DEER, FLOATING BILLBOARDS, AND WHO YOU ON?

Hey, ya’all.  How is everyone?  Doing good, I hope!!!  Well, Cheyenne McCray and I are back home from RT…well, Cheyenne is.  I’m visiting family in the south this week…making the most of the miles I put on my truck to get to Atlanta for the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention. 

What a blast it was!  We ate too much, drank too much, waited too long for elevators, and slept too little.  But we had a ball.  Reconnected with old friends, made new BFFs, and got to hang around with LOTS of wonderful authors and readers.  Woo Hoo!

So, something I wanted to share with you was the last half-hour of our trip into Atlanta.  It’s about midnight and we are dead tired.  Cheyenne is talking a mile a minute to try and keep me awake behind the wheel. Our sights were set on hitting the convention hotel Monday night so we would have all day Tuesday to rest and recuperate from the 3-day drive from Arizona to Georgia.

We are almost there. It’s midnight and our E.T.A. is about midnight-thirty. We are tired and punchy and our bodies are operating on fumes. It’s dark and neither of us has ever been to Atlanta, so we are clueless about where we are or where we are going.

We are on a major freeway in what seems to be the edge of downtown Atlanta.  We have the high-rises in our sights just up ahead.  We are in the city and almost there.  I am focused on staying awake and getting to the hotel!  We are in the heart of Atlanta.

Anyway, we are hurtling along at about eighty m.p.h. when I catch something that appears to be a light brown color off on the right side of the road.  I look, but too late—I see nothing.  A minute or so later, I catch another light brown blur on the right side, but am too late to get a good look.  Now I’m on high alert, and if they’ve put stupid pieces of artwork on the side of the freeway just to scare me, I’m gonna be pissed.

So now I’m driving 80 m.p.h. with my eyes (somewhat) glued to the right side emergency lane. There it is—another light brown blur…then another…then a bunch of anothers.  We have a whole freaking herd of deer grazing on the grass on the other side of the emergency lane of the freeway!

Now, don’t get me wrong.  We have deer in Arizona.  And Arizona deer like to run across the highway in the middle of the night, just like they do in the south.  But Arizona deer like to jump out from between tall trees and bound across the country road or highway close enough to the front of the truck to give me a heart attack.  They do not graze at the side of a metropolitan freeway in the heart of town!!!

To the people of Georgia…ya’all have too much grass!  There are advantages to having a lot of dirt rocks…deer don’t want to graze on our freeways.

Holy hell!  So now I back it down to about 60 (which I probably should have been doing all along, but I really wanted to find that bed in the hotel room), and traffic is flowing around me like creek water around a rock in the middle of the stream.  And, yes, I’m smack dab in the middle of the freeway because there are herds of deer grazing on the right side and now I see that there is more grass over on the left side. I don’t want to be the first to hit one.  Now if someone else hits one, I know which direction it’s going to be coming from—overhead!  Only one place I have to watch—the sky—and I figure their brake lights oughta give me a split second warning.

How come deer don’t come with warning bells and lights?  Seems like a poor design to me.

So, long story made a bit shorter, we missed the deer.  And now I’m WIDE awake.  In fact, the adrenaline shot I got from that episode has me a little wired.  Now I’m seeing signs floating in the sky.  Seriously?  How do they keep them up there?

I ask Cheyenne, “What the F…? Are those billboards floating in the sky?”  I’m starting to get freaked out and goosebumps are skittering up both arms.

Cheyenne asks, “What are you talking about?”

“Those billboards.”  I point to the lighted billboards all along the free way that are floating in the sky…way up high.  How could she miss them?  They’re lit up like the Fourth-of-July and floating, for crying out loud! LOL

She looks over at me and starts laughing.  “They aren’t floating.  They’re on poles.”

I squint at her.  “I don’t see any poles.  All I see is dark air between them and the ground.”

She laughs even harder.  “That’s not dark air.  It’s dark trees.  The billboards are mounted on tall poles so you can see them over the tops of the trees.”

DUH!  Here’s your sign!

To the people of Georgia…we don’t have that problem either in Arizona.  The signs are mounted on regular height poles that you can see because there are no trees hiding them.  Our billboards do NOT float in the air and scare stupid people!

