Day 27 - North Manchester to Auburn

As soon as I sat down at the table, downstairs in the Bed and Breakfast, a kid of about nine years old strode up to the end of the table and said, "Okay. It's my job to be the entertainment for the guests, so I guess I'll just get right down to it. This is a lego rocket ship I made." He plonked a plastic doodad about the size of a sandwich on the table. "Here's where the pilot sits; you can see the hatch opens and closes. I needed some lights, and this was the only spot I could find, so here's a red one, and a blue one..." I was charmed! But before I could have a real conversation, his momma called him back into the kitchen.

One plate of scrambled eggs later, I settled my bill and was on my way north out of town. The weather was even warmer than yesterday.

"Snuff" kept me happily occupied as I pedaled along and took pictures of neat things. The whole subplot with Vimes' son learning about animal poop was hilarious!

Check out this awesome use of roofing tiles:


Interesting ideas about zoning here. This is a big ol' graveyard acting as the front lawn of a high school.


Check out this sign!


I love the little sailor hat! I looked all around as I rode through but didn't catch any turtles out.

And the last picture for today, taken just as I was finishing up "Snuff":


I could have taken a more direct route to Auburn, but I just had to make a special detour to catch that road sign! It would have been funny to make a journal entry titled "Garrett relaxing in Garrett", but there were no motels in the town. Bah!

Plenty to choose from in Auburn, though. I checked in just in time to catch dinner at a nearby restaurant, and then, WHACK! The sleepies got me.

Day 28 - Auburn to Bryan, Ohio

I didn't sleep well. I wanted to book two days, but I was so far behind it was hard to justify. I decided to compromise by riding only 30 miles, dividing the distance between Bryan and Toledo. Toledo was a big enough city that I could probably find a rental car company that didn't charge something ridiculous.

Instead of leaping right onto the bike like usual, I sat around in the motel lobby catching up with my email and dumping out a lot of notes about the previous three days, which I hadn't had time to turn into journal entries. I'd forgotten how easily the computer distracts me. Whooosh! Three hours gone. I threw my geek equipment into the backpack and saddled up.

To save time, I decided to minimize my stops and just keep on' pedalin'. I started a new audiobook, the first in the "Pip and Flinx" series of classic sci-fi novels called "For Love Of Mother Not". It had a decent beginning, but then chapter 3 came along, and I was yanked out of the main narrative to get a steaming pile of expository dialogue from the villain, like a racehorse pulling up short to move its bowels halfway through the first lap of a race. "Whooaaaah, hold on, I gotta do this right now, sorry..." (Splaaaaaat)

Actually it would have been okay, but it was so clumsy. Most of the chapter was a collection of inner monologues, and they were so plot-ex-machina that they could have doubled as the voiceover for a movie trailer. "IN A WORLD WHERE SCIENCE AND MORALS COLLIDE... WE ARE A ROGUE BAND OF MISFITS... CHALLENGING THE EMPIRE..."

It was so execrable that I paused the book and pedaled in silence for a while, trying to decide if I should just cut my losses and delete the whole Pip and Flinx series from my iPod, never to return. "On the other hand, this book is so old, and it's written for such a young audience, that maybe these ugly, overexposed tropes are an accidental exception, and the rest of the book is still pretty good. After all, chapters 1 and 2 were decent, and the series is beloved by fans... Okay, I'll give it another chance."

So I continued, with chapter 4, and listened with a question suspended in my mind: What if chapter 3 had never happened? What if we didn't have the central mystery of the book and the main character rudely explained and spoiled only a few pages in, and were instead left to struggle with the mystery as Pip appeared, and then the kidnappers, and then the scientists and the agents? Putting it together from clues, with the narrator's perspective stuck entirely on Flinx? I went all the way to the end of the book with that question, and realized that with only minor editing, it would have gone from a mediocre book to an excellent book just by obliterating chapter 3.

Dammit!

But! I got this awesome photo of another state line:


By the time I rolled into Bryan, it was dark and cold. I ate a big meal in the restaurant adjacent to the motel, and booked two nights, so I could spend the next full day resting my legs and editing photographs. In the evening I felt like taking my brain off the hook with a big dose of pop culture, so I downloaded a heap of Weird Al videos, and swapped links to old songs with Erika on youtube, reminiscing about the 90's music scene and our evolving tastes and childhoods.

This video is awesome: CLICK IT, YO!

The price of digital content is being driven inexorably down, and I think that's a good thing. Even if it may cost tens of millions to make a feature film, the cost should go down because the method of delivery is being stripped of value. What is that method of delivery, if you include yourself in the equation? You sit in a room, looking at a screen, passively. You do not move, you do not create art, you do not give your opinions. You get no exercise, you get no interaction with another human. This should be cheap. This should be seen as cheap. A culture where this is made cheap will gravitate to participation and engagement.