It was about twenty miles past Normal when the green tea kicked in. I hit eighty in a howling slush squall looking to leave an oasis in the desert. The dark spaces between the ice flakes revealed a truck stop. It was a bland scrape of land with a soon to be rotten corpse of a metal shed. Good enough for what I had in mind. Or maybe not. Or maybe I have too high of a standard. It could have been from overuse. Had to wait in a line of truckers taking their first break for the week. I should’ve just found a spot in the great outdoors, it would’ve been a fresh air, water saving salute to mother nature. On the other hand there was soap and a sink.

Back on the interstate, driving at a pace not dictated by biology, the slushing stopped. A few miles from the exit is a town that sustained a tornado hit, it’s not making it back. A few more and we were at the gates dodging pot-holes. The fish in the lobby didn’t seem awfully bright and we were checked in, on our way to the room.

I think it was in 91 when I stayed there last. I was part of a hard partying crew, chronicling what the man on the street had to say about the Illinois lottery. From what I could remember I had been put up in a small wood panel room, and what do you know it was the very same room: My first clue in this conspiracy. Evidently, from what I could make out, I was to be infiltrating a very exclusive conservative organization. I played stupid through lunch, kept it low key. They were paying after all. I knew my cover was blown when I was ask to hang an I.D. around my neck: they knew who I was! They tried to buy me off with a meal ticket, so I went along with it. I wasn’t forced into the “conference room”, but I could not, not go in — ya exactly — you get it. The stiffs had their backs to me. I didn’t see Trump, the Bushes, Nixon, or John Birch; and there was more women than I had expected; but I did hear the word “conservation” whispered.

I sat at my table, the first speaker had already started. Something about easements, trusts, and legal focus, with the word capacity thrown in for good measure: typical verbiage of the man — MAN! A microphone had been passed around with the sole intention of exposing who exactly was at the “conference”, and it was making its way to me. Keeping my cool, I mumbled my alias “Rita Morgenstern, Assistant to the United Nations Aesthetic Czar” into the surveillance device. They bought it. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but my recollection of the proceedings were dimmed. It seemed to be an acronym festooned drivel of tech jargon. CRP, CCRD, ARC-GIS, I-something, IWAP, PSCC, whatever. I think they may have spiked my drink. Then legal studies were threatened and we fled.

The path we chose was along a bluff. Four inches of snow made it treacherous but beautiful. Our progress had to be quick, we were exposed, had to get off the bluff ASAP, besides the faster we put the legalese behind us the better. I slipped, nearly bought it. Came close to ruining our mission. Then our path became clear, a flight of stairs that led down into a deep hollow. It was a slippery twisting descent, and if it was a dead end we’d be had, but thankfully at the bottom, our path T’d, and even better there was a kind of cryptic map. I deciphered it and came to the conclusion to go upstream, deeper into the canyon. The darkness gathered, moss and ferns grew thick, and a sinister dripping of water from cliff above made the dampness show in our breath. Kelly had scraped her name into the wall, possibly trying to tell us something. Then I noticed other symbols inscribed into what had once been a beautiful moss covered stone wall. Good grief! We had stumbled into the box canyon of stupidity, and if we stayed within its narrow confines we too would become imbeciles. Illiteraly we were between a rock and a hard place.

My partner ESP’d that the legal sermon was over and only pure conservative ideas were being discussed, It was safe to head back. The path to the stairway was shorter than I expected, must have been under the influence of a time expander. I checked my readings and detected nothing, well played. Gravity was the issue going up, it was almost as if a gravitronic multiplier was being used. Crushing us as we made our way up, step by grueling step. A lady in a long black coat appeared, gave us a wide eyed look and mumbled a nod in our direction. A few steps farther and we at the top, the force weakened. Was it just a coincidence that gravity poured in on us at the bottom after we passed the man in black, and was let off after we passed the woman at the top: I think not.