Okay, another crisis averted.  But we are now beginning the serious downtown Atlanta search for our hotel.  No problem…we got Garmin!  So I’m meticulously following Jill’s instructions as she politely tells me to turn right, turn left, turn right, turn left, make another left, and another, turn right, turn left…now we are officially LOST!  And, Auntie Em, I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore. 

To the people of Georgia…you got too many on/off ramps side-by-side…makes Garmin communication a bit unclear.  In Arizona, we like to do one at a time…they are usually sequential.  Just sayin…

So…now it’s after midnight and we are lost in Atlanta in what appears to be a very industrial part of town…you know, the kind of neighborhoods where they always take the kidnap victims so they can’t be heard screaming during their torture sessons?!  Yep.  The thing that keeps running through my mind is that they always say, “Don’t get in the running car.”  Well, we are already in it!  Against all rational logic, I’m beginning to worry about who might be hiding in the back seat!

Cheyenne gets out Siri and saves the day by getting Siri to straighten out the mess Me and Garmin have created.  Now we’re cooking with gas.  We are now in downtown Atlanta, in the heart of hotel row, searching for our hotel.

Siri says, “Take a right on John Portman, then take a left on Ted Turner.”  Okay, we do that.

After a series of similar commands, here is how the conversation goes…

I ask Cheyenne, “Are we on John Portman or Ted Turner?”

She replies, “Ted Turner.”

HUH?  “I thought we were on John Portman.”

“No, we’re on Ted Turner.”

“Well, how do we get to John Portman?”

About that time, we come to a cross-street named…you guessed it…”John Portman.”

I let out a cheer.  “Yeah, there it is.  Finally, John Portman.”

Cheyenne is laughing as she says, “We knew it had to be here somewhere.”

I reply, “It’s a hell of a note when you don’t know if you’re on John Portman or Ted Turner.”

As you can imagine, it digressed from there.  We were giggling so hard by the time we arrived at the hotel, from all our stupid John/Ted jokes, that we were crying and almost fell out of the truck when we opened the doors.

I guess it was one of those things where you really had to be there because when the Valet asked what was so funny and I replied, “I didn’t know if I was on John Portman or Ted Turner,” he just nodded and smiled like I was the village idiot.

Well, those are just a few of the fun moments we experienced on our trip to Atlanta.  Next time, ya’all’ll have to come with us.  And yes, I’m certain ya’all’ll is a real word (in the south)!

That’s my story, funny and frivolous, and I’m stickin’ to it.  Hang on tight now, ‘cuz we’re gonna go real, real fast!

Love ya,

Kayce

CAUTION…MEN (NOT) AT WORK.

Well, folks, it’s me…Kayce Lassiter…again.  LOL  I missed my last blog date and I apologize.  It seems like life has been trying to run me over lately.  But I’m still standing and fighting the good fight.  

So, what to blog about today?  Hmmm…well, my last blog was about my cross-country trip and ripping the steps out of the motor home.  Nope, can’t top that one this week, but I can add to it because I finished the trip and then took off on another road trip.  On my first trip, I hit 14 states in 18 days.  On the second one, I hit 10 states in 15 days.  So in the last 5 weeks, I have personally driven over 10,000 miles.  That’s about 9-10 months of driving under normal circumstances for me, which means I’m pooped and ready to stay home or fly for a while.  LOL

Okay, so I didn’t wreck any more motor homes and I didn’t wreck my own truck…Thank God!  But I will tell you about something I have witnessed across this entire country and that is road construction.  Road freaking construction…and one hell of a lot of it!!!  I’m telling you, people, I will never complain about Arizona roads again—not after having traveled on I-70 and I-80 through multiple states.  I never knew it was possible to travel a road that long and be in a construction zone the whole stinking way.  Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit…not the whole way…only every 10 to 50 miles…and that’s a lot of construction zones.  That part I’m not exaggerating.  If you figure the average number of miles between construction zones is about 30 miles on a stretch of about 900 miles, that’s over 30 construction zones.  And I’m thinking I’m being generous at 30 miles between them because I’m pretty sure there were 123 construction zones!  They started the minute we crossed over the Arizona line into New Mexico and ended the moment we pulled into the driveway in Pennsylvania.  This entire country is one huge construction zone!

