Well, first of all, when I got up this morning, I wanted to just replay yesterday. Hanging around with my BFF and her SO the Guru and Droney and I’m not sure what they call their fancy new Prius, if anything. Maybe they told me and I fergot? I dunno. They have an absolutely loverly house in a beautiful neighborhood a short walk away from all kinds of fun restaurants and shoppies and things. After we were done galumphing around the Atlanta Mechanical Botanical Gardens, we just huuuuuuunnnnng around, reading, surfing the internet, doing slide shows of our phone photos on the boob tube. Oh, and streaming various videos including a facebook stream (or something) of my niece defending her phd dissertation in Hawaii yesterday. We also saw glimpses of Cap’n Pete piloting the Soo Locks tour boat on a Pure Michigan video. And once, The Guru, who was the main VJ, was about to cruise past a Go-Pro-type video of someone on a snowmobile climbing a big hill and I yelled, “Go back! That’s my old ski hill!” It was indeed Mission Hill and the snowmobile went up the hill in the cleared area where the old ski lift used to be. Memories.

Alas, we had to take our leave this morning and we have come to a Temporary Hard Stop near the I75 Snowbird Geezerway somewhere in central Kentucky, poised for the last leg of our Epic Journey. We did not take I75 all the way up. We got off somewhere in Tennessee and took back roads up, skirting Knoxville to the west of it, eventually hooking up with US27, which we also often drive in the Great Lake State. We enjoyed all of the twisty-turny-ness of the road as it wound through the hills that are so common in the eastern Tennessee and Kentucky geography. It was way fun to drive those roads and sometimes (for me) a bit scary. At one point the GG said something like, “This road would be really fun in the Ninja.” Yes, yes, it would be. It was okay in the Frog Hopper but the Ninja would’ve hugged those curves and downshifting its 6-speed manual tranny would’ve been much better than having to hit the brakes all the time.

Dollar General? I forget where I started noticing Dollar General stores. It was somewhere on our journey down to Fla. After about the fifth or sixth one, I started noticing ALL of them. And I started saying “Dol-lar Gen-rul” every time we encountered one and eventually the GG also took up the chorus. They seem to line the secondary highways of the southeastern United Snakes of America, the Woldemort of our small rural towns. We spent quite a lot of time on secondary highways this trip and every little town had one. The Dollar General in the pic was in Cross City, Fla. We were on our way from Steinhatchee (Stein pronounced Steen) to Long Boat Key and we were looking for the Taste of Dixie Diner in Cross City and we couldn’t remember the name right off the bat but I knew it was in an email (from my Atlantian BFF) in my laptop, so we were looking for a place to pull over and dredge my laptop out and there was a Dollar General right there on the right (US98) so that’s where we pulled over. I have yet to set foot inside a Dollar General and I doubt I will on this trip. I have nothing against Dollar General. I just don’t need anything from Dollar General (or just about any other bricks and mortar store).

As coincidences go, I happened to read on *this* trip, that Dollar General is thinking about opening up a store in Brimley, Michigan, the small town a few miles west of the moomincabin that I have known my entire life. If Dollar General opens a store in Brimley, I will eventually go inside one.

P.S. If you noticed a “fatal error” when trying to access my boring bunch of blather blahg in the last 24 hours, I can tell you that the Guru is also my blahgmaster and it was kinda fun (except that I reeeallly didn’t want to make him work) to show him the fatal error in person instead of having to send him a text message. He fixed it in a jiffy! Thanks for everything, friends!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2017 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.