First Day's Journey

So, it's been an exciting day.  I bought a inter-department national parks pass, which gives me access (for a year) to all national parks and recreation areas, I toured most of a very scenic national park in Virginia, and I changed a flat tire.

Yes, the first marvelous day of journeying was marked by a flat tire.  Fortunately, a generous benefactor has decided to gift me some dough for a set of new tires, as it's looking like I'll need to get them replaced tomorrow. (1 tire's bad, you need 2, and they sell you the 4th for free, and they're all old, so you should just suck it up and buy them etc. etc.)  Happy day after Father's Day!

But, there is some good news in it all; I stayed on my diet.  For lunch, before leaving home, I had my last frozen meal for awhile, the Steak & Cheese Melt.  I will miss you, microwaves and freezers.

For snack, I had one of these South Beach diet bars that I picked up that are equivalent to a Nutrisystem snack.  Sorry, no new pictures tonight because dealing with sorting everything on the camera is a bit much for me, at the moment.

Dinner consisted of some cauliflower (vegetable), a bag of BBQ Soy Chips and 2 South Beach bars (about equivalent to a Nutrisystem Dinner.  This was shortly after the tire change, when I was dealing with the fact that I was about 50 miles from anywhere and I was completely out of cell range, so I had to pick a destination from good old analog maps and assume there'd be an appropriate store there.

Here's some fun: I hadn't bought bug spray, because I figured I'd pick some up at the first park store I stopped at.  Turns out, I hit that flat well before that ever came to be.  While I was changing the flat, around 45-50 cars passed me, and one stopped pretty early on (early enough that I hadn't fully appreciated my bugspray error) and offered to help.  As changing a tire is a manly thing meant to be done by one person, I, of course, refused assistance and proceeded to jack up the car.  as I got to the point where I thought I could take the tire off, I began intermittently trying to wave down a car to borrow some bug spray.

Now, keep in mind, my trunk was full of shit, and it all had to go on the road behind the car and in the back seat to get to the spare tire.  So it was clear that I was a person in some distress, and I wasn't just frantically waving my arms 'hello'.  many people sped up at the sight, and the one or two who started to slow immediately accelerated away when I started to walk towards them.  I had one that stayed still long enough for me to reach the passenger window, only to realize that they were two old people staring at me with abject terror, who had merely been waiting for a the people coming the other way to pass.  Those bastards nearly took my foot.

As I was putting the first nuts on the spare, a nice gentleman with his family stopped when I flagged them down.  I'm terrible with accents, and I thought the gentleman sounded middle-eastern, but I couldn't be certain.  The driver and another man, who I'd assume was either his father or his wife's father, exited the car, and gladly lent me a bottle of bug juice to spray myself.  While I was juicing, I earned curious looks from the kids in the back of the minivan, clearly fascinated by the fat, sweaty man with all the junk strewn by the side of the road.  The gentleman went so far as to give me a bug spray wipe in a foil packet, in case I needed some more bugspray later.  This is the cheesiest story I have ever told, but it really did make me feel better about humanity.  I wish I'd gotten the gentleman's name, but I'll put up a more detailed (location-wise) account of this when I get a chance in the near future, in the hopes of making contact with him.

I finished tightening the bolts on the spare, hopped in the car, and drove off for dinner and my evening resting stop, to wait for the store to open at 7am so I can get me some tires (or maybe just get this one repaired).  Now, I'm going to try and get comfortable in the driver's seat, turn off the car, and go to sleep.

aaand now a cop's staring at me, signing off and blogging more tomorrow.