Shawn's first visit to Biscuitville (Clemmons, NC)... mmmmmm... biscuits and grits.

Shawn (right) and Brad (left) as the Elise is about to officially change hands.

Upon arrival...

The unveiling...

Carefully folding the cover as it's removed. Brad's exactly the kind of guy you want to buy a car from ;-)

"Omigosh... this is ACTUALLY going to be mine in a few minutes!" Shawn revels in the moment for a bit.

Explanation of the owners' manual... Brad might have a night job as a Lotus salesperson. He knows EVERYTHING about this car and was happy to help Shawn learn all about his new car.

Brad shows Shawn the art of ingress/egress, a special skill required of all Elise owners and passengers. Previous yoga experience is highly recommended.

Shawn signs the paperwork to make it official...

The beginning of "perma-grin". In Shawn's defense, I made him wear the hat.

So pretty...

Mmmmmmm... Lotusy-goodness.

Better not run over any matchbooks...

Brad backs the Elise out of his driveway...

Shawn in the car for the first time...

"Hey Shawn, get out a sec - lemme get a picture..."

Shawn practicing his newly-learned skill of Elise ingress. Still a little rough, but practice makes perfect, right?

Perma-grin continues...

"#@$%#$!!!! I'm sitting in a LOTUS! And it's MINE!"

About to leave Brad's place. I have a minor case of permagrin, and it's not even mine!

Shawn practices his Elise egress... it was most entertaining, but he did eventually get out. I had it easy since there's no steering wheel on the passenger's side...

Yay! Shawn's out... if only for a moment.

The Elise's first night in my grandparents' garage - thanks, guys!

The Elise gets to go in my parents' garage while we get some lunch...

Shawn is pleased...

Shawn experiences the joy that is Chick-Fil-A. Mmmmmmm.... perhaps one day we will have one in Washington.

Minus the box that everything's sitting on, we had to get all this crap into the Lotus. Amazingly, we did.

That boot ain't very big. Creative packing is a requisite skill...

Suitcase? Forgetaboutit.

I'm practicing my Lotusingress. Getting better, but still a little awkward....

We're about to get on with the journey...

Bye parents! Bye grandparents! See y'all at Christmas!

There's Hickory... I heard it's full of nuts.

Permagrin still in full effect....

Yep, we're lower than a Del Sol. EVERYTHING towers over us as we fly along a few inches off the asphalt...

Tractor trailers are a bit scary...

That's the "Meal Barn" right next to the "Deal Barn". Ain't that cute?

Refueling ourselves and the car is a frequent occurrence with the car's 10 gallon fuel tank and a certain Elise owner (who shall remain nameless) with the self-proclaimed "bladder of a twelve year-old."

Hmmmm.... we're so close to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Shawn didn't know what that was. Thus it was required that I introduce him to it. The small detour was well worth it.

Hey - it's TUNNEL VISION! Get it? Get it?

Shawn's co-monkey. Climbing trees is required every so often.

We made it to Tennessee! Yay!

Our first night in a motel...

Ooooh! I guess they have Bellsouth in Tennessee... don't know why that's interesting but we have a picture.

Nashville, here we come!

Hey! They have Coke in Tennessee, too! Too bad you can't see it that well since the Jersey barriers are taller than the Lotus =)

Us next to a Volvo XC90. We feel quite small.

A RACEWAY gas station. I guess the Elise would feel quite at home there.

My, an Escalade looks huge when you're in an Elise...

Apparently Kalifornia isn't the only place with smog issues.

Hello Nashville.

Good-bye Nashville.

Hey! We made it to Kentucky!

Shawn's first Cracker Barrel experience. Mmmmm.... catfish, fried okra, and cornbread. Yummy.

Look! A town named after my wife! She's really famous. We're gonna have to write to the governor of New Jersey, though, because their version looks pretty much like a dump.

I'll be home soon, honey :-)

Neat sunset. Probably due to not-so-neat pollution.