The walk along the bluff seemed less threatening. We waved goodbye to the black vultures roosted in the hemlocks. Passed over the road on that familiar bridge, and stealthy entered the packed room, only talking to four or five other agents. Soon an operative was giving a dissertation on land acquisition, which led to an assistant agent giving the details on mission planning. It was when the climate change analyst got up, that I knew their conservative badge was golden. He described a hedge of sorts. As the climate gets warmer we should actually encourage the plants and animals that are most adaptable. Ah Ha!

Dinner was served, typical Midwestern chow. Drinks were to be had after. I noticed karaoke was the show for tonight, “ha, maybe we will get up and sing”. The large dining room was packed and a very competent vocalist was belting out a tune. Maybe the karaoke was in the back at the bar? the place was happening but no singing. It appeared the five hundred person crowd and the opera diva was the event. who knew Starved Rock Lodge was a karaoke hot spot. Even though I stayed up late and had more than one drink, I’m ninety percent sure I didn’t get up and sing. Which reminds me of our room’s, bathroom.

It’s an old place, and state owned, but the fact that my toilet was so close to the wall that I couldn’t fit, could be described as a crime against humanity. I won’t go on about the stupid toilet paper holder, that was situated exactly at my bicep. Never mind the fixtures were fairly new, and a few simple tweeks would’ve fixed the issues. What really got me was a nifty closet light that was rigged to go out when the door was closed: but the door wouldn’t close all the way. I must have opened and closed it for an hour, and could not get it to work.

Sometime after my tangle with the room's furnishings and fixtures I got to sleep. On waking the first thing I do is make tea. Good tea, not crappy lawn clippings. I hadn’t even opened my eye’s and knew I had forgot it. All I had to look forward too was coffee: barbaric! Breakfast was just OK, maybe it was the two or five cups of sludge that had deadened my taste buds. Then it was back with the conservationistas.

One guy had the balls to lay out a framework for working with conservative land developers to conserve wetlands. A couple of lobbyist tried to shed light on working with the government and your local representatives. Two men wanted to conserve rivers. What mosaic, maggilla, riparian, and strata have to do with dragging the army into the corps, I was unable to detect. Right-of-way for monarch butterflies didn’t sound like the right wing propaganda I was use to.

Then it hit me, these were not real conservatives, they were fake. Real conservatives would be suggesting ideas for the stewardship of those unused resources. That the land should be allocated to the highest-valued use. A divestiture process put in place and “squatters’ rights” should be protected. It’s a moral wrong to let the land lie “fallow”. These people were conservationist, not conservatives.

We escaped after a lecture about meetings was threatened, hiked down another gravity well then up the four lane pathway to the top of starved rock. Saw a bald eagle. Somebody was fishing right below us. The snow was melting. A newly minted Latino family, on their way to twenty kids swarmed around the telescope. I had been there twenty five years earlier when you could stand on the actual rock itself, I saw a bit of it through the gaps in the wooden walkway. For Two million visitors a year the place was holding up decently.

Dispatch from vacation ghetto destination Florida.

I believe in omens, and the grimy experience at our first stop in a Clarksville meat-n-jiggle set the appropriate theme for vacation 2015: Ick. I don't expect much in the way of clean bathrooms or any clean public places in the south, but usually they contain the overt griminess to the rest rooms. I knew the filth was running over when I saw a half asleep pregnant teenage waitress come out with toilette paper on her shoe. It was a meal complete with the usual hairs, grease soaked buns, and sticky seats: I don't know why I expected more. After using a powerful solvent to extract ourselves from the booth, we fled, thankfully putting that part of our fledgling newborn vacation behind us.

The drive through Tennessee was an outstandingly normal amount of hair raising automotive piloting. Our arrival in the fair city of Chattanooga was positive. Maybe the dark and stinky oracle at Clarksville was an aberration, and we were charmed, after all we made through Tennessee without any horrifics. It was hot but pleasant and we stuffed as much touristy stuff as we could stomach into a two night one day stay; ya know: lookout mountain, the great aquarium, and the kin folk took us to a hip meat market for supper and drinks. A woke late for a travel day, chewed through time at some biscuit place my tooth did not like, but my stomach did. Almost stayed another night because some group had set up an enormous water slide down a steep city street. Reluctantly got in our car and blammo, an agent from the dark side broke our already dwindling charm.

