Random Thoughts from the Road: The Return

In the spirit of my first post, "Random Thoughts from the Road," I present part two - my return drive to Cleveland and the many random thoughts I had along the way. I was really tired after the week-long convention, so the thoughts were a little few and far between.

• There is a town called Clarksville in Michigan, which made me start singing the Monkees' song, "Take the Last Train to Clarksville" and I wondered if this was the town they were talking about, although I doubt it. (turns out, it's about Clarksville, TN)
• Billboards of Michigan: Awful picture of a scorning woman and it says, "Be a Hero - Report Vulnerable Adult Abuse"
• I passed a track that was apparently to train police officers to drive the police cars - like a test track for police cars. Never thought about something like that before.
• Billboards of Michigan: Leinenkugel beer. We have these in Ohio, too. And I enjoy Leinenkugel. And I really like saying Leinenkugel. Leinenkugel.
• Flipping around the radio dial, I stop at a talk show because I thought it might be NPR, but turns out to be a pastor who says he refuses to pray in an interfaith prayer or service because he won't pray to false gods, but wonders if it's OK to pray without using the name of Jesus, as he has been asked to do on occassion for city meetings and other public events. He even says it's OK, because he knows he's still praying to his god and his Jesus. So, I wonder, you can't do that at an interfaith prayer or service? Maybe I'm naive, but if there is a god, I like to think the omnipotent is listening to all of us - no matter what religious affiliation we subscribe to.
• Billboards of Michigan: GIGANTIC cleavage shot for Harley Davidson motorcycles
• Not even out of Michigan, I was REALLY tired and falling asleep, so I had to pull over at a rest stop and take a nap. I set my cell phone alarm for 20 minutes, ended up sleeping for 45 minutes. I was glad that no one came up to the car to see if I was OK, which is something that always seems to happen when I nap in the car. Yeah, because if I was dead, I would have reclined the seat, gotten a pillow, cracked the windows, and had the radio on something soothing. People, if I'm slumped over the steering wheel, THAT'S when you can ask if I'm OK.
• Was hungry mid-afternoon, so I finally stopped for a snack at a KFC/Taco Bell combo. I found it kind of amusing that there were 5 Hispanic gentlemen in front of me who ordered KFC, not Taco Bell.
• What is THAT SMELL?
• Turns out the smell was a truck full of live pigs.
• Truck full of live pigs makes me want to become a vegetarian.
• Growing up, I never liked ABBA. Now I LOVE ABBA!
• I am both deathly afraid of bridges and impressed and fascinated by their engineering. The bridge that replaced the drawbridge over the Maumee River in Toledo is a pretty cool, but very tall bridge. I remember getting stuck at that drawbridge whenever we went to Toledo or Detroit to visit my dad.
• I hate having the hiccups
• Thinking about how this weekend is July 4th and fireworks. I remember being pregnant with Eroll and going to late-summer baseball games where they had fireworks and I remember worrying about if it upset him in there because it was so loud.
• There are few stranger lyrics than "Alligator lizards in the air" from America's Ventura Highway. (apparently there really is such a thing as alligator lizards, which are a type of lizard and are not alligators, and you very well might see them along Ventura Highway. But they don't fly.)