Getting to Charleston: The journey's the adventure

There's nothing like the right pool of songs flooding your ears to give you an ethereal feel of having a soundtrack to your life. It's best at those special moments, when you take a deep breath and enjoy yourself; you realize how incredible it is, simply put, that everything works and everything's okay. Usually, at least.
Welcome to my Charleston trip with Brendan York, we'll be your misguided travelers for today.

This picture is just a little gay, but I'm sure 12 instagram filters could've fixed that if I wanted.
For those who were wondering (noone, probably) that's a Tollhouse Pie from Kaminsky's
Most Excellent Cafe, which is a wonderful name and they deserve to thrive. It's on Market St.
in the middle of downtown Charleston, and I think people thought we were hoboes who stole it
when we were loitering around eating it outside at like 10pm on a weekday...

(Charleston, SC) York and I were on a bus in those seats where you're forced to face other people, and so most of the trip is avoiding eye contact and pretending those people aren't there as if simply looking at them will give you Hepatitises A-F, when an older African American man with disheveled clothing and an Air Force veteran cap plops down stolidly across from us. He begins talking at us (was more of AT than to, really), but that turns into mouth-frothing harassment after awhile and he's yelling something about Rosa Parks at us, two poor young white kids just wanting to go to the beach, please leave us alone, when another man sits right next to us with a bucket and some kind of long cleaning mop or what have you. The older man begins harassing him. They both stand, yelling louder and louder until BAM! the younger fellow whales him in the face.


That's travelling. You live that every moment, realizing you can do just about anything and noone except you cares, because treasuring a moment and creating an album of personal photographs to laugh at with your buddies is all worth it- noone likes listening to travelers because they're the only ones who know what is was like to be there, hitchhiking from the beach or not having a place to sleep that night. Retelling stories means glossing over your entire adventure to pick out the 'exciting bits,' and thinking, "How can I tell this person what it felt like to embrace the sun and walk along a road for miles with everything I need in a backpack, wielding complete freedom and a stupid smile?" That's the hard part of traveling... and you realize it's pretty difficult, don't you? I mean, do you tell other people how exciting ice cream is? No, you simply recall the experience was generally pleasant and you and the ice cream got on quite well.

Artist's rendering. Not sure where the boxing glove came from.
Also, the guy was black. And old. And had sunglasses on....
I'm firing my artist.

I regret googling ice cream war, why aren't there more
appropriate pictures of people just throwing ice cream everywhere?

(Dover, DE) We got off the plane and make it outside of Dover Air Force Base; it's 10pm at night by now and what else is there to do but loiter outside of the front gate of the military base, just assing around while a cop car circles by? It wasn't even one of those menacing drive-bys where the officer is deciding whether or not to jump out and start filling us with new belly buttons, much more a curious, lazy drive-by or three where he glances over at us to figure out what we're doing in his world, maybe ride us over for fun or something. Finally, our couchsurfing host for the night. Manny, pulls up with a smile bigger than a wolf's at dinner, (not exactly the same kind of smile, but the same size), and introduces himself while leaning out the passenger side of his car to two strangers with obese backpacks. Like, we're talking some serious type 2 diabetes up in these backpacks.

Seriously,  my artist is so fired, our backpacks aren't  even that shade of pink

And so travelers don't tell stories to most people because most people don't care to really listen, at least not carefully enough, and honestly, they're not at fault.

You need to be there! It's like the highest form of inside joke is that mutual experience of wondering if this stranger will be some weirdo or an awesome traveler type, whether walking through historic plantations is actually fun (it kinda is), and if hitchhiking from the beach will work (it should?).


(Philadelphia, PA) We got lucky when it turns out Manny was heading north the next day up to Philly- this is some serious living on the edge here, like a penguin walking a greased up tightrope, because plan B was wingin' it. (Spoiler: Plan B would've ended poorly.) Throughout the entire trip, even in Philly, Yorkie and I are approached by bums or hoodlums or strangers asking us for money, as if having a backpack the size of a triple bypass burger with extra bacon means that we have an infinite supply of money- why does that make us a juicy target for bloody panhandlers? The last guy in Philly, I just talked at him in Polish while walking away.

That's when we walked into Heaven's Food Court (not the real name, why it isn't is a great question because that's a great name for what we discovered), an entire city block's worth of food courts indoors. For some reason, there's a big market share in Philadelphia for Amish fast food, which I found very questionable on several moral and philosophical levels, but I just went with the flow.



So that's why I'll listen to Ugly Casanova's Lonesome Blues and lean back, smiling, because for a moment I'm traveling. It's a beach-walking, sun-smiling, deep-breath sighing song that's a short glimpse of the road ahead of you or a place you've already trundled through.

Almost like the show, but without all the gaping plot holes
and nonsense everywhere, no offense Lost fans

The world is quite the large place. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a man invents a Perspective Vortex that gives people a true look at their place in the universe, and the experience is so traumatizing they're separated from their bodies and vaporized, in short. Traveling isn't quite that bad, really, less vaporizing and more walking and being lost in general... and there's nothing quite bad about it, let's be honest. It makes me feel invincible, unlike when Yorkles and I wound up in the Star of America motel in North Charleston where we were very impressed to wake up alive, let alone rested and covered in cigarette ash.

Next stop, West Coast.

(Written before I went to the West Coast, revised after I visited Hawaii)