It’s a cold and wet day in the city of Lexington, Virginia. We were intending to drive along the Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park but since it costs US$10.00 to traverse and it is so foggy, there would be no point in the venture. Thus, it comes to be that I am sitting in the campus library of Washington and Lee University on a wet Sunday morning, spewing forth with another MooQuack mailing.

Yesterday’s was a rather hurried affair, since we only found the library a few minutes before closing time, so I neglected to mention that we are now known through the greater southwest of Virginia. We were driving down the Interstate yesterday, heading north and we found that one of the few radio stations we could hear clearly was 107.1 PSK which was a country music station. They were doing a live broadcast not far from where we were, and since we had heaps of time up our sleeve, we did a quick U-turn and drove over to see them.

We managed to surprise the heck out of the two people working the broadcast, and they were certainly wondering how their piddly little antenna had managed to send the signal to Melbourne, Australia…*grin* We had a good chat with them, scored some free pizza and soft drinks (yum!) for lunch, a T-shirt and a few bumper stickers. Since we were there for a while, they came back to the broadcast during our time there and so I ended up on the radio, having a chat with Scott (the man with the mike).

I am sure that it took a few of the locals by surprise as well, since I know my ears would prick up if I were listening to a radio at home and someone from the other side of the world popped up. Ah well, our mission complete (ie: surprise DJ and eat free pizza), we headed off to the city of Roanoke, which is where the last MooQuack mailing came from.

This morning, since the weather was so miserable, we decided to splurge on ourselves and have donuts for breakfast instead of the standard cornflakes and banana which, though healthier, is becoming a little wearing. Bear in mind that these were not the amazingly weird donuts in the Walmart case, but in fact, the standard colors and designs on about 70% of them.

And yes, they tasted bloody awful…

The weather is not forecast for much better tomorrow either, which is a worry, since we don’t really want to sit around Lexington for another day waiting for the skies to clear. To give you some idea of why we’re doing so today - there is snow forecast for later this afternoon, and we’re just not wanting to drive on a road that has a strict speed limit of 35mph due to the winding nature of it anyway. Throw a little snow into the mix and we’d be straight off the edge.

In other ramblings, we’ve now been to the following states : Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia which is not a bad effort for 31 days of driving. We’ve covered 5,500 miles already in the van in that time, and seen and tasted a variety of foods we’d often never heard of before, from po-boys to sloppy joes to Cinnamon Toast Crunch breakfast cereal to Pool Room burgers to hushpuppies. I would not say we’re getting used to the food yet, but we’re certainly getting less surprises than before. The one thing we really miss is the vegetable component of the diet, though I dare say we’re eating healthier on the road than we did at home because we have so much more fruit and sandwiches now.

We expect to be hading into Washington DC in about a week’s time and not really looking forward to that. We’ve started to notice more crowding already as we move north, with less backroads to drive on, and frankly, we’ve really gotten used to the quiet isolated nature of the south-east USA. I am sure there are people reading this who are laughing that we think it’s crowded in Virginia, but it seems crowded to us. Atlanta was a nightmare to drive in, and if that’s any example of what a major city is like, we really don’t want any part of them!

Between now and meeting the President though, we intend to do a little bit of walking in the Shenandoah NP, since we were inspired to go there based on Bill Bryson’s “A Walk In The Woods”. We are still trying to locate a copy of that (we left ours in storage - duh!) since we want to quickly flick through and find a few places he mentioned in his text that we really want to go to. If anyone has a copy of it, and can tell us the town he went to where the footpaths and road were caving in because the entire town was built on a seam of coal that was burning and the whole town had to be evacuated, let us know - we want to see things like that! (NB: Update 9th April - it’s in Centralia, East Pennsylvania. Thanks to Colin and Katie who helped out with the answer!)

Let’s see - what else can I ramble on about? We managed to find a decidedly evil looking cow last night, with wings. There is a place near Natural Bridge, Virginia which looks like the sort of thing a person on drugs would see in an acid trip. There are odd statues of cows with wings and halos (Holy Cow), as well as a rhino with butterfly wings. All very odd and creepy. I think if I were a kiddie, I’d be scared of the place, not delighted to be there.

Cigarettes are really cheap here. Don’t panic - we’ve not taken up smoking, but it’s something I kept intending to mention at some point in a MooQuack and I just remembered. Instead of the $8.00 - $12.00 back home, they sell them by the *CARTON* for those prices here. A pack of Marlboros is about $2.70 - $3.50, depending on the state, so a lot of people smoke here because the price is not so restrictive. Smokers here are horrified to hear the prices back home, and I know the Aussie smokers reading this are going to be horrified at how gouged they are.

Fuel is varying between $1.17 - $1.55 per gallon (1 gallon = 3.8L) and we are getting 15-17 miles per gallon from the van (lower fuel economy when driving on the Interstates at 70mph).

I think that’s all the news from here. Hopefully we will not be chased by a bear in the Shenandoah National Park (we’ve had our fill of that!) and we might be able to report better weather next time we log on.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001
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