Daily Newsie

It’s approaching 5 a.m. EST and we’re sitting in a Denny’s somewhere in snowy Ohio, a mere 250-ish miles away from our destination. (Thank you, Quality Inn, for your unsecured WiFi network.) Having lived in both states, I’d forgotten how bitterly cold it gets in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It’s like they enjoy watching their residents scurry around bundled up to the hilt. Kentucky, on the other hand, doesn’t get cold until it absolutely has to, and then it’s rather apologetic about it — It’s winter, see, so I have to get cold, but, tell you what, I’ll throw in some 70-degree January days and you’ll forget all about it.

Thanks to Dramamine — which I fully believe combats motion sickness by putting you to sleep — I slept through most of Kentucky and nearly all of Ohio. I’m not really missing anything, because I don’t like Ohio. You’d think that a state that has had highways for half a century would have figured out by now how to keep snow from sticking to the exit signs so that you can’t see anything except the bottom right corner, but apparently they had better things to do. Like make sure all their rest stops smell like homeless people.

Ah, Ohio, I’m mostly kidding. After all, we are very much enjoying our breakfast here in Liberty, which our server tells us is about 15 minutes from the Keystone State. Last time we stopped at a Denny’s in Ohio we were treated to a table full of drunken rednecks. Best of all, we were seated in between the revelers and the parents of one of the revelers, so Hoss kept stumbling past our table to his parents’ table while his poor mother pleaded with him to quit acting like a jackaninny.

We’ll be back in the road in about a half-hour or so, recharged and ready for the sun to come up. We should reach The Best Friend’s place by midmorning, then tonight we’re headed to my family’s house to stay for a few days. I hope all of you have safe travels this Thanksgiving!