So I’m thinking why is so much of America under construction?  The story I was given everywhere we went was snow.  Okay, I get it…snow can tear up roads.  But we have snow here in Arizona.  I drove through Flagstaff and the roads were lovely.  Hmmm…me smells a rat in the grain room!  So if snow isn’t the definitive answer, what is it?  We know it ain’t heat because we have the market cornered on heat here in the Phoenix valley.  Now what?  Rain maybe?  Okay, that explains some of the country, but not all of it.  Remember, I said the roads were bad the minute we left Arizona.  I don’t think New Mexico gets a lot more rain than Arizona.  So what’s their excuse?   I smell a conspiracy!

Well, I think I finally figured it out.  It’s money.  Taxes, to be specific.  The more roads you have torn up, the more taxes you need to collect for the construction.  And let me tell you…you people in Illinois are paying WAY too much in taxes because every road in your state is under construction!  Driving through Illinois remind me of an old Mr. Magoo cartoon…things crashing down around you and you don’t dare look up because if you do, you know you’re gonna die.  So you set the cruise control on 25 (because you can’t go any faster than that) and you close your eyes and let the tires follow the grooves in the road and hope you don’t crash into a hundred construction barrels. 

And, while we’re on the subject…what the hell ever happened to construction cones?  The cute little soft cones that squished up when you ran over them?  Why did we go to huge orange barrels the size of a freaking cow that will turn your truck into a crushed Tonka toy if you are a little too far to the right…or some genius sets the barrels too close together?  Is this a test?  Is it a     conspiracy?  Are we rats in a huge orange maze?

Okay, I have an idea to reduce the taxes.  We move all the orange construction barrels to create a huge playground…or maybe we melt them down and use them to build a huge orange plastic city next door to Chicago.  We allow each state 10 roads they can tear up in 3 spots each year…pick the worst spots and patch the rest (nicely)...not those crappy patches that leave a mountain in the road big enough to high-center your car or a hole big enough to swallow a Buick.  Oh, and they can only replace 3 bridges a year…not all of them every year.  Then we take those 4 road workers at each site that are leaning on their shovels watching the one guy work…you’ve seen ‘em, you know I’m right…and we make them daycare workers at the huge orange plastic city next door to Chicago at a quarter of their existing pay.  There are enough of them out there that we could position them shoulder to shoulder around the perimeter of the orange city and they could watch the entire city from where they are sitting.  They’ll never have to move a muscle to keep an eye on the kids in that city…they’ll love it!  Then we keep the one guy who’s actually working the shovel at each site and we double his pay so he’s getting what he’s worth and we put him in charge of the 10 roads and 3 sites that are under construction in each state.

Voile…better roads, less taxes, everyone doing what they love and are good at.  LOL  Anything else you’d like me to fix while I’m at it?  No?  Not just a little bit?

All right, I know I’m exaggerating, but you all know there is a grain of truth in this.  And I’ll tell you…if I never travel on Interstate 70 ever again as long as I live, it will be too soon!  That has to be the worst road in America…and tearing the whole thing up doesn’t seem to be helping, people!  When I traveled that road in the RV, we had to tie the cabinet doors together with bag ties to keep them from vibrating open.  We had pots and pans, coffee cups, and toilet paper falling on our heads the whole way…all 123 construction zones.

You have never lived until you’ve driven through Chicago in a 30 foot RV during rush hour with your head wrapped in toilet paper and a coffee cup hanging off one ear!

That’s my story, frustrating and fantastical, and I’m stickin’ to it.  Hold on tight now ‘cuz we’re gonna go real, real fast!

Love ya,

Kayce

P.S.  I'd love it if you all would stop by and visit with me tomorrow at 4 p.m. EST at our book release party on Facebook.  If you don't already have an invitation in your inbox, get on Facebook and ask to friend me.  I will accept your friend request and send you an invitation to the party page.  Hope to see you there!  The party starts at 10:30 a.m. EST and goes until 10:30 p.m. EST and there are a slew of fabulous authors giving away a pile of free books, gift cards, and swag.  Friend me and join us!

Holy Flying Vodka Bottles!!!

Hey there, how ya’all been?  Good, I hope!  I’m doing better now…now that Murphy has been evicted from our couch!  Okay, I know none of you have any idea what I’m babbling on about, so let me back up and fill you in on what’s happened.  I’m currently on an extended road trip from Arizona to Pennsylvania, and back again by way of the scenic route.  In short, I think we are going to hit about 25 states by the time we are done.  All right, maybe not quite that many…but close!

