I'm forgetting offhand.
Oh, and we tried to keep in touch with cellphones, since I had one and Nick had one, but half the time I either couldn't find my cellphone or couldn't get it out of a plastic bag quickly enough to answer. Two times, we were meeting up in front of the arcade. Once, I spotted Nick while talking on the cellphone to him and he was like "where are you?" and I was like "Dude, turn around," and he and Martin did and me and Jason waved to him. But another time he was RUDE and was like "where are you?" and I was like "by the arcade," and he was like "I can't find you, where are you?" and after a few seconds I realized he was standing right behind me. Grrr.
We only went on two water rides during the day. One was a log flume and was wimpy (but a good log flume overall, it was just not splashy) and one was a water rapids one. Nick and Martin and I went on both of them, not Jason. On the rapids one, the people sitting in the seats to our right got TOTALLY soaked. I was sitting to Nick's right, and I got half soaked on my right side. Nick and Martin barely got wet at all. My pants were so waterlogged that I ended up taking off the bottoms of them and making them into shorts (they were the coolo safari pants) and carrying them around so the bottoms could dry out independent of the rest. Fortunately, my ziploc bags kept all of my stuff dry, and I had a waterproof disposable camera. Heh. Also fortunately we went on all the water stuff before 2pm and it was nice and sunny out for a while.
Bleh, it's sort of hard to remember every cool thing.
The fun begins
Anyway, so we had an EXCELLENT day... and then on the way out of the parking lot from the park, the car starts going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa... so we pull over and the left front wheel is COMPLETELY flat. Oops. See, remember when Nick scraped up against the curb? Yeah. So, nobody had an AAA membership except Jason, but it turned out his expired in April. Oops 2. Nick was on the phone with AAA for a while when two Cedar Point employees independently stopped to go "hi, can we help?" The one girl basically offered a ride into town to find a place that tows, but she called her roomate and they couldn't think of anything, and the second girl turned out to work for park traffic control, so she radioed a guy who came over a little bit later and helped us put the spare tire on and sent us on our way into town. The people were really nice and I think we should write a note to Cedar Point telling them that, although we didn't catch any names, we could at least mention the date and they'd know who was on staff, I think.
The funny thing is, none of us really overreacted to it. Not even me. It was like, there we were, stuck in Sandusky outside Cedar Point, with idiotic AAA people on the phone, and I was just like "dang, look at all the ducks! and what a beautiful sunset over the water!" and I called Eli to tell him what was on and asked if he could hear the ducks, and he could, and that was good. The only bad thing was, so Jason and I had eaten food in the park, but Martin and Nick both had been waiting to eat until afterwards since we figured the park closed at 8, we'd get dinner afterwards, head home, hit Pittsburgh around 2am. Oops.
So we got on the road on the spare tire and decided to drive into town to find some food and a place to stay for the night until we could get the tires replaced in the morning and all.
Finding Food
Allright, we hit 250 and the main drag around 9:50pm. We found our "mecca" of the road at this intersection where there was not only a Days Inn that was next door to a Goodyear, but it was across the street from a Cracker Barrel and other food places. So in this order, we tried and found "closed at 10pm":
1. Cracker Barrel. "What, can't you kids read the sign? We close at 10."
2. Max and Erma's. Across the road from Cracker Barrel, locked their doors at 9:55.
3. Ruby Tuesday's. Also closed at 10pm.
4. KFC. Turned out its lights as we were crossing the road.
5. Chi-Chi's. Next to the Days Inn, didn't even have cars in the lot really.
6. Wendy's. CLOSED AT 10PM. EVEN THE DRIVETHRU. WHAT THE FUCK?
7. McDonald's. Open until 11. w00t.
We decided that obviously the McDonald's was actually from another dimension, because they had orange milkshakes and their nutrition value charts came from something copyright 1994.
Attack of the Phones
Okay, so we checked into the Days Inn. At dinner, I'd mentioned that "wow, tomorrow is May 16th, which is both the day that DDR 6th Mix comes out for the PSX, but also is the day Episode 2 comes out, right?" So after the four of us got settled into the room a bit, Nick called around at some theatres. We'd noticed that the Sandusky Mall across the way had a theatre listing with SW2 mentioned on it, but we didn't really see a theatre itself within the mall. Hmm. Well, so Nick called around looking for a midnight showing. There was one at a theatre that had the address listed as being the same as the Days Inn. Weird. So he called it, and apparently had a conversation something like this:
"Hi, do you still have tickets left for the midnight showing of Star Wars?"
