road trip

I remember what a fine thing it used to be to either drive (with a navigator riding shotgun,) or navigate (with a driver.) If there’s an advantage to doing both--the current necessity--it’s that I get plenty of photographic memory practice. At any convenient (or at times sketchy) roadway stop, the technique is this: Scan the map and lock the current location, destination, and directional trajectories into visual memory. Then, as we pass the exit for Oopsie Caverns I will be able to reassure myself that Oopsieville is 2/5 of the way from exit 731 to the Tasty-Snooz Inn where (you’ll soon learn) they’ve switched all the room lighting to compact fluorescent, and your eyes will go bonkers accordingly.

Trucking south on highway 81, you pass a sign promoting some Cavern or other every 5 minutes or so. Although I don’t think I’ve succumbed since an official girl scout trip in the late 60’s, I felt it was high time to expose Gabe to the tourist kitsch that surrounds these geologic marvels. “Why do they have so much weird stuff made out of wood,” he asks naively. I am somewhat chagrined to realize that all the parks and playgrounds we stopped at when our children were small deprived them of the sensuous delights of hundreds of cedarwood knickknacks stamped with the words Shenandoah Caverns. Still, he is not tempted, being more interested in the “lab-manufactured” unrealistically-hued polished stones. I buy him a tee-shirt.

We do not try to lose Jeff on the Cavern tour, but I know what happened. It was right at the entrance to the “Short-man’s Revenge Grotto,” when we pass another tourgroup. Gabe and I notice a couple of rooms (caves) later. While I’m fairly certain Jeff will find his way out with the other group, our teenage tourguide, who generally exhibits the enthusiasm of a sedated turtle, is concerned that it will not look good on her resume to lose a person in the cavern, so she and I scamper back a ways to retrieve Jeff while our group waits. And I am glad, when I see his befuddled expression, that we did.

We manage two days in lovely, hippie-chic Asheville without major incident. Gabe allows as how a tour of the Biltmore Estate could be much more fun if it occurred in a post-apocalyptic world and involved periodic battles with zombies.

But we collect Becca from her 6-week counselor stint at Camp Cheerio, and only get vaguely lost in Roanoke looking for dinner.

Of greater importance is that I successfully nab several bottles of Cheerwine at a roadside gas station/grocery store where the proprietress sits in a rocking-chair surrounded by cases of beer, and the young man cashiering addresses me as “mai-yim.” The Cheerwine was requested by Olivia, who got a taste of this North Carolina specialty on last month’s church-youth Habitat for Humanity, house-building trip to Iredell County, N.C. Based on one sip of the stuff I’d say that you could make your own by adding soda-water to cherry cough syrup. As we leave the convenience store I shush Gabe, who I believe is about to say something tactless. Instead, once we seal ourselves into the car, he says “that was the smallest gas station bathroom I’ve ever seen. It was also the cleanest.” And I am surprised. Not by the small part.