Anyway, this trip has been a real learning experience for me and the toughest part was learning to drive a 30’ motor home.  Driving 5000 miles isn’t a problem.  Staying away from home for 3 weeks isn’t a problem.  Traveling with a woman I’ve met only once before isn’t a problem.  But getting this stinking house on wheels down the road seems to be a life-altering challenge.  I kept thinking if others could do it, I can.  But I might have been wrong.  LOL

Okay, here’s the deal.  Within the first week on the road, I’d broken 2 pairs of reading glasses and a pair of flip flops.  Then I broke the motor home.  Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself here.  Remember Stupid Girl—my alter-ego that does all the stupid crap…or at least takes the wrap for it?  Well, she’s along on the trip too.  I tried to make her stay at home, but the bitch jumped in the RV and refused to get out…so I had no choice but to take her along.  Who knew she was going to insist on driving?!  And who knew she'd invited Murphy to tag along too.

Well, the second or third night out, we pulled into a gas station in Oklahoma (with Stupid Girl behind the wheel).  We had been either behind or ahead of the tornadoes the entire way through Texas and Oklahoma, so she was a little on edge and still trying to get the hang of missing curbs.  Well, there was this stupid ‘ol curb at the gas station…one of those things that sticks way out in everybody’s way for no logical reason at all and serving no purpose?  Yeah…you got it…Stupid Girl hit the damn thing and the RV momentarily became airborne.  Woo Hoo!  Who knew she’d need a pilot’s license to drive the damn thing?!  We all got out and walked around the RV and looked it over and all was well…only a little curb, nothing damaged, we’re good.  We get gas and we head on down the road.  It was a huge relief to finally get to the RV park without having the RV picked up and blown into Kansas like a flying cow.  So we parked and got out, hooked up the utilities, and then noticed one of the 4 tires on the back was flat as a pancake.  Crap!  Stupid Girl!  So we call the RV rental place and they dispatch a fix-it guy to the RV park.  I’m imagining a long night going from place to place trying to get the tire fixed.  But we lucked out.  We got a smart guy who realized the absence of a hubcap on that wheel meant the valve extender thingies were hanging outside the rim.  So when Stupid Girl hit the curb, she took a little chip out of the rubber valve and all the stinking air leaked out.  Voile…flat!  So our clever fix-it guy just pulled the valve extender off, put air in the tire, and we were good as new.  Yeah for smart fix-it guys!

 (smart fix-it guy)

Now, you might think that was the extent of Stupid Girl’s idiocy…but you would be dead wrong.  She got us to Pennsylvania right on schedule and we picked up our third passenger and set about visiting family.  Now, anyone who has ever driven in Pennsylvania knows the roads this time of year are either crap or under construction.  They are rutted and torn up everywhere.  It’s a mess!  So here comes Stupid Girl still learning to drive a 30’ RV into a town with teeny tiny narrow streets that go up hills and down hills and the straight roads only have 6 curves per half mile.  Holy hell…we need Batman to drive these roads and all we’ve got is Stupid Girl.

So…first couple of days she does good.  She makes every turn, doesn’t hit anything going forward or backward, and life is good.  Then we head to the park for a picnic and this is where Stupid Girl really earns her reputation.  We make it down the incline on a very rutted dirt road into the park just fine.  No problem.  Then it’s time to go home.  Uh-Oh!  Going down the incline wasn’t a problem…crawl and take the bumps very slow.  Going up is a different story because you have to go at least fast enough to maintain upward motion.  So she is doing good until we come to the big hole where the entire RV seems to be swallowed up and spit out like we’d fallen into the belly of a whale.  The motion causes all of the upper cupboard doors in the RV to fly open and the little gremlins that were hiding in the cupboards started throwing everything across the RV.  This is where the flying vodka comes in.  Now…just to be clear…no one had had a drop to drink.  This was a totally teetotaler picnic.  The vodka was just inappropriately stored in an upper cupboard and the little gremlin living in that cupboard had a terrific arm.  Because he hurled the damn vodka bottle across the interior of the RV.  Stupid Girl heard the pans hit the floor and the horrific thud of the vodka bottle.  So she stopped dead on the incline which now looked like Mount Everest!