Yay! We made it to Illinois. Apparently there are people here. And they want to welcome us to their state. Or so the sign says.

The Lotus spends yet another night at a motel, this time in Marion, IL.

The Elise had bugs for dinner. My wife (the dental hygienist) would be yelling at it for not flossing if she were here.

Random guy pulls up next to the Lotus, gets out, and drools a bit. This happens often, whether we're in the car or not.

Hmmmm... a prison. "Shawn, how fast are you going? Oh nevermind, I don't want to know."

Only 290 miles to Chicago. We tricked the sign. We're not going to Chicago. We just made the sign think we were so it would tell us how far it was to get there.

But we ARE going to St. Louis, so we didn't have to trick that sign to tell us that we were going in the right direction.

Construction sucks, even if it is a Sunday and nobody's there.

Yay! We made it to Missouri. So what exactly is it that they want us to show them?

Missouri... was it coincidence that we saw the "Girls Gone Wild" bus headed down I-64 in Missouri? Hmmmm.... perhaps not.

Cool! They named a street after my wife here! She's more famous than I thought!

Omigosh - a Hummer is SOOOOO big when you're down here.

I'm sure this guy thought we were a bit loony, but we didn't care.

Yup, we're lower than a CRX with a cantaloupe launcher out back.

Wow, a Road Runner!

... and the horn goes "Meep!Meep!" Sweeeeet.

Higginsville apparently has a water tower.

Almost to Kansas City...

Construction sucks. Especially when you have to drive on the rumble strips. In an Elise. With your butt 6" off the ground.

Still sucks, and we have a great view... of a semi.

Oh JOY! We get to do 45mph for a while longer.

Those signs tried to trick us into going to Des Moines or Wichita, perhaps because we tricked one of their brethren earlier into telling us how far it was to Chicago. But we did not succumb to their trickery.

Is that yellow light on in OUR lane? My goodness, how did that happen?

Yay. Kansas City, MO.

Oh look, it's Kansas! In Kansas City, no less!

We didn't like Kansas. So we left. We didn't much care for Missouri, either, but as it stood between us and Iowa, we were forced to return.

They have Subways in Missouri, in case you ever wondered.

The Sports Car Bar... too bad it has a silly NASCAR banner on the front. The Lotus is rumored to be capable of turning right as well as left, so perhaps we should venture onward to another location where carburetors and pushrods are not idolized. They'd probably make fun of the Elise's 1.8L engine, too.

Yay. Iowa. Apparently they have people in this state, just like Illinois. What a friendly bunch.

This poor moth played chicken with the Lotus's windshield wiper. It lost. Severely.

Since we were a few hundred yards from Nebraska, we took 2 minutes to cross the river into Omaha so we could add Nebraska to our list of states we drove through... Necessary? No. Reason to make fun of us? No on that count, as well.

Downtown Omaha. I guess they have cities in the Midwest, too.

As a side note, do you see the FORD building there? According to some of the Tennessee locals, we should be able to buy a Lotus there. I have to remind Shawn of that every so often when we pass a Ford dealership :-)

Ok, detour's over, back to Iowa and I-29.

Look! It's Iowa. It's flat. And there are farms.

Down the road there are more farms.

And even further down the road, there are yet more farms.

Dang... I was asleep as we passed into South Dakota. Therefore it was mandatory that we turn around and get a picture of the sign. Back to Iowa we go.

Yay! South Dakota.

Pretty clouds. Still flat.

Still lots of farms.

At lunch, we happened upon a touchless carwash and decided to rid the Lotus of all the bug carnage attached to it. The owners were there doing their weekly check of the car wash's operation, and they gave Shawn the Super Duper Deluxe Special Wash on the house. How nice of them! I guess it's fun to have a unique car...

