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Tennessee has taken a no holds barred approach to construction, blasting through what appear to be small hills that could have easily been built over (from my non-expert eye) which has created wonderful views of rock strata that would normally be obscured by grass.  Tennessee’s geology is light on monoliths leading to a step-wise appearance to the rock face which explains the number of rock warning signs.  These fall into three categories which I think go in increasing severity:

  • Watch for fallen rocks
  • Watch for falling rocks
  • Falling rocks

The determinism of the last is a bit scary but after seeing what appeared to be little boulder families trying to cross the road I learned the resignation of the safety officer resigned to the inevitabilities of the hubris of construction.

Another road attraction was driving through Knoxville and seeing the glorious golden sunsphere.

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As majestic as The Simpsons said it was.

I really knew nothing about Danakin/Daniel Lackey before meeting him except that he was the friend of Bakkster/Andrew and his wife was… unenthusiastic about the prospect of having a strange man in the house.  I think Andrew’s encomium helped overcome this and the bond was sealed when I called her a “smelly pirate hooker” at dinner.

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Dan and Jill, no longer fearful of my presence (or good acting)

They were polite enough to let me do three loads of laundry and my efforts to separate the whites from coloreds came easily as I was in the South *rimshot*.  We broke the ice watching back episodes of ESPN’s Cheap Seats which I think is a show offered on what’s called a television.  It’s like a computer monitor except that you have a much narrower choice of options and the quality is slightly above that of YouTube.  Additionally, new content appears to be generated at specific times rather than continuously and the action is disrupted by 2 minute pop-up ads 5-7 times an hour.  It was fascinating.

Clarksville had recently flooded and on our way to dinner we surveyed the damage before eating  at a local brew pub.  The meal was fine but the restaurant hosted quite possibly the worst restroom I’ve ever used.  There was a 1.5″ gap between the stall door frame and the wall and urinals were situated such that just about everyone using one got to see my junk.  Also, the toilet was mis-seated so when a man of my… carriage sat on it water slowly leaked out the bottom resulting in a pants stain that made it look like I lost a rodeo competition to a fire hose.  My shirt tail was long enough to largely cover this but without the shaping power of my belt, I looked like a transvestite pear in a house dress.  Hazaa!

My pants were largely dry by the end of The Amazing Race which we re-wetted by Jill’s tears at her sadness when the gay brothers beat out the cowboys to the finish.  I faded off to sleep after more “television” this time by monitoring British automobile idiosyncratically on Top Gear.  This TV stuff can be quite entertaining, I hope it catches on.

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Today was my first day where I drove more than 500 miles and it was… dull.  The most common feature of the route were the omnipresent pro-life billboards.  There were three main billboard themes:

  • The billboard that attempts to prove the life of the fetus “abortion stops a beating heart”
  • The billboard that gives alternatives “pregnant and scared?  Call us.”
  • The billboard that tries to establish the commonality of abortion “every 92 seconds, someone has an abortion”

The last was my favorite as three different figures were presented: one every 20 seconds, 3200 a day, and 1.3 million a year.  I have no strong view of using billboards as a way to sway the public but at least get your facts straight as it takes a good bit of fudging to get these numbers to jive.  The billboards started affecting my driving as clouds started to look like little fetuses.  These billboards contrasted strongly with two other types: one from a man offering cheap vasectomies and this one:

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I probably should have cropped it. Oh well.

Driving into Tampa was nice as it had a legitimate skyline and I hit it as the sun was setting but I failed to be adequately prepared with camera in hand to capture it.  The person I knew in the area was Bob Tyler/Leezard:

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Florida seems like a bad place for beards

My actual host was a fellow named Mason/Earle Johnson who was a student of classics excited that he’d just scored a 1916 textbook on the topic which included lovely anachronisms as the dominion of Canada and Rhodesia.

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The Earle of Tampa

We went to Steak ‘n’ Shake after an hour or so of conversation that was more a delicate arrangement of non-sequitors and I met Luis Bishop Lopez whom everyone calls “Bishop”, a name further abbreviated by his family to “Bish”.  He’s owed me 12 dollars for about 8 months now and I was delighted to receive it.  I’ve not included a picture as he’s one of those people that perpetually poses and I simply didn’t have the patience to wait for something more candid.  The restaurant was as mediocre as I remembered from Columbus except for the part where I couldn’t safely differentiate the smell of chili from the server’s odor.  I think it was the chili, I really hope it was the chili.

After returning to Mason’s, his dog Daisy took a fancy to my socks and spent 40 minutes attempting to relieve me of them.  I found this funny until I realized that my sock supply was quite finite while on the road and that they are a precious resource.

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Daisy, the Hellion

The evening wound down over a game of Dominion that appeared to be a four-way game of solitaire with a National Geographic documentary on Shark Mountain (which is not a mountain made of sharks) running in the background.

