Well, I'm fixing to fly out of here in the morning. I'm still at my dad's place in West Virginia. Technically, he's somewhere between Beech Bottom and Wheeling. His physical address is within Wheeling's city limits by default since it's not within any of the other small towns in the mountains around here (my cell phone bill registers "West Liberty, WV" when I call his house, for example), but his post-office box, which is not far down the road, is in Beech Bottom. I dunno. There's lots of little townships floating around in the hills up here.

Let me start describing things for you. My mind is so full of all sorts of things I want to talk about, and this is probably going to get pretty wordy. I've been all over the map during this trip, and I've seen all sorts of countryside the likes of which I've yet to see before. So I'll start from where I started the trip... Monday morning, April 26th.

Sky Harbor is not a fun place to be at 7:30 AM on a Monday morning. It's got to be the busiest time for the airport, what with everyone starting business trips or heading home from a weekend's vacation. Our guy driving the shuttle from the travel agency just stopped in the right-hand lane of traffic and told us this was our stop; it would have been futile for him to try and pull in closer to the curb. So, traffic backed up behind us as we fumbled all of our luggage off of the shuttle bus (my dad had been in town for three weeks and we were flying to Kansas together). Then, we got to the ticket counter... and found that Dad had been placed on a flight four hours later than mine by his inept travel agent. Great. The Skycap got him a standby ticket, since the flight was oversold already, and sent all of our luggage through. We got to take the express lane through security since we were so late getting into the terminal after waiting for a new ticket, which was cool... there had to have been 1,000 people in line, and we blew right past. Shoes off, everything into a plastic tub, ooo-kay. I got that little nervous rush that I get every time I walk through those little checkers at the door at Fry's. I mean, I know I didn't steal anything, but what if they go off because of something else I'm carrying, and then I have to empty my pockets, and... so on.

We got to our gate with 10 minutes left in boarding. The attendant at the counter told us we basically had no chance of Dad getting on the flight, but she'd see what she could do. We made a quick contingency plan as to where I'd meet him at KCI when he finally got there, after I picked up the luggage for both of us that was already on the plane. Just as the lady was preparing to close the door, the attendant told us, "You're on. Here." -stamp, stamp- "Get in there. They're about to close up." We came to find later from the attendants on the flight that they had offered anyone willing to take one of the two later flights a $500 airline voucher, and one person in first class had accepted. They promoted someone from coach up there for free, but that was the only seat that had opened up. They gave it to Dad because he was the only single passenger looking to get on; there was a group of 3 and a group of 4 in standby as well, but we got the nod. Good for us.

The flight was uneventful, as were our first couple of days in Kansas. We drove around, rubbed elbows and shook hands, watched a few of the races at the National meet, which was our purpose of spending those first 6 days in Abilene. Then I got walloped with the flu. Wednesday night, we had driven to Wichita to watch a few races there. We've got a kennel there, which I may have mentioned before, and I'd never seen the facility. It's about 100 miles south of Abilene, and I felt fine all the way home from there. Then I wake up Thursday morning and I can't breathe. Well, I *could*... it just felt like I was holding a wadded-up towel in front of my face, and I was struggling to get air in. It got progressively worse throughout the day, and I suffered through the Hall of Fame presentations that night. Friday morning, I was in lousy shape... shivering, sweating, couldn't eat, couldn't drink. I got what medicine down I could, and thankfully by Saturday around noonish, I was starting to move a little again. My dad dragged me out of bed Saturday morning and made me go with him to McDonald's -- "It'll be good for you to get up and move around", and though I couldn't stand up straight without bracing myself against a wall, I ordered an extra-large Powerade, which suddenly looked very refreshing. I think that burst of electrolytes got me moving again, and by Saturday night I was feeling peachy. We flew out of there Sunday morning on a brand-new airplane. It was from a new Brazilian company called Embraer, and they said this particular jet had only been in service two weeks. Whoo. The pretzels were still fairly nasty. We landed in a glum, rainy Pittsburgh and drove over to Wheeling in his truck, which had been parked in long-term for so long they didn't have it listed in their computer.

