A last hurrah

My drive today took me back to Eustis, north of Orlando. For only the second time this trip, I revisited a town -- the first was Seattle -- and for the second time I spent the evening hanging out with Alex (my Floridian friend from the Utena forum, who again is not to be confused with my brother Alex in Charlotte, my college friend Alexis in Seattle, or my new friend Aleksa in Chicago).

The drive, as so often happens, was not very interesting. It was marked by my final admission of defeat in the struggle to keep Zhuge Liang attached to the dashboard. (For those of you who read only periodically, Zhuge Liang is my GPS; I am not keeping an actual Chinese tactician attached to my dashboard. Or anything else, for that matter, but I'm getting to that.) The sticky disc the GPS came with gave out way back at Lake Tahoe. I'd been using double-sided tape to keep it mounted, replacing the tape periodically as the sun's heat melted the adhesive, but as both the GPS and the dash became increasingly marked up, the tape became less and less useful. Finally, I believe in Indianapolis, I decided to try Velcro. This turned out not to be such a great idea; the Velcro did not stick any better than the tape had, but its residue is much harder to remove. So with only a couple days to go, I threw up my hands and have been riding with Zhuge Liang perched in the front seat with my foxes. Sometimes you have to know when to say when.

Anyway, as I was trying to say, interstate driving is boring, especially in the South, where the road is flanked by generic trees and you can tell this is not an actual forest: you're not seeing landscape, just landscaping. So I listened to some NPR, cued up my favorite traveling songs, and sang along to lunch in Jacksonville and at last to Alex's house in Eustis. Here, after other nocturnal activities -- the 1984 edition of Trivial Pursuit at Olivia's Cafe (where it turns out Edgar Cayce is the right answer to every question), dinner at the Mason Jar, and watching Perfect Blue, to name a few -- we went out on Alex's porch to look for lacewings. We didn't find any, but we did discover the praying mantis. I mean that in the same sense that Columbus discovered America -- it may not have been new to other people, but it was new to him -- and the emotional content was the same as if we had never known such a thing existed. We oohed and aahed as she showed off her spindly, frightening arms as if posing for a textbook photo (which Alex's mother indeed tried to take). Eventually she marched off into the bushes, wagging her butt at us, leaving us to look instead for the large toads and tree frogs that densely populate Alex's yard and, apparently, her grill.

Tomorrow the two of us will drive into Orlando to meet Andrea, another forum friend. We'll tour some gardens and go to some kind of tea and coffee market that Andrea says is brilliant, and then, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, I will get in the car one last time and point it towards home. Tonight's is my 100th post to Lover's Lanes. In the spirit of adventure and shooting for beyond the horizon, my post from home concluding this long journey will be #101!