JSB Travel Blog: Monday
Monday: All night drive to Nashville
Big van. Very big van. It’s big enough that whichever three of us aren’t on driving duty can lay down, recline and try and catch a few hours of rest. We’re lucky and thankful to have such a vehicle at our disposal. And the heat works! Comfy style. I forgot what an amazing perspective you can gain traveling by car and stopping at highway exit gas stations. Stopping at stations in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Tennessee we’ve seen consumer options akin to the roadside velvet painting vendors I remember from growing up in rural Ohio. Pennsylvania’s stations offered the innocuously offense plush stuffed animal white Bengal tiger heads just waiting to come home with you for the low low price of $14.95 and rest on the wall above your hearth. Perhaps the ladies’ rooms in VA and TN offered less ridiculous fare than what we found in the men’s rooms. The cologne and condom dispensers offered “Freedom French Ticklers”: ”It’s patriotic!” What, “Freedom Fries” wasn’t demonstrative enough? And that was before we found the even sillier “Bin Laden” condom. Truckstop sex is apparently not for the squeamish or unpolitical.
We stopped at that ol’ US Highway standby, Cracker Barrel, for breakfast and stuffed our bellies after a long night of travel. Homestyle cooking definitely has serious recuperative properties. We’re about an hour outside of Nashville and after a great breakfast, all we need is some showers and a change of clothes and we’ll be feeling great and ready to put on a great show for our Nashville friends. Bring on the rock!