My dad's trailer had been locked up tight since April 9th when we got here on May 2nd. The air reeked of stale cigarette smoke that had leeched out of everything in the trailer in his absence, and all Sunday night I couldn't breathe. Cigarette smoke gets to me anyway, but with the extenuating factors of my recent flu and the concentrated nastiness of it, it really knocked me out. That, and I was fighting the Sasser worm. My dad never set his virus program to update its definitions, and also never applied any of the Microsoft patches the computer downloaded. Then, he left it connected when he left, so there it sat. The worm just walked right in and set up shop. It took a few hours, but once I finally figured out what to do, I obliterated it. (When you connect to the Internet, the worm multiplies itself 128 times and each instance creates a random IP address to try and send itself to. Once they're all done, the worm shuts the system down, sooo... what little you could get done with those other programs sucking up your bandwidth would be terminated anyhow. So, I called my brother and had him print out and fax me the Symantec pages on it, and I got to work.)

Monday morning I set out on my grand journey to Williamsburg, Virginia. Our trainer up here lent my dad his pickup, and I thus took my dad's pickup on the trip. I'd printed out the map before I left, made reservations at the Patrick Henry Inn, had everything set up. Looked to be about a six-and-a-half-hour trip on paper. Well, come to find out that Mapquest sent me down the route between the Pennsylvania border and Richmond, Va., that approximately 78% of the population of the Eastern Seaboard drives on during the weekday. Goody. So, the trip took 10 hours. It was a heckuva beautiful drive, though. I've always liked driving places I've never seen before, and this trip was flush with gorgeous countryside. Above all else, I was struck with the loud greenness of everything. You just don't SEE that in Arizona. So, it was all right, even though it took a while. I had my CDs and plenty of refreshments. Finally got to Williamsburg around 7:30, gave Lindsay a call, drove over to her place. She'd told me her address, but when I tried to Mapquest it, it wouldn't come up. She said the development was too new to register yet. She wasn't kidding. The first two streets were nothing but foundations and frames. When I did get to Burgundy Road, the street sign was posterboard stapled to a 2x4. Nice neighborhood, though... at least it looks like it'll be when they finish it. It was cold and drizzly, so she gave me the driving tour of William & Mary, which was really neat, seeing all those austere historical buildings. Back at her place, we played a game which I can't remember the name of, but involved these little cardboard tiles, and you tried to build cities out of them, and... ahhh... I can't remember the name. Kind of a cross between Risk and Scrabble. Sort of. But it was a blast. Rolled out of there at 11:30 and... the whole city was pitch black. I mean, when she said stuff closed early there, she was serious. I thought for a minute there'd been a power outage the minute I walked out of her front door, until finally I saw a distant glow... a 7-Eleven. THAT was a relief, because I needed a soda. They're apparently truly all open 24 hours, even in a roll-up-the-streets-at-dark town like Williamsburg. Went back to the hotel room, got engrossed in the Wings-Flames game, which proceeded to head to overtime scoreless. Calgary finally scored with less than a minute left. Woohoo! Go underdogs!

I had figured to get up around 9:30, catch Lindsay for breakfast, and sightsee some on my own around the town. Faced with the daunting prospect of another 10-hour drive, though, I decided to skip the tourism. Besides, someone had awoken me at 6:30 AM pounding on my door. BLAM BLAM BLAM! I stumbled over and I could hear someone quietly shouting (if such a thing is possible) in the hallway. "Amy!!" BLAM BLAM! "The key won't work! Let me in!" BLAM BLAM!! I peeped out of the peephole (can you "look" out of a peephole? I think they'd've called it a "lookhole" if you could), and there was a guy holding an ice bucket out there. I took a deep breath, and in my best basso, I rumbled, "Wrong... Door." *grin* He jerked his hand back, kinda looked around, then realized that, yeah, he was one door too far over. He went one to my left, and I heard the lock click as he put his electro-key in. *shrug* Don't know if he forgot his glasses, was drunk, or what. The doors WERE fairly close together, though.

