With a couple hundred before our next turn, we decided to kill a few listless hours with one of the books on tape our friends had given us for the trip. I have listen to books on tape a few times before and I think that, in my case anyway, it is entirely unsafe for highway travel. I get so caught up in the stories that I loose track of where I am and where I intend to go. Apparently, so does Naomi. We weren't even a few minutes into the tape, a James Patterson thriller, before we became so engrossed in the plot of who killed who for what, that we missed our exit, and the next dozen before we realized our error, and spent the better part of 2 hours getting back on track.
Needless to say, we didn't make it as far we would have liked for our first day on the road. In fact, we didn't even make it out of California, stopping instead at a small town right on CA/NV boarder called Needles. Oh yes, Needles.
Nothing more than a collection of mobile homes, a motel 6 and a Denny's, Needles is set in a dust bowl at the tail end of the Death Valley Desert plains where, upon our arrival at 11:30 at night, it was still almost 100 degrees and seemed to be heating up. While checking in, I asked the motel clerk, who looked like she'd seen a needle or two herself, what people did around here for fun. She looked at me as if she wasn't sure what the word fun meant.
"Uh, well," she finally offered, "there's a Denny's down the road, people go there sometimes."
As Bill Bryson as apt to do in this type of situation, I came up wit a couple slogans the town might want to consider in any new tourism ad campaigns :
Needles: because you'll want to prick yourself with one to make sure you still alive... and not in hell.
Needles: you want em', we got em'!
Needles: because Snaketown, Ghostville, or Monsterland doesn't quite invoke enough terror in visiting young children.
Feel free to add your own...
2 comments:
needles to say, you made it out alive!
yes! More, more.
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