Target Shopping

Comstock Covered BridgeWe’ve got an old Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner that is starting to show it’s age. All the tools are cracked and it isn’t picking up stuff well even after a bag change. Plus that sucker is loud, so we went out today to get Donna a nice new fangled bag-less picker upper. Target had a couple in this week’s ad that looked promising.

After the blue law mandated 1:30 PM opening we headed out to Target. Allow me to interject an observation from my cubicle neighbor Jim:

Here in the Bible Belt don’t you find it odd that the blue laws will allow you to go into a grocery store on Sunday morning and buy a 6-pack of beer, but you cannot enter a book store and buy a Bible?

There were three to choose at the $129 price point, a Bissell, a Hoover and a Eureka. I pulled them off the shelf one by one and Donna pushed them around a bit, lifted them and generally got a feel for which one she liked the best. She liked the Hover the best, for a couple reasons, but the auto retractable cord thingie sent it over the top. As a bonus the price tag on the shelf said you got a $20 gift card with it’s purchase.

We had one final request, what did this puppy sound like? We looked all over for an outlet, but couldn’t find one. We corralled a sales team member and asked where we could plug it in. His reply was that he didn’t think they were allowed to do that. We insisted and he called on his walkie talkie to a higher up team member and got the same answer, can’t do it. What’s up with that? I’m sure a legal department team member had something to do with that rule. I was briefly temped to roll the display vacuum over to the TV section and plug it in, but decided to just buy it. If it turned out to be louder than our current unit (highly unlikely) we’d just bring it back.

When we got to the check out it rang up as 129 + tax. No gift card mention. We pointed it out to the cashier team member and she proceeded to thumb through the flyer. In that ad the $20 gift card was shown with a $169 vacuum. We told her that the card on the shelf said this one got a card as well. So she called over a higher up team member, whose response was the gift card automatically shows up, if it doesn’t, no gift card. We asked her to come with us to the shelf and we would show her and her response was, “I can’t leave the front.” Our response was, “Fine, we don’t want this vacuum.” I hit cancel on the credit card thing and we walked away.

Donna said, “Come on, let’s go back and look.” We did and sure enough we hadn’t imagined the $20 Gift Card sign. Trouble was that offer expired 7/7 (yesterday.) Some one had obviously forgotten to remove the promo shelf tag. Fifteen, twenty years ago the retailer would have apologized for the confusion, sold us the vacuum and given us the Gift Card. Now they’d rather just do without the sale and jeopardize future purchases. Sigh.

We came home and I bought the same item from Amazon for $95, no tax and free shipping. Hoover U5507-900

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 264

Aiken

Concord, NC to Aiken, SC. We managed to ride with the top down until we got to Chesterfield, SC to visit Donna’s cousin Laurie and her husband Ted. When we left them at around 11:00 it was already over 90º. After passing through a rain shower with the cloud cover still intact we finished the last 30 miles with it down again. It sure is fun visiting places, but it is great to be back home. Some trip notes:

  1. When I got in the car this morning the odometer read 62005 for the 3rd milestone of the trip, didn’t notice it last night when we parked.
  2. Total mileage for the trip: 2,637.4 for an average of 240 miles per day. Even though it didn’t move at all for a day and a half in DC and our hotel in CT was only 6 miles from the house.
  3. I filled up with gas 11 times or about once a day. The highest price paid for gas was $3.40 in Yorktown Heights, NY and the lowest was $2.88 in Clear Brook, VA. Average cost for the whole trip $3.15 (premium fuel.)
  4. Don’t ask about mileage because I don’t track that. I will do some quick math and see if it over 27 MPG. If it is, everything is OK.
  5. Signs on the side of the road in Connecticut warned that the fine for littering is $219. Why the odd figure?
  6. We took money out of a free standing ATM machine in a hotel lobby and the fee for using it was $3.05, not the usual two bucks. I can understand $3, but why the extra nickel?
  7. Public restrooms are scarcer up north compared to around here. So sometimes we had to get creative.
      a. The first floor in hotels will always have restrooms, just walk in like you belong there.
      b. We used the restrooms just inside the entrance of the Newton, NJ hospital when asking around downtown failed to turn up any place to go.
  8. At one hotel restroom break we even grabbed a banana off the breakfast bar, because the place we had stayed at didn’t have them. So if you are bold enough you should be able to walk right in and get a whole breakfast at most places.
  9. I bought a hooded sweatshirt at Furman U in Greenville on the way up. It served me well at altitude on the Blue Ridge Parkway and in the unseasonably cool CT weather, but will now be exiled to the back of the closet until November.
  10. I managed to finish one paperback book on the trip, good thing I was a quarter of the way through when we started.
  11. High-speed internet access was free everywhere we stayed and ranged from very marginal in a middle of the hall room in the Farmington Inn to excellent in a room at the end of the hall at the same place.
      a. Last night’s started good and got crappy later in the evening. Even tried the Cat-5 cable which professed to having a 10Mb connection wouldn’t do crap. Maybe there is a download throttle…

