Menu Close

June 2005

Good to Be Home

It’s good to be home. One of the great things about Charlotte is that there’s so much good and dirt cheap food that it almost makes more sense to eat out than to cook at home. Five or six bucks will buy you a complete meal with entree and two sides at any number of places, and it’s even cheaper at the cafeteria, where you don’t really have to tip. We could eat someplace different this way every night for months, particularly when you factor in all the assorted ethnic places which weren’t around when I lived here before…

And should we decide to eat at home, the groceries are dramatically cheaper too. It’s amazing how having multiple competing grocery store chains will stretch your food budget…

Other random observations about Charlotte:

  • Bellsouth sure is stingy with the phone books. SBC seems anxious to circulate as many as possible; you can get them at just about any supermarket. With Bellsouth, it’s like pulling teeth. They won’t even give you an office address where you can come to pick one up.
  • Obviously they’re doing something right here with respect to residential development in the center city. It’s absolutely amazing how much there is…
  • It’s so cute that finding graffiti on an abandoned building in the suburbs was actually worthy of a TV news story the other night…
  • I’d forgotten just how polite everyone is. Except the manager of the Steak & Shake near our house…
  • It’s really nice not sitting up in bed at 11:00 at night trying to remember if your car is parked legally or not…
  • How much do you think it cost Food Lion to license the theme from “The Andy Griffith Show” for its ads?
  • I’ve not yet run into a single task which wasn’t ten times easier to perform here than it is in San Francisco. Then again, I haven’t tried to buy drugs on the street or have anonymous sex with a homeless, syphilitic speed freak yet…
  • Aside from leaving some very good friends behind, I have no regrets whatsoever about leaving the City of Doom…

All Legal

It’s official. We now have North Carolina driver’s licenses. And the really cool thing is that I got my old license number back so I don’t have to memorize a new one. And the really SCARY thing is that I still had my old number committed to memory after all these years…

Really Home

Ruth’s Pimento Cheese Spread. It’s one of those things you just don’t realize you’ve been craving for thirteen years until you happen to see it in the Food Lion one Sunday night…

I could not be any happier than I am at this moment, being back in a city that makes sense to me and feels like home. OK, maybe I’d be a LITTLE happier if Bellsouth hadn’t lied and told me DSL was available in my new apartment, but that’s nothing a little bit of cable modem won’t fix. So maybe I’ll be able to answer email tomorrow; SMTP doesn’t seem to be working too well on my stopgap dialup account…

Pictures and commentary on the cross-country trip coming soon, I promise, along with the interesting and rather happy story of how Mark will be doing yet another one in a couple of weeks…

Montgomery to Greensboro

   

We had breakfast at Waffle House, where we were served by a big ol’ sissy who tried to clock these two guys traveling together from California. We offered neither confirmations nor denials, which probably frustrated him no end…

We looked around downtown briefly and saw the state capitol and an old Kress store which probably had at least some civil rights significance. And then we left for Atlanta, where we had to make an emergency stop so I could do some short-notice work for a client in Charlotte. We decided this would be a good excuse for another dinner at another Piccadilly…

 

And then, we started the last leg, to my parents’ house in Greensboro. We rolled in after midnight, and the trip was pretty much done. It had been rather a long and exhausting one…

New Orleans to Montgomery

   

We slept. A lot. The big dinner and the stress of the past few days had taken their toll…

We had lunch at Piccadilly and headed for New Orleans again. We’d planned to spend several nights here, but shelved that idea in Fredericksburg, so we only made a quick drive-through before heading out the Chef Menteur Highway toward Mississippi in a valiant effort to avoid the shitty freeway. We ended up taking the scenic route up US 90 all the way to Biloxi before moving back to the freeway. It was at about this point that the landscape really started looking like home to me…

Dinner was at a lovely spot called the Creek Family Restaurant in Atmore AL. Imagine listening to a country remake of “Take a Letter Maria” and eating bad catfish and onion rings with a side of something which may have been either yams or carrots, served by a surly waitress who apparently woke up that morning and realized “I have to spend the rest of my life in Atmore, Alabama, and that sucks so much that I’m going to take it out on every customer I see all day.” That was dinner…

We detoured briefly into Florida near Atmore, just so Mark could say he had, and in the process he also got to visit his first Piggly Wiggly. We made it into Montgomery pretty late…

