It's a Dry Heat (Part I)

I'll get back to rambling about the distant past in a bit, but I would like to take some time to ramble about the recent past while it is fresh in my mind. I'd like to tell myself all about my vacation in Arizona/Tennessee. I started with a plan. The plan was to take a friend. The friend lived, and still lives around 600 miles away, therefore the trip started with a very long drive. I started by heading west, crossing into West Virginia and Ohio along the way. This part of the drive was old hat to me, as it was the route towards Columbus and the home of the dread scourge Sterling Commerce. However, oh happy day, it was meant that I travel on past the wretched dead-lands in central Ohio and continue ever westward, my heart happy for what lay ahead. I crossed into plains lush with cornfields and cows and the scent of methane, and around this time for whatever reason I received a friendly wave from passers-by, which lifted my spirits and helped me buckle down for the long haul through Kentucky. I passed through Cincinnati and Louisville along the way, both of which featured many police cars along curbsides writing tickets to drivers likely writhing in rage and wallowing in their own stupidity and carelessness. I think, at least from a driver's viewpoint, that Cincinnati would be a habitable city. It looks clean and modern and is a place I may stop to visit one day. Louisville was much less charming. It felt like generic-city USA and is probably a place you have to explore a bit to get a real feel for it. Aside from these minor distractions, there was distressingly little to keep my interest while zooming down the highway. A smashed deer here, an orphaned tire tread there. I became complacent and ever bored with the road and longed for some sort of communication, even if it was that of an angry motorist. I persevered, however, and reached my friend's home in Tennessee where we spent some quality time in a hotel room and where we learned a little more about each other.