Driven by the Light of the Full Beaver Moon

It takes a lot to shut down a house for the winter when moving to a trailer in the swamp.

It's a manufactured home in a senior residence community!!

The preparations for the drive to Florida took forever. We put one of those Wyze cameras in the hallway, and another in the bathroom, and hired Jimmy Poon's kids to shovel the driveway as needed for $6 a month.

I'm not cheap, that's six bucks a month each.

We loaded up on prescription drugs, got every blood test that gummint health insurance would cover, and gassed up the '84 Tercel. Shoved a couple of gravols into Chippy, and that was it - we were finally on the road back to eternal summer.

The border opened a week ago, and of course, some mooks insisted on trying to cross the day of. They were rewarded with a 6-8 hour wait. I hope their Sherbooke bladders held out. Maybe they were in RVs, but many of them surely were not. I guess it depends.

We gave things a week to settle down and finally, the day came. The day we would leave Flusherville and roll down Highway 91 (or something).

Wonderfully, there was a surprise for us on leaving day. A new, pristine, white, virgin blanket of Fuck You stuff had fallen on the yard overnight. This was perfect and fitting and a fine middle finger to all the poor saps stuck at Veeblefetzer, slaving for The Man, who would be stuck in its icy grip while we numb-assed it to Florida.

It took a few hours to get away in the morning, and once I mansplained to Mrs. F. that strapping the rowing machine to the roof of the '84 Tercel was 'aerodynamically unstable', and besides, we didn't have enough binder twine to do the job, we encased a Gabapentin pill in about two tablespoons of dried up chunky peanut butter and let Chippy gobble it up.

"Here, Chippy... this is 'special treat'!" 

After a indeterminate-lengthy drive from Flusherville through the tri-city area to the border crossing in Ontario's numerological Thousand Islands, we found ourselves within eyeshot of the border - but waiting in a line of vehicles that weren't moving.

The best part was when the Quebec guy in front of us hopped out of his car to get a sandwich from the cooler in the back, and did a great plumbing-ass triple split right in front of the Quad Queen. The second best part was when he did it a second time half an hour later. I guess you get hungry when your asscrack is hanging out in the cold.

They finally opened up a couple of lanes and things got moving again. Soon, it was our turn.

I'm probably not alone on this. I sweat bullets when being interrogated by the border Stasi. Even though I've done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide, my eyes go all shifty, my forehead self-decorates in beads of guilty sweat, and I wet myself like a frightened terrier.

Fortunately, the guy we had was very friendly, reasonable, and foolishly let us through.

I fondly remember taking two and possibly three people with high bridge anxiety disorder across this span while weaving back and forth on the way to an Albany Springsteen show once. Sorry.

He let us through! We were in the USA and the only thing between us and the warm sub-tropical crotch rot of Florida was about 21 hours of driving.

Chippy seemed to be doing okay, thankfully.

We hadn't really gone very far but because of the hour wait at the border, and the terrier-pants, a pit stop was in order, and that pit stop included some Five Guys.

Take those teeth, you hot double cheeseburger bitch. Take all of 'em! Yeah, baby, yeah.

We drove on. We'd probably started out too late, and things came to a head when we hit ice pellets, sleet, and rain in the Fingering Lakes region or some such, and then it got fast, dark, wet, and busy, just like a... you fill in the blank.

The Quad Queen doesn't drive too much, but she had done a stint for an hour and at least I was somewhat refreshed. But boy, by the time we were on the last leg, I was tired and my eyes were as dry as the surface of the coming Full Beaver Moon.

We really only had one navigation snafu, and that was when the GPS I had strapped to the Tercel's dash told us to go the right way, but the signs were saying things like 'Toll Road, No Cash Accepted'. We did a little dipsey doodle and found a place to stop in some godforsaken Poonsylvania town, and confirmed that the route was correct - and they'd photo your license and bill you. No more than 12 minutes lost.

Around 8:00pm we pulled into the lovely hotel La Quinta, which is Spanish for 'cookie cutter'. Everything sussed out, our room was there, and we crashed hard.

Day 1 was in the bag, with only days 2, 3 and half of 4 to go.

Where we played 'where the fuck are we' in front of a show of American military strength, a disused tank repurposed as a display tank.