Eccentric Flower:199812/trolls ducks zebras and armadillos

thirty december

trolls, ducks, zebras, and armadillos

The last day of the trip, which I thought would be the most routine leg since I have come back from DC a buncha times and can do it in my sleep (sometimes almost literally), was hellish. This was mostly due to the weather. Rainy, but rain half-mixed with roadmud so the wipers smeared it all over everything.

I hate buying gas in New Jersey. There's no self-service. I rail about it every time, and I go out of my way to avoid it, but sometimes you just gotta get gas on the Turnpike.

We noticed a sign that warned of a "gridlock alert" in NYC on the 31st ("expect severe delays"). What I want to know is, how can they predict that? What makes them so sure?

We ate lunch/dinner at Palisades Center again. It was even scarier when we saw the cavernous underground parking. I had joked that the only thing it was missing was an ice rink. This time, wandering a little further down the mall than we had before, we learned that it had one.

Travelling this road as many times as we have, we have developed an unusual language. When Nonelvis said she was accumulating change to "feed the ducks," I knew exactly what she meant. On the Garden State Turnpike, they don't use a ticket system. We pay four tolls of thirty-five cents each. The first time we took this road, the tolls took us by surprise, and I commented that it was like being pecked to death by ducks. Now it's become "Time to feed the next duck ...."

We also tend to refer to tolls as "trolls," which relates back to the section of a Jack Chalker book about the Troll Bridge (fee: one goat, one pig, or three chickens).

A slightly more cryptic one is the "Zebra" - the signs for the Tappan Zee crossing all refer to "Tappan Zee Br" (exact spelling), which to my benumbed mind becomes "Tappan Zebra" when you try to say it aloud. So now we cross the Zebra, with Nonelvis always alert for her beloved Barrier Machine.

The Zebra is about when the road conditions got really nasty. 287 is under construction and it was raining heavily; people were acting like lunatics, unsure where to drive, some going dangerously slow, others dangerously fast. Lack of lane markings didn't help. I don't understand why in the north, the Land of Trolls (toll roads are unknown in any Southern states except Florida), they can't use some of that money to keep the lines in the road painted. I don't want to hear any sad stories about winter weather and snowplows.

Then when we rejoined I-95 in Connecticut, traffic came to a halt. The rush hour exodus from NYC. Took us an hour to go about fifteen miles.

The traffic ebbed, but the weather kept getting worse - rain and fog and everything, as I kidded, except armadillos falling from the sky. Nonelvis kept hoping that the weather would somehow magically change as soon as we hit Massachusetts. She got her wish! It began to snow.

Honest. Blizzard variety. It didn't last long, fortunately. (Me, looking heavenward: "You forgot the armadillos!" Nonelvis: "Please don't say that.")

When we finally got home, we found that in our absence Inu had managed to dismantle the automatic cat feeder. Never underestimate your cat.

And now we're spending the day recuperating. After reading these five entries, you probably need a little recuperating too. Well, I felt I owed you some words after my absence.

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