I will end this day in my nice warm bed in my nice warm room with actual privacy (Leen's not due back from her trip to Florida until Friday) and talking to my darling Robert. Damn it, I have sorely missed him.
Sean kissed Karen good night. It was sweet. Apparently he asked her up to his room, too, but Karen declined and then joked the next morning about how she got an offer for a torrid one-night stand from a guy with a cute accent. Cute accents are important to Karen. She wants to go to Britain for a couple of years so she can pick up the accent.
I really liked him; he was very candid, very genuine. I liked that. I also liked that I actually got to do some talking. I haven't said a whole lot lately, mainly because I'm a lot less comfortable talking with a larger group. Three others is about my upper limit. In a group larger than that, everyone else seems so much more interesting than I, and I always just end up listening, or else I put my words together too slowly to follow the conversation.
We're presently in the car, retracing our steps back to Toronto in order to head back over the border at Detroit again. We passed a large, old, clipper-style ship (I think that's what that sort is called) beached just below the highway. Some kind of tourist attraction (isn't everything en route to Niagara Falls, the neon town?), I'm sure, but it might actually have had some historical value. I'm not betting on it, though.
We just passed over a town where there was this pair of black birds taking flight and soaring together over the houses. It was something straight out of a story. They circled once before heading off east, and I felt like they'd done that just for me. It was almost magical.
Lindsay put on Ella Fitzgerald and Claire is singing along as she drives. Oh, oh my God, we're driving past Wayne Gretzky's birthplace. And now we're stopping here for gas and breakfast at -- where else? -- Tim Horton's.
We found out while we were inside that apparently there is a Tim Horton's in Kentucky. We absolutely must investigate this further at some point. [Note: As it turns out, it's in Ashland, where Leen's from.] Lindsay apparently made a fool of herself in the bathroom; since all the stalls' doors were closed, she assumed that they were all full. So she's standing there waiting, and another woman comes in, gives Lindsay a quizzical look, and goes straight into one of the stalls. All the stalls were empty. And there's Lindsay waiting! It cracked me up when she came out of the bathroom and announced to us all, "I am such a moron!" Heheheh. Today is Lindsay's birthday, too.
On the road again. Highway 403 just ended, and Lindsay ate a chocolate Timbit slowly and ceremonially in honor of it. Oh, dear, I think it's silly hour again. And now we're discussing how Lindsay should be "impaled at the stake" (her words).
Claire's currently trying to figure out how she can get an article for the Cardinal, our school paper, out of this trip. Her current idea is "The call for Tim Horton's in America".
And now we're back in the USA. Our Customs guy was really funny; he asked us if we had any meat or produce to declare, and then he added, "Besides Tim Horton's." We had a box of Timbits in the front seat. (Hey, there's a Tim Horton's/Wendy's combination in Ohio! Exit 97 (Buck Road) on I-75 south. w00t!)
Is it yet painfully obvious that we're now all Tim Horton's junkies?
Going from Windsor, Ontario to Detroit, Michigan is an enormous letdown. Windsor is so pretty and Canadian and ... clean. Detroit is factories and ... smog. You can see the air go gray as you cross the bridge, and that smog casts a terrible pallor over the city. Detroit seems so very bleak. It's sort of sad. At the same time, it already makes us all the more nostalgic about Canada.
The truck drivers right around Toledo were all just really nice; they let us over when the traffic was really crazy due to some insane lane shutdowns. Accidents suck.
I just remembered how we drove up to the Falls proper at night on Tuesday because Lindsay remembered that she had wanted to get a rock from Niagara Falls for her dad. They light up the Falls at night, and when we first got there, they had a lime green covering over the five floodlights. Someone observed that this made it look like a waterfall of Mountain Dew. Karen, my fellow caffeine junkie, really liked that idea, but that offended my sensibilities more than anything else in that sleazy tourist-trap town. God's creation does not require additional color beyond the white of the churning falls and the muddy green/brown of the water, the white of the gulls above it and the rainbow when the setting sun hits the spray.
