THE long, long drive

Yep, it was a loooong drive--so I'll just give you the highlights.

We saw some windmills,


and a creepy cloud face watching over us (it's right above the semi).

It could have been a boring drive, but Jon and I came prepared with all the essentials of a good road trip (in addition to a car):

1 - Trail mix we ate so much of that it makes me a little sick to think about it.

2 - A mostly reliable co-pilot (that would be me--no road trip is genuine without at least 9 or 10 highway U-turns).

3 - And music. Well, we would have had music except someone had broken into our car and theifed the stereo a few months ago.

Good thing we actually like talking to each other. We ironed out our top 5 TV shows/childhood cartoons/anime series/animated movies lists and mapped the plot for several issues of the comic Jon has in the works. That got us all the way to New Mexico and then we talked about our favorite memories and moments with our favorite people. After that topic was exhausted, we'd made it to Texas and the sun was setting.


After a few hours of driving in the dark we passed a sign that said DO NOT PICK UP HITCH HIKERS PRISON FACILITY which made me think of this story I read in a magazine about a woman who becomes pen pals with an inmate and tricks herself into thinking he's a nice person because she's lonely but finds out he's this horrible person who murdered his wife and parents.

I told Jon about the story and immediately regretted it because it's dark and late and I get scared so easy that I already felt the paranoia fear setting in that the car was going to break down and we'd be invited into a mansion only to find out too late the owner likes to bath in the blood of young maidens.

Then Jon asked me if I made sure to lock my door every time I went into a gas station so that no one could get into the backseat of our car underneath all of our stuff.

You wouldn't think a guy with such a sweet face would ever say anything that would scare his wife so much but when he said that it made me so scared in my heart that there was some hairy man in plaid shirt crouching underneath all of our stuff in the backseat and he was going to reach out his dirty hands and kill us.

Since I was already scared it made me remember all the scary parts in movies I had seen and I started thinking about this one time me and my friends told scary stories (and by told I mean looked them up on the internet and then read them to each other) about skin-walkers--and, in short, I had really freaked myself out.

By this time it was around 1 a.m., we'd been driving since early in the morning, and Jon started seeing stuff on the road that wasn't really there--mostly raccoons. Raccoons are probably his spirit guide. He was getting pretty tired and needed to take a nap so I drove for a while but then I started having these hallucinations that there were these black shapes moving along side the road in my peripheral vision and the road would start looking like it was a mirage and then snap back to normal.

Around 3 a.m. we figured it was time to find a hotel and get some sleep. So we did.

We finished our drive to Austin the next day and we were so excited to finally see the Austin skyline that we just about made water in our pantaloons.