"Yeah."
"Where are you guys?"
"We're behind the Sandusky Mall."
"Uhh, where is that?"
"It's on 250..."
"Wait. Ok. I have one question. Are you across the street from a Days Inn?"
"Yeah, we are."
"Thanks! *click*"
So, we drove across the street and around the mall and at 11:20 went into the theatre and got tickets. They were running three screens of the movie. Even though we were in the middle of nowhere Ohio, there were still plenty of geeks there at the midnight show, dressed as Jedi Knights or carrying lightsabers and such. It was amusing. Nick observed that he felt like the only non-caucasian person in Ohio. To pass the time before the movie, we played suicide Spades. It was pretty amusing.
Despite the fact that most of us were operating on like 3 hours of sleep and had been up since 7am, we managed to stay awake for the whole movie. Well, I think Martin said he fell asleep a little, but I stayed awake. I'd talk about the movie, but don't want to give too much away. Let's just put it this way: I laughed and groaned a LOT more than I expected to. There were just hugely ridiculous chunks of the movie, and the Amidala-Anakin storyline was just not really believable. (I'm sorry. When she tells him that she loves him, it's just NOTHING at all like when Leia tells Han that she loves him. It just didn't fit.) Also, it felt like they were cramming a teenage romance movie into the middle of everything else. Then there was the cannery row scene, or should I say the Chicken Run parody? Blah... it really felt more like a sort of "preludes" series of vignettes than a cohesive movie. You know, like you're supposed to look at it and the whole time be like "wow, those are the people who become Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen in Episode 4," or "Dang, that's Young Boba Fett," or "God, no wonder Anakin Skywalker turned out like he did," and such. But, as I remarked to Jason afterwards, "You could sum up this movie by quoting Mallrats: 'Like, holy shit, motherfuckin Yoda and shit.'"
Seriously though, I was just like, "This is the most surreal day ever." I mean, there we were, in Ohio, having gone to Cedar Point, stranded by a flat tire, seeing Star Wars at midnight... but, we did figure it would be the perfect end to the day. And it was pretty cool to do.
The next morning
Anyway, after the movie it was like 3am and we finally went to sleep. I don't know if any of us really got a lot of sleep. I think Martin actually slept really well (after I convinced him that no really, it was probly a better move for him to sleep on the other side of the bed from me rather than on the floor, and that no, I didn't care either way; why are people so weird about sharing beds? Carl, you don't have to answer that), but I remember waking up because Nick was up at like 6:30 and dropped a bunch of quarters on the table or something, and then waking up because he was like going to Goodyear when it opened at 7:30 or something, and I slept some more, and at 9:30 got up for real. It turned out that they replaced all four tires and the car was ready to go at 9am. Dang!
We got breakfast at Cracker Barrel. I had some "Old-Timer's breakfast" special and it had grits with it. GRITS! They are so fucking weird. I will never understand southern food. They also had those peg games on the table. For the record, I will repost the solution to that, whichlaurabee and I came up with on March 26, 2000. I was able to resolve the thingy while sitting at the table, but man, I can't believe that day was so long ago. I remember having dinner with Mike and Laura and Willie and solving the thingy. Sigh.
Anyway, so after Cracker Barrel we pretty much hit the road. Second star to the right and straight on till afternoon...
The drive home
I fell asleep for much of the first part of it. We listened to Boa's album and it was pretty good. We stopped at a rest stop on the Ohio turnpike about 8 miles from the PA border and Jason and Nick ate McDonald's food. After that, I drove home. I got all the way up to 75 mph at times! I drove for about an hour. Learned a lot about highway driving. Nick gave me tons of advice on switching lanes and keeping speed and navigating around trucks and the like. It was good practice. I had fun. Dropped Jason and Martin off at Morewood, switched places, Nick drove me home... and I guess that's the end of the story.
The Cast
Deanna - the heroine, or, at least, the one writing this entry.
Nick - who some of you know from Claritech, some of you know from the cslounge, some of you know from Kiltie, and who has a car and drove most of the way there and back. Nick is a great guy. That's all that needs to be said.