I was ready to step on it, but the fuel gauge was nearing a quarter full. So being proactive I drove to the nearest filling station. I was focused on the mission, and hadn’t noticed the place was a bit shady and only started to realize this during my altercation with the bad fuel pump. As I was not filling er up, a weak sith lord drove up and asked me how to use the tiptronic shifter in his car. He must’ve used the force to sense my tiptronic expertise, and I still wonder why this didn’t surprise me in the least. I gave him pointers, after all I'm from the middle of the Midwest and seem to be genetically inclined to friendly naivety. Then he asked me for gas. I could have ripped his head off, it was just slightly poked out the open window, like he was offering it up, but I just said, "er.... No" I don't think I even used a capital “N”. As he drove away dodging the submarines, I noticed he had only a flimsy antique paper dealer plate — it was probably stolen. Another check mark: tally two.

After every dark passage it brightens, and soon we were making good time admiring the land, and ready to hop in the cool gulf currents just hours away. Of course the zombies in the backseat knew nothing of this, grunting out an occasional, "are we there yet" but even that soon changed at Birmingham. The brake lights went red like a hoard of low angry demons barring the gate to the holiday, damming us to the purgatory of stop-and-go.

My wife was driving, this normally fills me with angst, but my tooth over rode any masculine dominance issues, leaving me with plenty of free time to look up alternate routes, all of which were exceedingly indirect. Stopping then going then stopping was making me sick, I had to look up from my course plotting, and noticed a car overheated on the side of the road. It was fairly new car, I shouldn’t expect that to overheat, “it doesn’t even look that hot out”. She said “it’s ninety eight”, “wow”, then I noticed there several other cars pulled over with the windows open, not good. I got worried, that’d suck screwing the car up on vacation, so at the next exit we go got off, and began our ten hour short cut through rural Alabama.

Sore tooth or not I couldn’t take it anymore and we switched seats, leaving my S.O. with the navigation. I thought I had explained to her the route I had so painstakingly plotted. Maps estimated just hour or so extra to our arrival time, and I always beat it. Just keep on the little blue line. It was going great, we were seeing a the part of Alabama that existed outside the reach of the interstate. Beautiful, idyllic, the temperature off the big road was a lower, and were were getting on down the road. Nearing Auburn it went wrong.

Maybe I took a wrong turn, maybe she just wanted to see Tuskegee. I have heard of the Tuskegee airmen, and evidently this was place according to the sign. It could be educational for the undead in the back seat, besides one of them needed to excrete some fluid. It was right there, we could’ve drove in, but it looked deserted, in fact the whole town looked deserted. The placed looked like it had been dolled up then forgot. There were some new roadways, curbs, and drainage; but it was all overgrown. I immediately investigated. Of course, I should have spotted it right away. I had just vacated a similarly deserted place. It had the wrapped up, see ya next fall, look, of a college town. It was the home of Tuskegee University.

My navigator must have been thrown off by my refusal to stop, and we must have went in circular route to Dothan Al. To tell you the truth the only thing I remember about it was the sheer number of traffic lights for such a small town. It was almost like they wanted a traffic jam. Maybe they thought it was the ticket to big city fun. Finally I was allowed to drive again and we made excellent time to coast.

We got in late, but not in the dark. Our rental place was close but we had prearranged for the key to be left in a safe box. Excitement was mounting as we left with the key. The salt air was making the meat bags in back ancy. My legs were falling asleep, good thing I was driving. No problems finding the place, it was on a sand spit that everyone on the internet said made for great wildlife viewing, and was a family fun hot spot. We passed the famous oyster shack on the way in, oh boy. Pulled up to a light blue house way up in the air on old power poles, that was the first clue. All the other houses on this precarious piece of real estate were also on stilts. Some wood but most concrete, not nearly as high as this one, and not old crusty tarred lumber.