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Virginia’s road signage is a strange beast.  When crossing through more rural areas there seem to be a lot of reminder signs like “two way traffic on this road” and a secondary set of “No Passing Zone” signs in areas without dashed center lines.  Additionally, there seemed to be a lot of signs warning about upcoming traffic control devices like warning signs for stop signs as well as signs for traffic lights even when the sign and the control device were both say on the downward side of hill.  This may be an attempt to keep the department of Public Works busy, but I hear that’s done by planting poppies in the median and then tilling and replanting them each year.

Entering West Virginia proved much more aesthetically pleasing than I thought.  Having seen Pennsylvania’s coal regions, I thought West Virginia’s would be the same but there was a marked lack of windblast hellscape.  Turns out that West Virginia merely does a better job of hiding it.  My host in WV was Chris Dodds/LiquidChicken and I got to meet his wife who sadly was not the chosen subject of the only well-lit, reasonably composed picture I got of her.

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Apparently the cup is more compelling than I thought.

Chris was the first person I met that I didn’t really know much about except for rough information about his past.

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LiquidChicken

I’d never heard him talk and the combination of intelligence and an Oklahoma accent was new to me.  But, as I learned in college, class is a far bigger determiner of mannerisms than region or ethnicity.  Proof:

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iPhones: Bringing 20 somethings together since 2007.

We ate dinner at O’Charlies, a presentable chain that was the first of many locations I found to have Diet Mountain Dew on tap.  I’ve almost never encountered this in a restaurant setting and failed to pace myself for the fact that I’d eventually need to use a bathroom that wasn’t mine.  Chris’s has three entrances so I felt like I was going into lockdown in a panic room.  The urgency was exacerbated by him initially giving me directions to his bathroom that ended in a coat closet.  He nearly became the owner of a brown coat.

My next stop was in Florida which was a bit more than I could safely drive in a night and since few of the hotel billboards in the Carolina’s seem to list price, I had to do the safest thing I could: Drive past a sign for an upcoming hotel complex, go to the mobile version of hotels.com to check prices and stop at the first one under 50 dollars that offered free wifi.  I went through this cycle three times before stopping at 1 AM at a Rodeway Inn which was staffed entirely by Indian Americans and a slightly more presentable version of the Simpson’s crazy cat lady.  The web access was insufferable; 300kbps should not qualify as “High Speed”.

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Chris gave me a tour of the base and I took very few pictures except for a few of him driving.  This a was an oversight on my part as for some reason I thought that a 17-40mm lens would be the right one despite everything I wanted to capture being hundreds of feet away.

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10 and 2... with military precision.

We then rocked the cleanest Chinese Buffet I’d ever seen and I peppered him with questions about dealing with 200′ of lake effect snow in his childhood home of Michigan.  Apparently, one escapes from a house with snow above its roof by clearing a working space with successive pots of boiling water.  Good to know.  I departed from Langley after capturing a wicked bumper sticker and headed for MONDO’s house in Roanoke.

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"I'm not gay, I just really love rainbows"

Doug Bowser/MONDO’s house is set in the foothills of Roanoke and he insists his town is dull as all get-0ut as proven by their biggest attraction being a giant fluorescent star.  This introductory palaver was held at a local restaurant whose bloomin’ onion was served with thousand island dressing rather than horseradish dip and that considered key lime an appropriate flavor for an after dinner mint; I’m fine with 1/2 of those things.  We left for the star after I seemingly inspired terror in his children who I don’t think spoke more than 5 words in my presence.  If only I could have this effect on Cub Scouts.  I received a tour of Roanoke which apparently consists of an art house that looked like the illegitimate child of a low polygon count sea urchin and the Sydney Opera House, hospital buildings, and “The Star”.

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I shit you not; this a tonemapped HDR across 8 stops. You still can't make anything out.

The star had a high hedge setup surrounding it that made it look like it was the draw-limit for a video game.  That if one stepped beyond it, one would noclip, or alternatively appear in the distance as a giant version of oneself.

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The difference in light temperature between star and cityscape emphasizes the end-of-the-world-ness.

Most of the tourists cleared out and I was able to get a nice panoramic of Roanoke and a keen HDR of the city.  I learned long ago that most cities look far more impressive as night panoramas than their illuminated counterparts.

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Flickr threw up if I uploaded something over 40k pixels across, so I scaled this down to 30.

I also got a shot of Doug in what I’d call intrigue mode and what he’d call creepy old guy mode.

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Man of mystery or figure of terror? Only the courts can decide.