Jason - (aka
jcreed), the smartest person I know, also a great guy, and who made it much easier for me to wimp out on rides by being a bigger wimp.Martin - (aka
combinator), whose idea it was to go to Cedar Point in the first place, and who was my co-conspirator in arranging trips for it, and who is graduating and leaving Pittsburgh forever on Sunday, which makes me very very sad. :( I mean, the other guys are graduating too, but at least they'll be here this summer. Anyway...The trip there
Nick overslept a little, but we managed to get on the road around 8ish. We took the wormhole to 376 East, got on the Turnpike, got off at Cranberry and had Burger King for breakfast and bought a dozen Krispy Kremes for the ride. Got back on the turnpike. Hit Sandusky pretty uneventfully, really... we listened to a lot of Martin's weirdo electronic music CDs for most of the trip because nobody else brought any music. Oops. I am exaggerating, I think for electronic stuff it was probably pretty good, but I can't tell the difference really. We got to Cedar Point around noon. Pulled into the parking lot, accidentally going up on the curb of the parking booth. This is an important detail that I will mention again later.
The Park Itself
DUDE! Cedar point is waaaaaaaay cool. It has a ton of roller coasters, rides, neat stuff, arcades, etc... everything you want in an amusement park for maximum amusement. Even better, it is on Lake Erie, so when you go up to the top of roller coasters and other such rides, you have this fantabulous view of the lake and the surrounding area. I managed to pick the best possible day for us to go - it was nice out, but not too hot or too cold, and not raining at all - and since it was the middle of the week in May, there were like no people there, so there were no lines for ANYTHING. It was great. We started out with a wimpy roller coaster or two. Jason was feeling kind of sick for a few hours so he didn't go on many of the rides with us, unfortunately. I think Martin and Nick actually managed to go on every single roller coaster in the park, although I skipped the really big ones. I went on the normal wooden ones, and the non-upside-down steel ones (well, I did go on the Corkscrew but I regretted it later). I went on one called the Iron Dragon two times in a row - it was one of those neat ones with a top rail instead of bottom, but no loops or anything silly like that. I also liked their Tower of Power - where you had the choice of being blasted 240 feet up and then bounced up and down like a human yo-yo, or were slowly raised 240 feet up and then shot downwards and got to bounce up and down like a human yo-yo. They also had a really cool indoor coaster that was cooler than Space Mountain because it was actually REALLY PITCH BLACK inside for big portions of it and damn was that scary. It had blacklights in the entryway and I found out that half of my braid beads glow under blacklights. Heh.
In addition to rides we did other fun things. There was an awesome arcade that had old old video games and pinball games (my god, they had Hercules!!) and of course they had Dance Dance Revolution!! It was only a crappy 1st mix machine, which had awful selection of songs and I didn't know any of the codes for it, but you know, people from the middle of Ohio and Michigan actually seem impressed by people like me "freestyling" Butterfly Basic and Brilliant2U Basic and all. So I guess I had fun anyway. Probably a good thing I couldn't play hard songs, come to think of it, because I would have really worn myself out doing so. In addition to fun games, I got to eat corn dogs, which is one of my favorite amusement park thingies to do. Whee! I took lots of pictures, hopefully many of them will come out. We'll see. If I think of more about rides I'll add it later. Maybe I'll talk about that pond with the huge carp and the geese and goslings and ducks and ducklings that were SOOOOO CUTE! I love ducklings! They were the most adorable thing ever.
Oh, and Nick says I have to mention the Millennium Force since he thinks it's the coolest roller coaster they have. It's this huge steel rollercoaster that has this like, 300-foot drop that is almost straight down. So your stomach tries to fall out through your nose, except then you are swooped back up. It's pretty damn intense. What really is annoying is that they take your picture inside one of the tunnels of it, except I didn't know this in advance (but Nick and Martin did). So they knew when to put their hands up and smile, but I didn't, so Nick bought this picture that has him with his arms up and smiling and me going "OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO DIE" and cowering in fear. The only justice is that the girl selling pictures asked Nick if he was gay "because you're from Pittsburgh" or something. Yeah. I bet if I keep telling that part of the story, Nick will scan in the picture to embarrass me, although he most likely will anyway, so it doesn't matter. So it was the last ride we went on of the day (although Martin and Nick had gone on it earlier). It was also one of the only rides with any appreciable wait, like half an hour or so. I think maybe the Raptor and the Magnum might have had waits as well, but that's about it. We went around a gift shop at the end of the day and Nick and I bought Millennium Force shirts, and we both ended up wearing them today (Thursday) to campus. Plplpl. Hmm, so I really do remember having a lot of fun hanging out with jcreed and going on the "wimpy" rides. We went on wimpy roller coasters, and the ferris wheel, and one of those "driving" rides where you get to drive a silly car, and the bumper cars as well, and other things I'm forgetting offhand.