There were two different sets of badly designed stairs leading up to the same doorway, I’m not sure why. It looked as if there was some sort of construction feud. They converged and came up through a nice big deck, rendering it all but useless, couldn’t tell this from the pictures. The clue was the elevator, it had been put in after the house had been built and had used the original entry stairway position.

This set the theme of the place: a couple of odd decks, awkwardly placed rooms, a living room kitchen combo that was large and useless, and the best room in the house, a glassed in portion of the formally nice big front deck that the elevator dumped into. It was tiny but it we ended up spending most of our indoor time in there.

Alright I thought I’ve stayed at some badly designed places and have had a great time, hell my house is badly designed, but there was another layer to this subversion. It was dirt, the place was filthy. The walls had hanging layers of dust, the lampshades were dusty, the floors were all greasy and dirty, the kitchen chairs had never been cleaned, and on and on. The dustiness, I later learned from peeping up through he encrusted intake vent, was cause by ancient furnace filter that only covered two thirds of the intake.

The slimy greasy part of the mess was caused by frequent frying. I hadn’t really thought about it, but this particular place was a fisherman paradise. It was located right were the Apalachicola river dumps out into the gulf of Mexico, incredible amounts of wild life. The guys on the beach drove there buggies and trucks right up to the water's edge and put as many polls as they could into the water. This led to another eye opener, that night we went for the customary first walk on the beach and noticed it was one of the busier roads we had encountered in the area. They were friendly enough, somebody even waved hello with a beer in his hand as his pick up bounced by. The paroled backseat inmates were swimming as we strolled along, but the water was murky, and things were bumping into their legs. Sissies, kids these days, I didn’t think much of it, I’m from a place where swimming in muddy water is what you gotta do if you want to get away from the chlorine. Well after a day or so of watching my fellow ghetto dwellers pulls sharks of many descriptions out of our swimming hole, I decided maybe we ought to look for another place to bath, although hammerhead sharks are fascinating.

We ended up sitting on the wonderful beach at the state park, and snorkeling in st. Joe bay, which is fantastic. This became a daily routine, as it became clear that our piece of beach was a shark infested, drunker Daytona five hundred.

For a side trip we made it into Apalachicola, had and expensive but great meal, it’s great function town. Wandered into a marine research station my wife thought was the museum, that was interesting. My youngest primate thought he might become a marine biologist after a gaggle of college girls disembark from a snorkeling expedition. Found the small ocean side aquarium by Carabella, it was a hands on, personal type of experience for the kids.

Then made the long ride back down the coast to the ghetto, making it back just in time for drinks and treats under the shack, amide the swaying stilts on the concrete pad at the picnic table: this had become our hang out, it was the cleanest spot in the rental unit. It also provided us some distance, gave us all some breathing room, we still evidently hadn’t entirely gotten over the car ride down.

Within the first hour of our landing at that large shack on stilts I had been plotting our escape. I had logged into Fake boast to see what my “friends” had been posting, and actually gleaned some useful intel. Apparently a cousin of mine was going back Illistan when we were coming down and had been caught in a gigantic traffic snarl around Birmingham. I starting looking, and learned this is nothing out of the ordinary. There was just no easy way up. I came up with three scenarios: we could leave a day earlier and just eat a day's rent (honestly it would’ve been a relief to get out from under the grime); Suck it up and sit in traffic — no freaking way; or Head west to Mobile.

The Westward direction won out. On deciding we weren’t going to bail, I clean a path through the place — literally mopping our chosen pathways into white clean tiles. I also just cleaned where we sat on the chairs, one spot on the handle to the fridge. Dusted a glaring square into the wall, and many other forms of devious cleaning. The bathrooms weren’t to bad, just dusty. I think this is because whoever the cleaning service was used them, or maybe it was my wife.

