and now you know...

alrighty, now as much as I'd like to leave y'all to wonder on that nice cliffhanger sam left you on, I think I'd better finish it.

so we're in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, pushing the car until it was too hard. so then we just sat around and let the car cool for a while. we decided no to call Ronny, and instead to just drive it home. we were really close, and it had cooled for quite a while. so sam got in, kept the lights off, turned the radio and AC off, and used a flashlight to light the road. he had some theory about keeping everything off to lessen the chances of over-heating. so he drove it home no problem. he tried to turn off the car at the top of the driveway but claimed that the brakes stopped working so he turned it back on. I had decided to walk home so I wasn't in the car. I can't confirm nor deny. sounds suspicious tho.

in the morning, the car looked and sounded fine. we obviously wanted it looked at anyway tho, and luckily Ronny knew a good mechanic that would do it for cheap. so we drove about 10 miles away to where this guy had a shop in his backyard. this was a sunday mind, so the fact we could do that was impressive. and he said he'd take a look at it, but wouldn't be able to actually work on it that day. so he stares at it, and we explain where we saw water gushing out...and he gets down in the engine and points at one side and says "about this area?" as he says this, his finger brushes a tube that FALLS OFF. well, it was connected on one end, but where it went into the engine just fell off. he didn't push it or anything, he barely touched it.

so he explained it wasn't a big problem, but he'd have to take half the engine off to get to it. this obviously sounds expensive so I asked him if he had any approximate figure. he said he'd be able to get to it the very next morning and it would be about $125. quite shocking to me. the shops I know of would charge that just to start. and sure enough, next day he called and had it all fixed. pretty cool fellow. wish I could remember his name. I'll work on that.

so with that near disaster successfully avoided we decided to leave the next day, on tuesday. and here I paid the story to step outside. I'm writing this in a coffee shop in DC, and I've just noticed the rain that's been falling all day has turned to snow. not very heavy but I'm gonna take a few minutes to look at it. brb.

interestingly enough, it can't have been 5 minutes and there's already a pretty big layer of snow on everything. living in texas, I've had no experience with snow. the little I've seen hasn't stuck on the ground or anything. it's odd to be here and see a pretty thick snow that's covered the ground in 5 minutes. a whole new experience. which is what this trip is about of course. I feel like a kid again. oh wait...I am a kid. nvm.

anyway, so...we left tuesday. Sara and Ronny drove with us about 30 minutes to some little town that I don't remember. maybe madison. it was supposed to have a KFC that had an all-you-can-eat-buffet. it turned out that while it did have it, it was only serving on wednesdays. so we headed to a hole-in-the-wall southern diner called Adrian's Place. some pretty good food there, and great sweet tea too. I recommend it. course, you don't know how to get there as I'm not 100% sure of the town name. bwuhaha, it's part of my plan.



from there we got on I-20, considered turning around and taking it all the way back to Longview, TX, but decided not too. we drove across the rest of GA, all of SC, and most of NC. we came into Wilmington, North Carolina about 6pm I think. there we met Maureen Carlin, who lives and attends then University of North Carolina at Wilmington. it was really good to see her, I always enjoy time spent with her. she's a blast. we hung out with her and her friends on tuesday night, and were supposed to stay with her in her dorm that night. supposed to. of course we didn't. they forgot that they couldn't sign in guests after 12 and we didn't try before then. so we ended up sleeping in our car. the next morning we hung around in coffee shops and such. Maureen was busy with school, (as a matter of fact we didn't see her anymore while we were there,) so we were on our own. after lunch we headed down to the beach, even tho it was overcast and NOT a beach day. it was a nice beach. the sand was white and squeaked. not like Galveston. hah! we had a pretty good time there, took some pictures, watched the locals. Wilmington is an impressive town, I wouldn't mind visiting more in the future. here are a few pictures of that.








after staying at the beach a good while we went and hung out some more in a random coffee shop. eventually sam decided we wouldn't be sleeping in the car again, and we went and got a room at a motel 6 somewhere. cheap rooms, which was nice, and they can do seeing as they don't offer internet. how are we supposed to keep y'all informed without internet? :P

next morning was fairly routine as far as mornings go. woke up...ate breakfast... showered..you know, morning stuff. we had 7 hours to drive to DC so we headed out about noon. we got here, saw many monuments as we drove in, (while trying to remember the name of the Washington Memorial, (the tall one as we called it,) we also discovered sam thinks the Statue of Liberty is in DC. poor guy..) we eventually got where we were going and met Amy Doolittle, one of our oh-so-many DC connections.

I should note that sam complains often that all my posts abuse him, and that I should be nice. but he says alot of things, most of which I ignore.

so now we're here, in DC, our fair capitol, and it's cold, and rained all day, and snowed this evening. as always, we'll keep you updated.