It really bothered me that they'd managed to find a way to make the Falls so very garish, to make them conform to the neon all around them. I was relieved when suddenly the lights became white ones. I don't know if they switch among using plain white and colored lights or if the colored cover just happened to break away, but either way, it really set me much more at ease, though I think I will always love the Falls best at sunset. I sincerely wish I'd had my camera, but something still clicked into place in my soul all the same. Deism, after all, is considered a natural religion.
We stopped again to eat in Wapakoneta, which turns out to be the birthplace of Neil Armstrong. They have a model lunar module by the highway. We ate at a Wendy's where I got chicken nuggets, fries, and a Frosty, which I didn't get to finish before we left. I have thrown away more drinks in the last few days than I have in the last month. It's what comes from traveling with hurried people. I always seem to be dragging behind. I never thought of myself as slow before.
Ohio amazes me with how flat it is. In some places you can see all the way to the horizon. It's astounding. I think that, for perceived time elapsed (not how long it takes, but how long it feels), the drive from Toledo to Dayton is the absolute longest in the whole world because everything looks the damn same. I'm trying to stay awake until Dayton so that I can yell "Hi, Grishnys!" and wave and be a dork and stuff just like I did on the way up.
I really want to get some sleep. After all, I'm running on maybe three hours of it. I don't regret sitting up and talking with Karen and Sean one bit, though. I also don't want to miss out on any of the trip, though, because I would be a totally crap scribe if I just said, "Screw you guys, I'm going to sleep."
I'm wearing my beret today. I'm absolutely adorable. Go me!
It seems like the weather's getting quite pretty the further south we go. Maybe it's even like that at home. That would rule, to get to come back to nice weather...
Oh, wow, I fell asleep. And now we're dropping off Karen at her house. The extra room in the backseat is weird. I sort of wish that we could all have parted at UofL instead of doing it piecemeal this way, but that's just me. We'll all be back together on Sunday anyway. Oh, gosh, this is the first time I've been lonely for someone who lives at UofL. I guess we have gotten closer.
But now the road signs say Louisville on them. Oh, it's so nice to have the end of the road in sight. Eighty-eight miles.
Yeesh! We just almost got into a fender-bender! Claire was talking and not totally fixated on the road, and the guy in front of us slammed on his brakes and Lindsay screamed. Claire stopped in time and nothing happened, though. Then she made fun of the way Lindsay screamed. They're swapping sports stories now. I'm just trying to think of any possible loose ends to tie up.
The sun is setting, and I can't seem to get home fast enough. I had a wonderful time overall, absolutely wonderful. Canada seems to agree with me. My ankles and wrist do still hurt a bit, though. When they quit hurting, I'm going to bother Mum to take me to the skating rink. I will learn to skate, dammit.
But I love Toronto. Yonge Street is still dancing in my mind, full of lights and windows and colorful signs that get blown around in the wind. Even the construction was somehow less onerous there than at home. I was sad to leave Canada, but the closer I get to home, the more desperately I want -- need, almost, to be there.
I've really stopped breaking up my entries at all; this has been a continuous flow all day long. I sort of miss writing the SIGHTS and SOUNDS parts, because they were really good exercises in description for me. I could write so many pages more on everything I saw, heard, tasted, smelled -- the parking garage we used had a stairwell that smelled like week-old pizza. We "lost" the car there a couple of times and had many giggles at our own silliness.
Oh! The androgynous British person actually turned out to be an Australian woman. She was from Melbourne.
I'm starting to wish we had had that film crew. That, and that my camera hadn't broken. Pictures being worth heaps of words and all that. I feel like there's so much I've forgotten or just not thought to write down. Try as I might, I fear I haven't captured the spirit of the trip. But I can hope.
... Do not believe in a bird called Hope ...
Heh. That might just be the spirit of the trip, right there. Fifteen miles to Louisville. Getting there. Getting there. And now I'm back in the right county -- Jefferson. There are actually tears of anticipation welling in my eyes, which have been a very pale gray today, as seen in the rearview mirror.
Oh, geez. Just passed a HUGE wreck on one of the off-ramps.
I can see the clock tower now! Almost there!
I've arrived safely back. Now it's time to close the book and go tell my Robert I'm home.
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© Cynthia 2002.