[G2:1125]Twice I had to go outside last night and douse cats in heat with an ice bucket full of water. And I almost had to do the same thing with an addled vagrant who kept returning to the office a few doors down to repeatedly argue with the clerk about something unintelligible.
Then there were the suspicious cars circling the parking lot, the shoeless women strolling into the lobby for the continental breakfast in their nightgowns, and White Trash Theatre going on across the road between a very large woman and a weedy man wearing a fanny pack. She yelled profanities while he threw pebbles at her. Not handfuls of pebbles, just individual pebbles.
I'll be sure to make a note in my database to remind me of my pleasant stay here.
In the meantime, it was on to more important concerns. Among the items I had to find today were a building shaped like a boat, the apartment where Hogan's Heroes star [g2link:1138]Bob Crane was murdered[/g2link], a trailer park that housed a man and his corpse bride for 11 years, and the final resting place of [g2link:1144]Ernesto Miranda[/g2link], the man who ensured that we citizens would always be aware we had a right to remain silent.
Things went pretty smoothly, though I have to say I never realized before my visit to Bob Crane's death site how shifty I must look on my excursions. It dawned on me how 70s-cop-show I appear, pointing a telephoto lens out the window of my car, speaking into a voice recorder, then speeding off. I felt like Jim Rockford the rest of the day.
The real highlight of my adventure, though, was when I discovered an In-N-Out Burger right outside of Phoenix! I hadn't had In-N-Out since the day I moved back to Texas from California 5 years ago. The freshly cut fries, the spongy buns, the sweet grilled onions. Donny's right, those are good burgers.
Otherwise, the day was pretty uneventful, save for Streets and Trips repeatedly crashing on me and my being chased off the aforementioned trailer park by a guard dog. OK, so it was just a hyperactive Chow, but he had a very loud bark. (So much for my Jim Rockford high.)
[G2:1135 class=right]Of course, I did get sidetracked at one point. After I had a spare car key made at the Lowe's next to In-N-Out — just in case I got locked out in the middle of the desert, only to be discovered 6 days later as nothing but a pile of bones in a snazzy pair of glasses — I remembered to mark a GPS waypoint at the In-N-Out for future reference. That's when I discovered something preprogrammed into my Geko called GRMPHX.
After a couple of minutes murmuring to myself words like "gramp-hax" and "grim-phux," I realized it stood for Garmin Phoenix. It must be the local office, I thought — the local office for the people who make the GPS receiver I so dearly love — only 1.2 miles away! And they deliberately programmed their location in here, so they obviously wanted me to pay a visit!
I was giddier than a person should be at such a discovery. All the things I've been seeing, and I was excited about a Garmin office. But 6 days on the road can do that to a person. Exhaustion topped with a happy, happy lunch caused me to giggle. And I became gigglier as the LCD's readout of the distance fell. 1.0 mi ... 0.7 mi ... 0.3 mi. Hee-hee-hee!
The pathetic part was the disappointment I felt when I arrived to discover that the office was empty. Empty!
I swore something had to be wrong. I circled the building to make sure. Watching the receiver's arrow make a complete 360 amused me again momentarily, but I was dismayed by the truth it conveyed. They'd moved. I expected at least a T-shirt for finding them.
Bastards owe me a T-shirt.
[G2:1093]
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