Houston to New Orleans

   

We left Houston, went through Beaumont, and finally — after four days and 900-plus miles — we escaped Texas. We determined that Exit 880 off I-110 is probably the highest-numbered interstate highway exit in the country. Even I-5 in California, which goes from the Mexican border to the Oregon state line, only makes it to Exit 796…

Of course, our Texas car trouble paranoia was replaced by Louisiana state trooper paranoia. We’d both heard for years about how they look for any excuse to pull over cars with California plates here; there have even been news stories on the phenomenon. So we didn’t speed. We stayed at least 1MPH below the limit even as cars passed us, cursing all the way. And we had no problems…

We have no problems with TROOPERS, I should say. The roads were a different story. These were some of the most godwaful freeways I’ve ever driven, with undulating waves of bumps which threatened repeatedly to send the car airborne. Say what you like about the mechanics of building of sinking soil, but both Texas and Mississippi seem to have discovered a technique Louisiana never read about. It was hell…

Settled for lunch at a KFC next to a Wal-Mart (where we bought a pillow) in Lafayette…

 

We arrived with just enough time to unload, shower, change, and drive into New Orleans for Poppy Z. Brite’s Prime Dinner at Marisol, around which much of our trip had been scheduled. It was a great place and a nice dinner (even the calf’s brains and sweetbreads weren’t nauseating like I expected) and it was nice to be recognized. The only mildly uncomfortable moment was when we apparently freaked out the entire restaurant by informing our server that we don’t drink and thus would be skipping the wine…

After dinner, we drove around just a bit, being careful to avoid scary neighborhoods like the one we drove in through, and I got to see the oldest continuously-operating A&P store in the country…

Fredericksburg to Houston

   

We made a morning tour of Fredericksburg so Mark could pick up some souvenirs for his parents, and to kill some time which waiting for FedEx to arrive with my car paperwork. We no longer needed the paperwork, but we also didn’t want to leave it in Texas. We also checked online and found that all our stuff had safely arrived in North Carolina…

Given the time frame and our level of paranoia, we skipped Austin (and a couple more friends) and went straight to Houston for the night. The car was running slightly hotter than it had been, but it held up just fine. All the same, every rattle filled us with dread. And given the state of our shocks, there were lots of rattles…

Lunch at Whataburger and dinner at Luby’s. We’d finally arrived in cafeteria country and I somehow knew everything would be OK as we made a whirlwind tour of Houston. I also knew I wanted to visit Houston again. I’m less convinced that I want to visit Fredericksburg again…

Stranded in Fredericksburg

 

On a hot Friday morning in Fredericksburg, we called my parents and asked them to FedEx the newly-issued North Carolina tags and title for my car, lest we need to rid ourselves of it. Then, we walked over to the garage, which also doubled as the local impound lot. The idiot mechanic at Behrend’s (if you’re ever in Fredericksburg, avoid this garage) looked under the hood, told me all the coolant had leaked out of the radiator, filled it up again, and told me he couldn’t find any additional leak nor any good reason for one. The car started just fine. He took a small payment under the table…

Back at the motel, Mark and I were unconvinced by his diagnosis. Why, for example, had the car been running so smoothly and even so much cooler than usual over the past few days. Why did this happen all of a sudden and with no warning; it wasn’t as if we’d had a slow radiator leak which would have been gradual and noticeable. Our suspicions were confirmed when we realized we were still leaking. We drove to a Goodyear dealer on the outskirts of town, where the mechanic said, “I can’t work on this foreign car.” Mind you, he was talking about my 1991 Toyota Corolla, constructed in Fremont CA, which is one of the most common cars on the road today…

We then went to Chassis by Zach on his recommendation. We love Zach. He has a certain wry humor and a talent for finding what’s wrong with cars and fixing it (and Mark thought he was cute). He surmised that our problem was a busted radiator drain cap and a pinched O-ring. After one incorrect part delivery and one brief moment when he feared he might need to pull out the radiator, he sent us on our way with a fully-functional (in relative terms) car. Yay, Zach…

We stopped at the H-E-B and bought me a souvenir 100th anniversary bear to celebrate. And we went for a drive in the evening to test things out. So far, so good, although a significant damper had still been put on the trip. At least we slept reasonably well…