Days like this, part 1

Happily ensconced in a cozy Days Inn in Paducah, Kentucky, I sit down to write a blog entry and realize there's so much to record about my trip so far that I'm already (after just three days) having trouble holding it all in my head! Why haven't I written a nice long entry sooner, then? Part of it is that I've been effing tired from all the driving; I'm still getting used to feeling my buns fall asleep as I spend seven consecutive hours behind the wheel punctuated only by a gas stop. But today, while I'm tired, I feel better, and moreover I have my own private room. This last matters. I've loved staying with my hosts -- people who know the area, can take me to the good restaurants (or cook up something delicious themselves!), can chat with me after a long and lonely stretch of road -- but one's own room is comforting in a different way and engenders a different kind of consciousness that's more conducive to writing.

Now, how to write? There's a certain irony about roadbound travelogue in that driving is the common and dominating feature of my days, yet there's not much to say about it. I've been on the interstate since Eustis and so I can't share quaint rural towns' oddities as observed from the car. (I think I'm going to take the back ways through Kansas in a couple days.) The most interesting thing about the driving has been the changing landscape. South Florida, for those of you who've never been there, is flat like a board. I'm not used to driving on hills. The pita-bread terrain of north Florida and Georgia was a novelty, but it wasn't until the long march through Tennessee where I-24 is flanked by sheer cliffs as it jags in all three dimensions that I realized how much hills matter in driving. Cruise control does not always work on hills, and the gas pedal doesn't work normally either. Fortunately, Blackbird is tolerant of my learning curve; she is a fantastic car. Later, after a breathtaking series of interchanges in Nashville that would have been nigh-unmanageable without GPS, the skies opened. As the rain poured down I wondered how people in the Rocky Mountains get around during a storm. Nice thing about that is, I can just ask my friend in Denver when I get there in a few days.

While my eyes scan the road, my ears are kept busy with music, NPR, or random local radio stations. I listened in fascination to a Georgian call-in show aimed at conservative housewives; the hostess spent fifteen minutes promoting a website billed as a Craigslist for conservatives, which helps make sure you don't accidentally do business with a liberal. Not that she's a liberal-hater, exactly. She was just using conservatism as an index for cleanliness and conscientiousness, and I have to admit that if I was going to hire a lifeguard from Craigslist sight-unseen, I'd be reassured to know he was a Mormon. Talk radio: a window into culture, including our own.

At this point in the entry I'm conscious that this is getting a little long. I have a lot more to say and no knowledge of when I'll have another writing opportunity like this, so I'm going to plow right along but split this post into a few parts. This way, if you don't want to read the whole update, you can stop here and come back tomorrow! But first, check out the double rainbow my friend in Eustis and I spotted outside her house...