I didn’t take any pictures today, so for your entertainment, I present a shot of the Colonnade at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA from yesterday.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 263

Concord

Rat Toes

Hagerstown, MD to Concord, NC. Today’s plan was straight down I-81 to I-77 and we stuck pretty much to it. Boy is this corridor busy during the week.

We stopped in Lexington, VA to take a leg stretch. We used to have someone to visit when we came to town, but now that the Lewis clan has pretty much scattered, we were left to our own devices. So we decided to do the Sally Lewis Loop Walk, about 2 miles around the outside, then through the middle of the campuses of VMI and W&L.

Couldn’t hardly stand the traffic I-81 any longer when a warning sign let us know the right lane was closed at mile marker 127. We ducked off the Interstate at Exit 132, following US11 into Christianburg before turning south on VA8 to pick up another stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway. With today’s 34 mile segment it meant that we had driven a total of 220 miles out of the possible 469.

I-77 was just as busy as 81 and once you got about 40 miles north of Charlotte the road surface started to reflect the heavy usage by becoming very rough and potholed. Making us very happy to get on a secondary road east to make it to our overnight stop destination. we probably could have made it all the way home tonight, but decided to stop here in Concord, so that when we get up early tomorrow morning, we can ride home with the top down.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 259

Hagerstown

MetroOr Not Since We Went To The New Menu.

Farmington, CT to Hagerstown, MD. We got an early start and used the usual route out of Connecticut (I-84, I-684, Saw Mill Parkway, I-87/I-287), but instead of getting on the Garden State Parkway we stayed on I-287. Didn’t stay on the Interstate for long though, Donna broke out the NJ map and we hit the back roads. One, because we would rather stay off the Interstates and two, we were headed to western NJ to visit another far flung relation of Donna’s in Blairstown, Betty. She is the daughter of the sister of Donna’s grandmother. Is that a cousin, second cousin or first cousin once removed?

After lunch at Betty’s we stayed on the back roads and entered in to our least favorite state of the union, road-wise, Pennsylvania. As long as we can stay rural through the Keystone State we are fine, but the major routes really suck, rough and chock full of 18 wheelers (plus add today’s rain…) When we finally hit I-81 we were going to grab a bite to eat and stop for the night.

At the intersection of PA 443 and I-81 we ate at a place called Gooseberry’s Family Restaurant (or something similar) and we almost didn’t stay because we had to walk through the smoking section to get to the no smoking area (an omen we should have headed.) When Donna tried asked if she could get the chili instead of the offered soup de jour with her entree, the waitress said that you couldn’t have any substitutions since they went to the new menu. So Donna just ordered the chili in a bread bowl. While we waited on our meal, the man of the couple at the table behind us asked if they had any specials, to which the waitress replied, “There are no specials since we went to the new menu.” When I got my Blue Cheese Burger that is pretty much what is was, a bun, a burger patty and some blue cheese. I didn’t bother to ask if I could get some lettuce and a tomato slice because I knew what the answer would be… “Nope, not since we went to the new menu.”

After that dining experience and our prejudicial feelings towards traveling in PA, we got back on I-81 and drove an additional 100 miles just so we could start our day tomorrow in a different state, Maryland.

I didn’t even take the camera out of it’s case today, so the POTD attached to this post is one from last weekend in DC, a shaky shot of a Metro train arriving in the station. I chose this picture because as we entered into Maryland there were two big rigs with wide load signs on them parked just outside the Welcome Center, the load, shiny new Metro cars. After a couple of miles we found out why those two were there, they must have been waiting for their police escort, because up ahead we could see a state trooper car following yet another wide load Metro car.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, up again, down again, up once more, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 257

New Britain 4

New Britain's Iwo Jima MemorialOr Do You Know Where You Are?

Or even All Ashore That Is Going Ashore.

When we got up this morning our intention was to head south to Jersey to visit a cousin of Donna’s. That was if it was OK with her because we had already scheduled the visit for Thursday. By the time we bid “fare thee well” to the family and it was time to leave, the cousin couldn’t be reached. Being as we had the room here at the Farmington Inn for another night, we opted to tour a little of central CT. Used the web to look up where some waterfalls could be found and headed out.