We retired to the estate that I will call Mondovania and watched TV of the form “The world’s <superlative> <adjective> <noun>”, something I’ve not done in quite some time.  Doug’s much more expressive in person than I thought he’d be with a sense of humor, timing, and perspicacity he rarely can show show in-game.  If there’s ever a Skype Video plugin for TF2, he should use it.  We retired as the clock struck 2:30 AM and my pano finished cranking.  I was given a luxurious queen-size bed but forgot to ask for a map about it and set up camp in one corner, watching the other for signal fires that would indicate incoming artillery fire from the headboard.

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20100503-1-InterroLoopAndrew, my first host. Awesome taste in hats.

Andrew’s couch was sufficiently comfortable that my rugged determination prevented his bay window from rousing me at the crack of 8.  He’s close to the NSA headquarters (or the one we’re allowed to know about), so we shot over to meet Ken Bateman/NovaDenizen at “the parking lot”.  This was a surprisingly difficult task as there’s no real signage for Museum vs. MiniTruth.  Our first three passes were towards the headquarters rather than the museum and each time we dropped off some piece of contraband after passing successive signs starting with our cell phones, then cameras, then our dignity as we learned that the NSA strategically hid their museum behind some planes.

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I took a picture of an awesome spy plane which due to cloaking, looks like this one.

I also learned that working for the government wasn’t as glamorous as I thought.

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Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

Arriving at the actual museum, we met up with a docent the staff referred to as “General” and who probably cracked codes for Washington.

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The "General". In another picture, he looks like diabeetus docent.

He asked us what we wanted to see, but as with most tour guides, he showed us what he knew, which largely consisted of US cryptology through the 1960s.  I asked about steganography (hidden writing) and he kept making “if I showed you I’d have to kill you” references.  At one point he brought up the Global Consciousness Project and he went from friend to foe.  Such unmitigated woo as the Princeton eggs lack a mechanism, rigor, and grounding.  I refused to cede the point and Ken suggested to me that I may have been IRL trolled.

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"YOU GOT TROLLED, TERRY"

The guide again hit my skeptic nerve when he indicated the complexity of DNA was proof of a creator.  DNA isn’t a code, it’s a recipe.  With a code and an encryption scheme, one can go from codetext to plaintext and back.  There is no such option with a recipe; as one can’t determine the exact ingredients and process of a cake by looking at it, one can’t determine a genome strictly from the phenotype.  Ken and I noted that the displays had calibration stickers on them (which he’s looking at above) and during this discussion we somehow picked up a barnacle.

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Das Barn

His opening question was “so what was your first computer” which sounds like what would happen if we were being picked up by a gay assembly code programmer.  We lost him in the gift shop after he asked us about bible codes and we traded his presence for a stereotype that reminded Nova of the art style of TF2.

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I'd say more Monty Python than CF Leyendecker

I had a delightful dinner with the two and departed for Langley Air Force Base.  The Virginia sunset between tree breaks was fiery and I stopped to capture it.

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4 stop tonemapped HDR of sunset.

I called my next host, realizing this was the first time I’d actually heard him, and he guided me into Langley Air Force Base.

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Guess where?

Chris/Captain Obvious is a mental health professional for the air force with a 8-5 job and weekends off which is probably the most immasculating combination in the eyes of more “hardcore” service members from other branches, I think he’s swell.  He largely works with people dealing with stress, and PTSD, which makes sense when servicing people who work in intelligence. Additionally, he makes fine nachos.

We played some TF2 which was difficult as my laptop was perched on a night stand with a web-like net of cables connecting it and under the commandment of “Thou shalt not wake the neighbors”, demand I rarely have to worry about otherwise.  The night ended with Chris refusing to read me a bedtime story. :-(

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Sunday was a marathon of fun as there were two Magic tournaments followed by a barbecue. This was followed by frantic packing for my big loop. There were a few big chunks of stuff I brought:

  • Week of clothing
  • Spring camping equipment (for staying in parks in the South)
  • Winter camping equipment (for staying in parks in the icy North)
  • Computer stuff (two laptops, I’m cool)
  • Photography equipment
  • Emergency food, 60 bottles of water, emergency car equipment
  • 4 sources of GPS data

My car looked like it was packed by a hybrid right-wing survivalist/wildlife photographer.  I tried something new, packing each of the above things into separate Rubbermaid bins and bringing 3 clothing bags: 1 night bag, 1 for clean clothing, and 1 for dirty clothing.  I did a final once-over of the car, trying to estimate how much more paint I’d lose from my front bumper and left for the glories of America.

Tracking:  https://www.suburbanadventure.com/interroloop-location/ I’ll update the map when I hit a new location and a few other times.  The application that provides information must run in the foreground which decimates the iPhone’s tiny battery.

Route:

Click for the full-sized version.

Most of the stops are one of three things:

  1. Someone I know
  2. A place significant in the history of America’s nuclear history
  3. A national park

The total length is a little under 12000 miles.  I’ll probably need to have an oil change around stops 16 and 34.  The route’ll change as I find things I can see and discover other things I can’t.