from my west-bound windshield

Statistics from my drive out here:

Number of days driving: 3

Number of hours driving: 36

Number of states nailed: 7 (MN, SD, ND, MT, ID, WA, OR)

Number of middle fingers received: 2 (but one was from an abandoned leather work glove on the side of the road and doesn’t really count)

Number of middle fingers given: 2

Things I saw:

Skeleton trees

Cigarette pizza

Too many suspicious Office Max employees in Aberdeen, SD (as I tried to find a computer to blog from)

A town named “Local Access”

The highest point in North Dakota (summit attempted, failed)

“It looks like blood but smells like tree sap.”

The lodge from Twin Peaks

A town in Idaho named Syringia. The only place in America (besides Soho) where everyone is a heroin addict.

A cow skeleton (that still had its plastic ear tag buried in some uneaten cartilage)

Bruce, a civil engineer and professor at the University of Tennessee, who knew Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit (and U of T) fame.

Good band names discovered:

Death by Butterflies

Middle of Somewhere