Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Michigan
Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2015 6:42 am
Left jivermo at the glacial lake and headed to Michigan via New York. Do not have a front license plate. Do not have a registration sticker. Do not have a safety inspection sticker. Don't even have those little heart attacks when a police officer drives/walks by. The Law has given me a pass because the Law likes my car.
Gingerly, I drove to the barn to say hello to my Squareback and others, paid the rent, and passed by the house along Lake Ontario where I had an incredible year of chaos and learning living with a self-described hill-billy from hell and her four feral children and a 58 mile commute to work every day. I loved it. It was beautiful, it was exhausting, it was harsh there:
It is much more of a ruin now, but we had our moment where we inhabited that place, out there mowing the grass, digging up the sewer line, playing in the barn, letting the seasons reflect all over us:
Had a achy heart-ache saying good-bye to my hopes of domestic life in the pastoral peace under the golden afternoon spring sunshine of rural New York. Went to Cleveland instead:
Yeah, so past the corporate imprimatur on our modern day colosseums, I drove on crumbling buckled pavement, the arteries of our modern civilization are not healthy:
We should take heed:
I sure was taking heed. Driving my little 44hp wind-sailing cow into this beautiful Jackson Pollacked sky:
Kept an eye on the wall cloud, that's a wall cloud, isn't it? The Weather Channel loves talking about "wall clouds". I looked to see if there was rotation:
Once I was past it, I just drove into the night time and gloried in the hues:
I no longer remember where I camped. I have a run of horrible choices for campsites this Itinerary, and they all have amused me in a demented sort of groggy way. The Piggly Wiggly Park & Ride spot was the worst. I pulled off behind a Piggly Wiggly supermarket at 1:00AM and tucked behind two Chevrolet vans that said Park & Ride. I didn't know what day it was, I decided it had to be a Sunday where nobody would fire up the Park & Ride vans early in the morning to go to work or anything. I was tired. It was hot. I stripped down to my tank top and no-longer Calvins and crashed out with the sliding door open, my toes in the breeze. 5:45AM I awaken to women's voices, a pile of them, and it is too late for modesty, this is a whole office crew showing up behind the Piggly Wiggly to pile into the Park & Ride van. Yackityyackity while I try to find my shorts, yick?yack, where are my shorts? where are my shorts? dammitwherearemySHORTSshortsshorts?? Driver's seat!
"I will merely drive off and we will never meet again," I tell myself in a wan attempt at rebuilding my dignity. Stop at the Shell station right at the pumps to get my shoes on. Step out to seriously now go find the rest room and then get a groggy cup of coffee. Hey look, it is half the women from the Park & Ride van clustered around the carafes.
Beautiful subsequent morning on the way to hippiewannabe's house in Michigan. That helped:
No photographs from our visit! I wonder if hippiewannabe is really really going to sell his bus. With that trick rheostat mixture control knob, I don't see how he could. After our victorious day of replacing ball joint boots, I don't think he can. Excellent shishkabob and a beer ended our day. You missed out, TrollFromDownBelow. Since there are no photographs from this year's visit, I have to share one of my favorite photographs from a prior visit. To be fair to Don, the garage is so much b... the same