Everyone else in the RV scrambled to make sure no one had been hit and to retrieve all of the projectiles from the floor and stow them safely in the lower cupboards.  When everything was once again stowed, Stupid Girl was still shaking from the commotion that had scared her half out of her wits.  So when she started to again pull out of the park and onto the teeny tiny little street made for mice pulling garden carts, she didn’t see the curb on the passenger side.  In her defense, she was sitting with the front end pointed in the air and she was shook up from the near-miss with the flying Smirnoff.  So imagine her surprise when she hears the bottom of the RV scrape the curb!  Maybe it only scraped the bottom, huh?  Noooo.  Then someone says, “I think you caught a post.”  Noooo!!!  Okay, let’s stop right where we are and let’s get out and see what happened.

It is not pretty.  We get out and look and there we are…we are off the curb and there are no steps to get into the RV.  Huh?  That’s not right.  What’s all that metal crap hanging down under the RV?  Oh crap…those are the steps?  Maybe we can just straighten them out, but first we gotta get out of the road.  So Stupid Girl jumps back in the RV and pulls it straight across the highway onto a side street where we can better assess the damages.  Then we get out again and this time we notice the odor.  Definitely not good!  Sewage is now spilling from the bottom of the RV onto the street.  I think I actually recognized last night’s dinner as it floated past us on the street.  We stared, dumbfounded, as our black water tank emptied itself on the streets of Wrightsville, Pennsylvania.  Residents of Wrightsville…we are soooo sorry!

Now what?  Let’s open the door and see how badly damaged the steps are.   No…let’s not!  We open the door and there is a 2’x2’ hole in the floor.  Where there used to be steps inside the entry door, there is now a drop to the pavement.  That’s not good.  Oh, and under the steps…that’s where the 2 house batteries are stored.  We are screwed!  We have a 2 foot hole where our steps used to be, the batteries are wedged in sideways about 6 inches off the pavement, sewage is pouring out of our black water tank, and the broken pipe is hanging about 3 inches off the ground.  Holy Crap!

But, Thank God, we are not without resources.  We have a wonderful friend named Debbie who manages to come up with a pair of pliers and some wire.  She fearlessly crawls under the RV and manages to wire the pipe up so we have a good 6 inches of clearance now.  Yeah, what a woman!  We have called every RV repair shop in the county and no one is willing to come out and look at it.  Did I mention this all happened at 4pm on a Friday afternoon?  Well, of course it did…because Stupid Girl was driving!!!

Long story short, we limp back to our camp in the next town over where my friend’s 3 wonderful, amazing, resourceful brothers all show up with blow torches and hazmat suits…okay, maybe a slight exaggeration.  But they did show up with tools and know-how and they took the steps out, found the backup shutoff valve for the black water tank, put a temporary patch over the 2 foot hole in the floor of the RV, and straightened the door out enough that we could open it in case of a real emergency.  Then the next morning we make more phone calls and find a wonderful repair guy in Dover, PA who comes up with an ingenious temporary way to put another fitting on the black water tank so we can use the toilet and dump it at the parks.  Yeah again for smart fix-it guys and good family!!!

          (those were our steps)          

 (that's where the steps used to be)

So how, you ask, are we doing now?  Well, we can’t use the door so we have to enter/exit the RV through the cab by climbing over the seats.  But we can use the toilet.  Yeah!!!  We have to crawl under the RV to dump it and often have to get creative on where/how to park so the drain tube will reach, but we’re getting pretty good at that.  Stupid Girl seems to have finally figured out how to miss the curbs, so life’s been pretty good for a few days.  Now we just have to deal with the rental place when we return the unit.  Of course, we have been good doobies and kept them appraised of the events and progress, but I’m certain they are sitting there holding their breath and expecting Stupid Girl to return their RV as a convertible.  It could happen, ya know.  We have 3 more days to go, so cross your fingers that Stupid Girl is done being…well, STUPID.

That’s my story, stupid and stinky, and I’m stickin’ to it. Hold on tight now ‘cuz we’re gonna go real, real fast.......(and Stupid Girl is driving)!

Love ya,

Kayce

(Thanks to Peg for the pictures...check out some of her pics and quotes on Facebook at "Humans I Meet".)