Leaving town we passed a sign for the National Iwo Jima Memorial in New Britain/Newington. I have a photo of the monument in Arlington and every time we pass this one, it can be seen from Route 9, I think to myself, “I should stop and get a photo.” This morning I did.

We had directions to a couple of waterfalls in the south central part of the state with the first one being in East Hampton. Called The Cascades with a 20′ drop, the pictures made it look worth the trip. Reading the print directions, it seemed easy enough to find, but in real life proved elusive. We didn’t find Cox road where we expected it, so we turned on a different road to find our way back to a main road. What should we pass along the way but Cox Road. We turned onto it and seemed to be headed in the right direction, we crossed a listed road and Cox turned to dirt as advertised. About the time we got tired of bouncing on the dirt road and thought of turning around we came to the advertised fork in the road. There in the middle of the road were two fellows on off-road motorcycles. We stopped to ask where we were, but they beat us to the punch by asking first. They wanted to know if they went the way we came would take them to Portland. I answered yes, but wouldn’t dare try and direct them because of our round-a-bout way of getting here. They pointed to the fork of the road where we might find the waterfall, but had never seen it so couldn’t tell us how much further it might be. It was then that the 4 of us decided to return to where we did come from on the way we knew, the way we had come.

Our next destination was Chapman Falls in Millington, CT on the grounds of the Devil’s Hopyard State Park. Because the state park was on our Connecticut state map we had a high confidence level we cold find this one. As a bonus, our route would take us right by a covered bridge, Comstock Covered Bridge, one of five in the state and one we didn’t get a picture of in April. The bridge is not so historically picturesque because they have it supported by giant steel beams running longitudinally awaiting restoration. It looks like they have been waiting a long while because those steel beams are quite rusty. Chapman Falls turned out to be easy to find and easy to photograph. The roads surrounding the park are awesome. Lonely, narrow, tree lined and twisty they are perfect Miata roads. Hard to believe there is that much area of Connecticut that is still pristine and sparely populated.

When we left Devil’s Hopyard State Park and headed back we decided to take the Chester – Hadlyme Ferry across the Connecticut River. This small ferry, holding maybe 10 cars, and costing a whopping $3 is the second oldest continuously operating ferry in the state. As we approached the other side of the river Donna and I got back in the car and opened the CT map to decide how to get back to Farmington on the best 2 lane roads available. We both had our heads buried in the map when all of a sudden we heard, “All ashore that Is going ashore!” We had docked and the other three cars had long since departed. With a sheepish smile and a wave I started the car and drove off.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 251

New Britain 3

By a NoseOr 61,000 Carousel Horses.

Today we all piled into two cars and headed over a couple towns to Bristol and visited the Carousel Museum. I am not as big a fan of carousels as others in the group, but it was a very interesting couple hours, mostly due to our guide. She was only two years out of high school, but her knowledge and interest in the subject as well as a natural way with us, John Q. Public, made the subject almost exciting.

This evening Donna and I went over to catch up with a boyhood chum and his wife who we hadn’t seen in a while. We had a good time catching up on the events of the distant and recent past. Unfortunately a lot of the discussion centered around the foibles of our being upper middle-aged.

The Emperor clicked over to exactly 61,000 miles as I pulled into the hotel parking lot tonight.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 249

New Britain 2

Friendly'sThis is the 3rd memorial service in the last two months and I hope this doesn’t become a trend. First, in April, it was Donna’s Aunt Mary, then Jerry the Condo King in May and now my Mom’s in July.

Tonight’s for my mom was a nice little service and even though the minister had never met her he did a credible job. Mom was not real religious, but in the early years she would take us kids to Sunday school and church, but when we moved to the other side of town my dad wouldn’t drive us back over to the church on Sundays (Mom never got her license), so we just stopped going. I wonder how my life would have differed if my church going days hadn’t ended at the age of six?

After the service my brother had arranged a little gathering at the VFW hall with finger foods, etc for anyone who attended the service to go to. We went, ate a bit and chatted with my step dad’s kids, but most of the folks there were Paul’s friends or co-workers. We had a request for soul soothing ice cream from the family table, so Donna and I, younger sister Diane and her husband Allan and big sister Ginny headed to Friendly’s.

Top made an extra transition today because I washed the southern bugs off the nose in preperation for gathering some northern species of insects the next couple of days.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, up again, down, up yet again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 245