2017/05/17
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Wednesday, May 17, 2017 (#137)
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writed by Woozle
Tuesday 5/16
So... we drove up to Asheville on Tuesday to pick up Zander from Warren Wilson for the summer. We usually do these trips in one day – drive up, grab Z, get lunch, head back (or if we're bringing him there instead of bringing him home: drive up, eat lunch, drop off Z, head back) – but this time we decided to drive up the day before and stay overnight, so we could (by request) eat breakfast at the Waffle House. Benjamin had been cleared in advance for missing a day of school on Wednesday.
So we (the hypertwins) did our usual Tuesday stuff, including a very inconveniently-timed appointment with my electrologist, did the last minute packing for ourselves and Benjamin, then drove to B's school to pick him up (and only arrived about 2 minutes later than usual) and headed straight to Asheville had to go back home because of stuff that had inevitably been forgotten.
The drive up was largely uneventful, and the only picture I took was this one (right side of the page) of me waiting outside Gladfelter (at WW) for the rest of the gang to refill their zillion water bottles, and showing how completely I still fail at girling despite 43 weeks of HRT (but who's counting).
Having picked up Zander (and water), we then checked in at the hotel, got most of the stuff out of the car (except, apparently, my laptop -- which was not stolen overnight, despite the car being left unlocked) then drove off down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Asiana Grand Buffet (somewhere I have earlier photos of this) for dinner, as is our ancient and venerated ritual since 2015, then back to the hotel, collapse, and fall asleep to the sound of Zander playing D&D with his buds via laptop.
At some point after picking up Z, I noticed a sort of up-and-down feeling in the car when accelerating and some vibration at higher speeds, and the thought in my head was basically "hmm, we'll need to get that checked out... I'll have to pay attention to this so I know how to describe it... don't want to say anything, though, because Harena doesn't need more stress." I was going on the assumption that it was mechanical – somewhere in the drive-linkage – and any attempt to investigate it would delay our return by at least a day (which would have been a problem, because B did need to get back to school on Thursday).
Wednesday 5/17
For some reason, I started madly taking photos on Wednesday.
We pretty much always stay at this hotel:
Their free breakfast isn't worth much, but it's within easy walking distance of (and on the same side of NC-70, which is 5 lanes and rather busy, as) the local Waffle House, and also substantially cheaper than the Holiday Inn just up the hill. (The internet is frequently iffy, but we have enough cell bandwidth for that not to really matter.)
So, once everyone was awake, we walked up to the Waffle House:
...and we had an enjoyable breakfast:
...and then we walked back:
...and then we packed up and checked out of the hotel (checkout time 11:00) and drove back to WW to help Z finish packing up all of his stuff (checkout time 1:00) and wodging it into already-overcrowded Kestracel Weiss for transportation back home.
Here are a couple of bumper-sticker collections we saw on the way out:
