The road goes ever on and on...

Day one is in the books. With a bit over 800 miles behind us Rob and I are settled in a hotel a little more than an hour from Highlands. Tomorrow we'll head to the race venue and see what we can find out about the race by quizzing some of the locals and taking a look at the actual terrain.

We got on the road around 1045 this morning, which was about a hour earlier than we had planned. It's not often that things go more smoothly than you expect, but we were willing to take advantage of the fact and get on the road with some time to spare.

A bit more than a hour into the ride we got to Carlisle and decided to stop for lunch and take a quick look at the house Jen, the girls, and I had lived in immediately after I left the service. While the picture to the left doesn't really do the house justice, Rob did say that Jen deserves a medal for allowing me to uproot her from this place and bring our gypsy caravan to NJ to follow a job. With that quick sojourn behind us, probably the most significant happening of the day came around 1 pm when the stereo in the van spontaneously died. I personally think that the device had been giving us some none-too-subtle hints that it was about to give up the ghost while listening to some podcasts earlier in the morning. It did this by repeatedly flipping the direction of play for the cassette adapter with no warning. My working theory was that the stereo was using this technique to file a protest for being overworked. When we didn't didn't read the signs properly there was clearly only one remaining option for the stereo. So, it quit. This obviously puts the kibosh on our ideas for listening to the entire Dune audio book...perhaps more importantly it also limits our ability to start each day with a ceremonial playing of White and Nerdy.

At this point our fingers are crossed that the problem is just a blown fuse that can be quickly swapped out. We'll try to find a Dodge dealership tomorrow so that someone can look at the issue and at least give us an idea of whether it is quickly repairable. If not, then we'll do without...and this trip will seem a whole lot longer. Strange as this may seem to some of you, even Rob and I are hard pressed to come up with enough conversation to fill 8+ hours of non-stop driving.

With our entertainment options thus reduced, Rob and I had to settle for more primitive entertainment on the road. I will allow the our readers to determine our state of mind by considering the two pictures below which I considered hilarious when I saw them.
















Ok...so we aren't talking Monty Python quality humor here, but come on...El Cruncho? That's pretty good. And I don't know who Professor Cline is or what he studied, but I have to say that his Haunted Monster Museum is awfully damn intriguing. It also makes you wonder, what exactly do you think he is a professor of? Monsterology?

More information tomorrow once we have had a chance to recon the race site. -- John