More washing and bug removal. After this was the fun part... I opened the boot to get bottle of Griot's Garage Speed Shine out so we could shine up the Lotus, and much to my surprise, there was a great deal of water in the boot. Apparently, the latch holds the lid securely enough to allow the seals to prevent water from entering the luggage area when it rains or water is poured onto the car. However, we learned that shooting a high-pressure stream of water at the rear of the car will cause vast quantities of water to enter the luggage area. This not good. This caused us to take a few items out of the boot, place them behind the seatbacks, and drive with the windows down to dry them out. That made for about a 30 minute delay. Lesson learned: don't take the Elise to touchless car washes... or any car wash for that matter.

We were only a couple of miles from the Minnesota border, and we'd never been to Minnesota. Now we have. Here is proof.

Back to South Dakota for the next way-too-long miles.

Neato clouds and sun.

More neato clouds and sun. This is better than looking at the rest of South Dakota, which is very flat.

BTW, I'm not such a bad photographer that I can't get the horizon straight... it's hard to hold the camera still and straight while hanging out the side of a Lotus at one-... I mean seventy-five miles per hour.

Wow. You can learn all about South Dakota from this sign. I learned that I wanted to get to Wyoming soon.

Apparently Dick Cheney commands the Soldiers of Satan and we should stop him and his henchmen. Wow.

If you're in the middle of Nowhere, SD, you can find someone to date from this newspaper at the rest stop. Makes me glad I'm married.

More fun clouds and sun.

Oh look, the Missouri River.

And more of the Missouri River. Isn't this the 10th time we've crossed this thing in the last 2 days?

One of the 629.7 signs along I-90 for Wall Drug. I can't believe I sat there and counted them all. South Dakota was rather boring.

Oh lookie! It's the Elise in front of Wall Drug.

It's me taking a picture of someone else taking a picture of the Elise in front of Wall Drug.

The scary little animated orchestra playing inside Wall Drug.

We ate at the bar across the street. Excellent pizza. Mmmmmmmm.

Eight frickin bucks to get in to see Mt. Rushmore. Dangit. Oh well.

The view from the Lotus at the drive-through window. Amazingly, they didn't even ask what kind of car it was when they issued the pass. Unfortunately, however, they listed it as a "Lodus". I suppose that's better than the "Lodest" that one of the hotel clerks wrote when we registered one night.

The Lotus in a parking garage... Shawn was appropriately paranoid about being run over by SUVs backing up and not seeing the car.

Hmmm... three Vettes all with Michigan plates. Road Trip?

Oooooh! It's Mt. Rushmore. It's big.

The trail around the base of Mt. Rushmore.

One of the air compressors used to power the air tools used to carve the granite. I wonder if I can fit one of them into my garage. It has a 3" outlet pipe... That would power a die grinder and an impact wrench simultaneously, right? ;-)

Hey! It's North Carolina, where we started...

and Washington, where we're headed!

Look at all the state flags and the pillars saying when they were admitted to the Union. Neato.

More pretty clouds and sky.

The ground has started to be something else besides flat. Yay.

Yay! Wyoming. Apparently there are no people in this state since the sign says that only the state welcomes us and not the people of the state. I guess it might also be that the people here are anti-social and don't want to welcome us.

The scenery is pretty cool here. Sorry about the lack of a level picture... stupid wind.

Everyone who drives the Lotus is afflicted with PermaGrin.

Even though we cleaned all the carnage off of the Elise yesterday, it has returned today. Poor Elise.

Yay! Montana!

i can't log in!!!!!!!!!!!!!


ps i'm totally drunk !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111111
	

for those that are part of my family that respect me:

i'm not drunk!  really and truly!  and i didn't mean to respond>all before.

to those that are not part of my family:  i didn't mean to watch sin city on 
dvd with my girlfriend and drink lots of shots of various boozes that i 
didn't intend to make me so drunk that i can't internet.

ps: my brother is way more responsible than me.  but that's okay.  i have 
three years to catch up.

pps:  i will regret this in the morning.


-j