You Drive me Crazy

We got up early and left Messiah at around six o'clock and arrived at our Lexington hotel a little before seven. If I ever voluntarily spend twelve hours in a car with my peers, you have permission to employ nonlethal forms of restraint. Really. Well, it wasn't all that bad. Dylan made us some decent mixed CDs to help pass the morning hours, and then made up for it by talking about "driving theory" and "the psychology of a driver who isn't me" for two hours. Further note: he laughs exactly like Tyler Durden, but a full octave higher and (unfortunately) thinks I'm hilarious. So he laughs a lot. He doesn't know I'm not kidding yet... we'll see how that goes.

Gavin, I'm sorry to say this, but West Virginia is as bad as I always thought it would be. We drove for about three hours through clusters of homes that looked like something out of The Hills Have Eyes or Evil Dead (or a Cormac McCarthy novel, for those of you who aren't B-literate), and some of the people definitely looked shady. If I had been related to any of them, I might have been worried. Luckily, the most interaction we had with the locals was watching a few boys in plaid and overhauls fish out the back of a truck. That's right: fishing from the truck bed. I may have been the only person to notice this anomaly, but they existed! I wish I had a picture, you can't pay people to pose like that.

Oh! Lisbit had a great moment in the park. We arrived at Blackwater Falls (still in West Virginia) around eleven, and after the first glimpse of them through some foliage all she had to say was "Hey, they aren't black!" They were beautiful, though. Massive rhododendron bushes and pine trees were covering huge pieces of ferrous fallen rock. The whole river looked like the kind of rapid you imagine only exists in Wyoming or Alaska, and three or four stories of water cascaded down into a frothy, white foam. There was a rock jutting out in the middle of the spray, and it reminded me of the rock that Ariel sits on while she's stalking GenericPrinceHere. I really wanted to just stretch out on it and, um.... well, I don't know what I was going to do, but it would have been awesome. But that looked like a bad idea, and I probably would have died.

I'll try to post some pictures as soon as we figure out who remembered to bring the USB cable for their camera. (Hint: wasn't me.) I think Lisbit has hers, though, so we should be able to post something later tonight or tomorrow. Mostly, we just drove all day long so that we could take our time touring Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia (again) on our way back. All told, the Falls were beautiful, driving sucked, and I'm still not sure how group dynamics are going to turn out, but I'm fairly optimistic. For once. Ha ha ha. Anyways, we're going to Louisville tomorrow and then to Mammoth on Monday. Yay!

Today's lowlights include Dylan and Lis trying to chant Latin along with the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack and an unsolicited dissertation on the various rock bands present in our driving mix versus their Guitar Hero counter parts.