Oh, and we tried to keep in touch with cellphones, since I had one and Nick had one, but half the time I either couldn't find my cellphone or couldn't get it out of a plastic bag quickly enough to answer. Two times, we were meeting up in front of the arcade. Once, I spotted Nick while talking on the cellphone to him and he was like "where are you?" and I was like "Dude, turn around," and he and Martin did and me and Jason waved to him. But another time he was RUDE and was like "where are you?" and I was like "by the arcade," and he was like "I can't find you, where are you?" and after a few seconds I realized he was standing right behind me. Grrr.
We only went on two water rides during the day. One was a log flume and was wimpy (but a good log flume overall, it was just not splashy) and one was a water rapids one. Nick and Martin and I went on both of them, not Jason. On the rapids one, the people sitting in the seats to our right got TOTALLY soaked. I was sitting to Nick's right, and I got half soaked on my right side. Nick and Martin barely got wet at all. My pants were so waterlogged that I ended up taking off the bottoms of them and making them into shorts (they were the coolo safari pants) and carrying them around so the bottoms could dry out independent of the rest. Fortunately, my ziploc bags kept all of my stuff dry, and I had a waterproof disposable camera. Heh. Also fortunately we went on all the water stuff before 2pm and it was nice and sunny out for a while.
Bleh, it's sort of hard to remember every cool thing.
The fun begins
Anyway, so we had an EXCELLENT day... and then on the way out of the parking lot from the park, the car starts going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa... so we pull over and the left front wheel is COMPLETELY flat. Oops. See, remember when Nick scraped up against the curb? Yeah. So, nobody had an AAA membership except Jason, but it turned out his expired in April. Oops 2. Nick was on the phone with AAA for a while when two Cedar Point employees independently stopped to go "hi, can we help?" The one girl basically offered a ride into town to find a place that tows, but she called her roomate and they couldn't think of anything, and the second girl turned out to work for park traffic control, so she radioed a guy who came over a little bit later and helped us put the spare tire on and sent us on our way into town. The people were really nice and I think we should write a note to Cedar Point telling them that, although we didn't catch any names, we could at least mention the date and they'd know who was on staff, I think.
The funny thing is, none of us really overreacted to it. Not even me. It was like, there we were, stuck in Sandusky outside Cedar Point, with idiotic AAA people on the phone, and I was just like "dang, look at all the ducks! and what a beautiful sunset over the water!" and I called Eli to tell him what was on and asked if he could hear the ducks, and he could, and that was good. The only bad thing was, so Jason and I had eaten food in the park, but Martin and Nick both had been waiting to eat until afterwards since we figured the park closed at 8, we'd get dinner afterwards, head home, hit Pittsburgh around 2am. Oops.
So we got on the road on the spare tire and decided to drive into town to find some food and a place to stay for the night until we could get the tires replaced in the morning and all.
Finding Food
Allright, we hit 250 and the main drag around 9:50pm. We found our "mecca" of the road at this intersection where there was not only a Days Inn that was next door to a Goodyear, but it was across the street from a Cracker Barrel and other food places. So in this order, we tried and found "closed at 10pm":
1. Cracker Barrel. "What, can't you kids read the sign? We close at 10."
2. Max and Erma's. Across the road from Cracker Barrel, locked their doors at 9:55.
3. Ruby Tuesday's. Also closed at 10pm.
4. KFC. Turned out its lights as we were crossing the road.
5. Chi-Chi's. Next to the Days Inn, didn't even have cars in the lot really.
6. Wendy's. CLOSED AT 10PM. EVEN THE DRIVETHRU. WHAT THE FUCK?
7. McDonald's. Open until 11. w00t.
We decided that obviously the McDonald's was actually from another dimension, because they had orange milkshakes and their nutrition value charts came from something copyright 1994.
Attack of the Phones
Okay, so we checked into the Days Inn. At dinner, I'd mentioned that "wow, tomorrow is May 16th, which is both the day that DDR 6th Mix comes out for the PSX, but also is the day Episode 2 comes out, right?" So after the four of us got settled into the room a bit, Nick called around at some theatres. We'd noticed that the Sandusky Mall across the way had a theatre listing with SW2 mentioned on it, but we didn't really see a theatre itself within the mall. Hmm. Well, so Nick called around looking for a midnight showing. There was one at a theatre that had the address listed as being the same as the Days Inn. Weird. So he called it, and apparently had a conversation something like this:
"Hi, do you still have tickets left for the midnight showing of Star Wars?"