Anyhow, so I met Lindsay at Mama Steve's Pancake House, and I had creamed chipped beef over biscuits. That was quite tasty, and it seemed somewhat indigenous, too. I'd wanted to try something local. The biscuits were fresh, and the sauce was thick and hearty. Got on the road afterwards at about 11:00. Managed to hotfoot it through the DC area just before rush hour hit, which saved me some time. Rolled back into my dad's driveway at 8:30. It was great fun, though, just being out on the open road. I went through this massive tunnel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike... the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel. Just a whole lot of grand, sweeping countryside, a lot of places I'd never seen before.

My dad's address is 118 Callie Drive. The guy who owns the land subdivided it into two houses -- his own, and a trailer he rents out. When he tried to get electrical service for the trailer, the city told him it needed its own physical address, so the ruts in the ground that lead to what is now my dad's driveway became Callie Drive, named for his mother. It's literally two ruts in the ground -- not even a gravel or dirt road. Right through the grass behind Russ's house. Dandelions grow thick in between the two tire tracks, why, I don't know. North Fork Short Creek runs by in front of my dad's yard, about 50 yards from his front door. He's got a great spread up here -- I call it "trailer", because it resembles one, but in reality it's a manufactured house. It's about as big as a good-quality two-bedroom apartment, if all the rooms were strung end-to-end instead of being in a cluster. He's quite up in the hills; no cell phones up here. It's 10 miles from anything retail -- save for the Domino's Pizza down at the eastern end of NFSC Road. Yeah. Weirdest damn thing. It's literally 15 minutes from any other sort of retail thing, halfway up this mountain, and then... there's a Domino's Pizza. And they deliver. Dad had it once and said it was terrible, so we didn't try it while I was here. He has a tendency to not give anything a second chance. Heh... don't mention Boston Market in his presence. Eleven years ago, he gorged himself on food from there and got sick, and blamed it on the "rotten" food. That's been one of the nicest things about living on my own these past five years -- eating at Boston Market whenever I damn well please. I love their creamed spinach.

The area up here is really in decline, in general. The major industry up here was steel manufacturing, and when the steel mills started to close down a few decades ago, no new industries really popped up to pick up the outflow of workers. There's scores of deserted buildings around here, especially downtown near the racetrack in Wheeling. The racetrack itself is actually on Wheeling Island, in the middle of the Ohio River between West Virginia and Ohio. To get there you can either come across on the big interstate bridge and wind your way through a bunch of surface streets, or you can disregard the 2-ton limit on the 1850's-era suspension bridge and come across on that. (Literally. It was rebuilt in 1856 after being destroyed in a fierce storm and has stood ever since.) The island is only about a mile wide by three miles long or so. The racetrack is in the very southern tip of it. The big casino, which has made Wheeling into the best track in the country, is on the inner-island side of the track. They're connected, but worlds apart. The track has been here a while, but when you step into the casino, you're transported to Vegas. On a whim, while touring the facility with my dad before dinner on Wednesday night, I plopped down at a dollar slot machine and fed in $20. Gradually, I went up and down until I was at $28. "How far should I go?" I asked my dad. I hit "Bet 2 Credits" one more time, and it spun and spun and... Bar, Bar, Bar. Just single bars, but still, a look up said "Pays 10 to 1." So I was at $26, and I won $20, and up came "Credits: $46." I almost pulled a bicep hitting the Cash Out button. I know when my lucky number comes up, THAT's how far I should go.

Anyhow, the week has floated on by. Just a lot of sleeping and laying around on my part. It's been really nice not having to use my brain for much of anything. I think that's the point of "vacation", though... to vacate. But I'm looking forward to being home. I've had my fill of small towns. This has been a nice change of pace, staying in Abilene and Wheeling for a couple of weeks, but neither is a place I'd like to move. They're nice enough now, but give me that Phoenix winter any year.