It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, April 22
Greetings from The Shire…Per standard Sparrow policy, it is always nice to return home.
Tuesday in Red Wing I came back strong after Monday’s lousy service at the Red Wing shoe store when I tried to buy some boots but no one even bothered to measure my foot…Well, right next door there’s a Duluth Trading Company store and I have lots of DTC stuff, including some of their boots and I went in and there they were, a pair they came out with last year and were now on the clearance rack and in my exact size, too…I’d really liked them when they first came out but for some reason never pulled the trigger on them but this was too good to pass up.
The new ride pulled out at about 0630 Wednesday morning…I immediately headed across the river to Wisconsin because my record for Most States Visited in One Day is 4 and if I made it to Wyoming I could break that record and if I made it all the way home – highly doubtful – I could even get six in.
(Before heading out, tho, I had a chat with Lowell, an older guy who has probably been the nite auditor there since the McKinley Administration…The problem was my credit card was billed for the stay and I could’ve sworn I’d paid in advance…He double-checked and said no, there’s no record of the payment and I checked my statements and found nothing and he said he’d ensure the kid that had taken my reservation was taken out and flogged…By the by, Lowell has a tuff job, too…It’s an old hotel with a stand-alone front desk: there is no back office for him to retire to, which is really tuff.)
GPS offered three routes home, with the fastest being the way I’d come in…Boo to that because yours truly wanted as little backtracking as possible and ol’ Sparrow ended up rolling with the route that offered a leisurely trek across Minnesota, before flooring it thru South Dakota and then turning south thru eastern Nebraska and then west to Wyoming…My goal was to make it to Interstate 80 by dark and we’d consider matters from there.
I actually got pulled over in South Dakota…We were on the outskirts of Sioux Falls where the speed limit goes from a hundred and ten miles per hour to 65 in about 30 feet and the constable caught me having the temerity to do 68…I am not making that up…So I pull off the freeway and into a truck stop parking lot and he’s really nice and conducts himself in a professional manner that would have had Reid and Malloy standing back and nodding approval…I ended up with a warning.
It was late afternoon when yours truly began wondering when in the hell GPS would spit me out at I-80 because for a few hours it would send me south on a Nebraska state/county road and then west on another and then south and so forth…After yet another instruction to head west I actually took a good look at the route and BOOM it wanted to send me on state and county roads all the way to Cheyenne…I am not making that up.
Well, fuck this noise, as we used to say in the Navy…I’m not really complaining tho, because it was a beautiful drive, thru country you simply don’t see on an Interstate….But I wanted to get to Cheyenne before the weekend, so I headed south to the Interstate and almost the instant I cross the Wyoming border BOOM it starts snowing pretty good.
Crap…We had lousy roads and weather in Wyoming on the way out and perhaps it’s been snowing non-stop since…I had no idea…There’s a hotel next door to where I gassed up and I figure it’s probably prudent to find shelter for the night but they’re asking $120, plus tax, for the night, a rate I’d heard her quote the lady in front of me…Well, as regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall, you have two people walk out on your rate within 30 seconds you’re probably charging too much…I’m cordial, tho, because I might be obliged to pay it…Ol’ Sparrow got a break, tho…Back out in the car, Priceline shows there is some availability in Cheyenne, so I book one for $84 a night.
It’s snowing pretty good when I get there around 2000 and while tomorrow’s forecast holds moderate interest, I defer everything to the morning before heading next door for a really good burger and fries at Denny’s.
The morning shows the snow is over but the roads blow from Cheyenne to Laramie and from Laramie to the state border, where they don’t get a whole hell of a lot better, while the long way – I-25 south to the big city and then the usual route home – is looking pretty good…GPS says it will be about six hours, two more than the other route, but that’s with good roads…Recall it took six hours to get to Cheyenne on the way out and it would probably take that again so it was a fairly easy decision to take I-25 south to the big city.
Great call…Five minutes after pulling out we were back in our home state and within 30 minutes we had blue sky and dry roads and the sailing was so smooth we were back at The Shire by 1230, only five hours after pulling out, a full hour less than anticipated by GPS and well less than the other route would have taken.
The cat greeted me the same as if I were coming home from work: at the door meowing for her canned yummy ration…Then with more efficiency than you might expect from yours truly, bags were unpacked and laundry started and the cat issued fresh dry food and water and her cat box was dumped out and fresh litter poured in, tho it should be noted Tammy had dumped it out once, too…Ol’ Sparrow was back in his natural habitat – reading in the chair – by 1530.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: The Sleep Log will return.
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
It was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
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