"Yeah."
"Where are you guys?"
"We're behind the Sandusky Mall."
"Uhh, where is that?"
"It's on 250..."
"Wait. Ok. I have one question. Are you across the street from a Days Inn?"
"Yeah, we are."
"Thanks! *click*"
So, we drove across the street and around the mall and at 11:20 went into the theatre and got tickets. They were running three screens of the movie. Even though we were in the middle of nowhere Ohio, there were still plenty of geeks there at the midnight show, dressed as Jedi Knights or carrying lightsabers and such. It was amusing. Nick observed that he felt like the only non-caucasian person in Ohio. To pass the time before the movie, we played suicide Spades. It was pretty amusing.
Despite the fact that most of us were operating on like 3 hours of sleep and had been up since 7am, we managed to stay awake for the whole movie. Well, I think Martin said he fell asleep a little, but I stayed awake. I'd talk about the movie, but don't want to give too much away. Let's just put it this way: I laughed and groaned a LOT more than I expected to. There were just hugely ridiculous chunks of the movie, and the Amidala-Anakin storyline was just not really believable. (I'm sorry. When she tells him that she loves him, it's just NOTHING at all like when Leia tells Han that she loves him. It just didn't fit.) Also, it felt like they were cramming a teenage romance movie into the middle of everything else. Then there was the cannery row scene, or should I say the Chicken Run parody? Blah... it really felt more like a sort of "preludes" series of vignettes than a cohesive movie. You know, like you're supposed to look at it and the whole time be like "wow, those are the people who become Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen in Episode 4," or "Dang, that's Young Boba Fett," or "God, no wonder Anakin Skywalker turned out like he did," and such. But, as I remarked to Jason afterwards, "You could sum up this movie by quoting Mallrats: 'Like, holy shit, motherfuckin Yoda and shit.'"
Seriously though, I was just like, "This is the most surreal day ever." I mean, there we were, in Ohio, having gone to Cedar Point, stranded by a flat tire, seeing Star Wars at midnight... but, we did figure it would be the perfect end to the day. And it was pretty cool to do.
The next morning
Anyway, after the movie it was like 3am and we finally went to sleep. I don't know if any of us really got a lot of sleep. I think Martin actually slept really well (after I convinced him that no really, it was probly a better move for him to sleep on the other side of the bed from me rather than on the floor, and that no, I didn't care either way; why are people so weird about sharing beds? Carl, you don't have to answer that), but I remember waking up because Nick was up at like 6:30 and dropped a bunch of quarters on the table or something, and then waking up because he was like going to Goodyear when it opened at 7:30 or something, and I slept some more, and at 9:30 got up for real. It turned out that they replaced all four tires and the car was ready to go at 9am. Dang!
We got breakfast at Cracker Barrel. I had some "Old-Timer's breakfast" special and it had grits with it. GRITS! They are so fucking weird. I will never understand southern food. They also had those peg games on the table. For the record, I will repost the solution to that, which
laurabee and I came up with on March 26, 2000. I was able to resolve the thingy while sitting at the table, but man, I can't believe that day was so long ago. I remember having dinner with Mike and Laura and Willie and solving the thingy. Sigh. 1 Start with slot 1 empty. Then do the following
2 3 moves: 6 to 1, 4 to 6, 1 to 4, 10 to 3, 13 to 6,
4 5 6 3 to 10, 15 to 13, 12 to 14, 7 to 9, 10 to 8,
7 8 9 10 4 to 13, 14 to 12, and then 11 to 13. There will
11 12 13 14 15 be one peg left in 13.
Anyway, so after Cracker Barrel we pretty much hit the road. Second star to the right and straight on till afternoon...
The drive home
I fell asleep for much of the first part of it. We listened to Boa's album and it was pretty good. We stopped at a rest stop on the Ohio turnpike about 8 miles from the PA border and Jason and Nick ate McDonald's food. After that, I drove home. I got all the way up to 75 mph at times! I drove for about an hour. Learned a lot about highway driving. Nick gave me tons of advice on switching lanes and keeping speed and navigating around trucks and the like. It was good practice. I had fun. Dropped Jason and Martin off at Morewood, switched places, Nick drove me home... and I guess that's the end of the story.
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