Well, y’all, this is more or less what I’ve looked at all day long. It’s just been me and Fay, or maybe Fay’s bitchy little sister, not sure which, flirting for hours and hours along Highway 64. Sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain. Then mostly rain. And while I would have perhaps preferred a blue afternoon sky filled with nothing but those overweight clouds we enjoyed in abundance back in June, I can’t really complain about the weather. I mean, everything is so impossibly green when it rains like this. So impossibly lush. I can almost forgive the low contrast. Almost.
My travels today have taken me through Savannah (nothing fancy; it’s where I more or less grew up), Waynesboro, Lawrenceburg, Pulaski, and Fayetteville. All sweet towns, especially that Fayetteville. I wish I could sit out in a playground with it and make clover chains, that’s how sweet it is.
I find myself tonight in Lynchburg, home of the Jack Daniels distillery. I didn’t get here in time to take the tour, but if I can ever coax myself into going to sleep, I might get up early tomorrow and go. It’s just down the street and hopefully it won’t be terribly crowded on a Wednesday morning.
When I opened up the door to this motel room and hauled my gear inside, I felt, rather acutely, like perhaps the Coen Brothers were in the corner filming me and that I needed to wait, pensively, for some sort of heist/scheme/plan to go horribly wrong. I’m still waiting. Best I can tell, the only exciting thing that has happened tonight anywhere in the godforsaken world is that Hillary Clinton made me fucking cry. YES, I SAID IT. And the good kind of cry, too. I don’t think this can be blamed on ovulation, either. Wine, maybe. Maaaaaaayyyybbbbeeeee.
Wine, you say? Yes, I did remember to stock up before coming into Moore County, which is dry, despite it being Mecca for whiskey lovers the world over. My trip to East End Liquors in Fayetteville was eye-opening, as the wine selection was so remarkably awful that I ended up paying $20 for a bottle of Merlot. Yes. Yes, I did. It was that or Arbor Mist. WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR?
I don’t mean to insult the proprietor of the store; he told me himself that he’s been trying to find his own personal inroad into wine, but so far has come up short, because wine just tastes yucky. His words — yucky. And this is something I understand completely. Wine was so horribly foreign and awful to me until that one fateful bottle that sparked something in me (latent alcoholism?) and now I can’t imagine ever not drinking wine.
Hang in there, I told him. The good thing about wine is that even if you don’t like one, you’ve still got hundreds of thousands more that are quite different that you might actually like. Sure enough, he said he’d persevere, because if he’s going to order and stock wine, it would help to know something about it. I hope for the good people of Fayetteville that he continues in his quest, because right now they are getting a bum deal.
All right, enough internetting for me. It’s time to snuggle up in these bedbug-infested sheets and watch Law&Order until I pass out.
I want to ask your permission about linking your site. Can you email me? mike -at- hollihan -at- net.
Your trip seems like it would be a blast. I have been to all of these town and yes Fayetteville is something to behold. My wife is actually from Waynesboro so I know that you didn’t see much. Riding on 64 is much nicer than taking the interstates. Have fun!