The only other time we ate out was on the last day, at the clam shack down the road. It looked like a mom and pop shop, but was really a high end eatery for the southern bow headed, visor wearing, aristocratic crowd. I believe they liked the slumming, dirty, yick—don’t go to the bathroom, vibe of the place. It was decent food, and very expensive, but on the upside I only got a little sick. I don’t know maybe my stomach wasn’t used to the hot food. We had basically given up on cooking the entire week, and existed on cold cereal, sausage, cheese and crackers. Our two youngins went through a pallet load of frozen waffles, Literally.

Time came to pack up and head back, I dreaded it. We left early and were making good time, the road was deserted, and I had a short cut in mind. It was the best short cut I have ever taken, if successful it would avoid the dreaded outbound Panama city traffic. On the map it was a major county road. I traced the whole thing days ahead using the satellite view, two lanes the whole way.

Too our west I had noticed some dark skies, the radar showed some light rain, but when we made the turn onto the shortcut the dark and damp seemed to grow. One minute it was dry the next it was a very tropical, down pour. It wasn’t awfully bad, no traffic, and the road was nice... but then we rounded a curve and it turned into a black top. Still no worries, but then the water was building on either side of the dwindling roadway.

I looked on the map. We were crossing some sort of swampy creek type of thing, if it hadn’t have been raining like crazy I would stopped to look. But then in the distance yellow machinery loomed ahead, No signage, no nothing but a torn up red mud pathway. It was coming down when I stopped the car and got out to have a look. It wasn’t all mud, looked like there was quite a bit of rock, probably what the road was before they paved over it. It was muddy just from all the scrapping a smoothing they had been doing. Emptied the bladder, got back in, backed up a ways, and got it up to a smooth twenty or so before I hit the gravelly mud and hydroplaned across the half mile to the pavement on the other side. Got some red dirt on the car, some people might’ve accused me of going native.

That tropical rain is crazy, and I think it might have quit, and become completely dry just a mile or two away from the muddy crossing, and a mile or two from there we turn up onto a four lane, and few miles from that onto the interstate proper, headed for Mobile and a battleship.

If you have people who are into those type of things the USS Alabama could turn out to be one of the best stops in the whole experience. In fact if you ask our offspring about the vacation we took, and they’ll just mention the battleship, nothing else.

It must’ve been hot tropical existence in that gigantic piece of metal. Parts of it are air conditioned, but many aren't, and the gun turrets reminded me of an oven. I squeezed into one or two, smashing sweaty kids out of the way, wiping off the eye paces to get a look down the sights, I think they all still worked.

We got there by Ten A.M. and beat some of the crowds and heat, but in time both were in full force. Two and half hours is enough battleship for me, besides I was hungry. I had noticed quite a few seafood places very close the ship, they all seem to have good reviews and the price was right. My wife had been looking also and wanted to drive through the old part of Mobile to the supposedly oldest restaurant in town. Ya know Mobile was founded in 1702 so that could be one hell of old eatery. Drive through the old part was nice, it was neat city, at least in that area. After a few wrong turns we finally made it to the antique eatery, and I was surprised by the dark brick exteriors. It looked to have been built in the late 1970’s. So I went inside of the packed place to have some of mobiles historical delicacies. I ordered the red hot chili dog and battered fries, it was fantastic. The two zombies ordered their usual hamburgers, I guess that's what zombies eat now, and my wife had a po’boy, or pull pork. It was was the cheapest we had eaten out all week, and so we left Mobile with our wallets intact and drove good old route Forty Five up to Tupelo Mississippi, the birthplace of the bishop of rock and roll — Elvis Presley. We didn’t see much but the hotel room, we were tired and wanted to get home.

The next day we left, I suppose. We had more great pulled pork in Marion IL.., and finally made it home. While surveying the toll of time on our sweet dwelling, and wondering if the mower would trim grass that high, all us made a vow never to go on a mid summer beach vacation again. I was relieved until my wife notified me that I was to go on vacation to Tybee Island, Ga, In the summer of 16. Her mother was coming with us as we were to stay with her entire family in some as yet to be determined beach ghetto.

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