Whew that was a heck of a cliffhanger, huh? Potential dead hookers, then no update for three weeks.

So, no, there were no dead hookers. At least, not in our room. And yes, Jenna was still there in the morning. Our first mission of the day was to find Starbucks. Of course, the NEXT exit off the highway had about 55 hotels to choose from, but let’s not dwell. Clearly we (I) didn’t look all that refreshed, the lady at Starbucks gave me an extra shot of espresso. And we were off.

Sadly, Indiana had no welcome sign for our arrival (all other states previously did, well not for us specifically, but for any vehicles on the highway). Ohio even said goodbye, which was nice.

Indiana…Indiana…what can I say? “Stay classy, Indiana”. Jess and I stop at the rest area. We head to the restroom, I accidentally cackle loudly upon entering and a woman in a stall ON THE PHONE makes some sort of comment. I promptly turn around, leave the restroom, re enter and say “Wow, what was up with that chick laughing?”. Cuz I’m kooky like that. Women on the phone proceeds to complain on her cell that she had her dog and just because there was a sign that said no dogs, that shouldn’t apply to her, it wasn’t like it was pooping or anything. Sigh. As I said, “Stay classy, Indiana”.

Nerd Girl playlist:

INXS rock block
Kid Rock rock block (is that a Kid Rock block?)
“Single Ladies” – Beyonce

And peace out, Indiana. We had a license to Ill-inois.

Jess thought Illinois drivers were very Illinoy-ing.

But we still had some fun…

And then finally, at 1:51 central, 32 hours after we left Rhode Island, we arrived in St. Louis.

And we REALLY needed showers.

And our rooms weren’t ready.

And there were already Lotus peeps in front of the hotel.

Taking pictures.

Of us.

Dammit.

We last left Thelma and Louise, er, Me and Jess in West Virginia.

West Virginia did not last long. We found ourselved in Ohio. Or rather, the GPS, nicknamed, “Bitch”, directed us to Ohio. In any case, we were in Ohio. We knew we were somewhere behind a @the_turtle. We decided it was time to stop for food. This time at the lovely Ruby Tuesday in Somewhere, Ohio. Oddly enough, sitting in the parking lot…the Turtle. We went in for some dinner. And were met with … ZOMBIES!

Okay, not exactly. We were seated at a lovely table overlooking the gas station, sandwiched between two families with small children. Now, Jess and I both have small children. So we aren’t opposed to the little buggers. These were some fine examples. On my left, may I present Zombie child. Approximately two years old, the girl had a pacifier in her mouth the entire meal. She was well behaved and sat coloring for the duration of their visit. Oh yeah, and going “ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” the ENTIRE MEAL.

On my right, I present The Extended Family. Seemed like many families had gathered together. Split over a couple of tables. Lots of adults, presumably happy to see eachother and catch up. And Mac n Cheese Boy. He had his dinner all over his hands. How do I know this? Because he repeatedly got up from the table and came over to me and grabbed my shirt. Extended Family didn’t seem to notice or care about Mac n Cheese Boy, he was free to roam as he pleased. Extended Family then harrassed the poor waitress wanting their bill split into 65.3 different receipts.

But I digress.

“Living on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi hit the playlist. In which I attempt to “Baby Take My Hand” and Jess dissed me. She says she was tired. Whatever. Oh speaking of tired. I fell asleep soon thereafter (at least judging by the lack of tweets). Jess was getting tired, so pulled off to the only hotel she could see…

The Econolodge.

Okay, fine by me. I’m laid back. I was asleep. If the driver says she is tired and we need to stop, then we need to stop. It’s Econolodge. By the highway. How bad could it be?

Cut to “check in”. Here’s a travel tip: When registration has bullet proof glass, you MAY not want to stay there. We joked about paying by the hour. Ha ha. Ha. *ahem*.

After paying and receiving our room key, we walked out to the car, to see two “gentlemen” talking to the police. Always a welcome sight. Jess made a remark about finding a dead hooker in our room. At which point, I said, “I’d rather find a dead hooker than get broken into.” Thinking a dead hooker is probably a one-off event, as opposed to a break in. The police had left and Jess and I carried every single item out of the car and into our rooms. I think we both secretly feared we would wake up in the morning to find Jenna gone. Touching as little as possible in the room, we went to sleep.

7 states in 15 hours.

Will Jenna be there in the morning? Will we find a dead hooker? Stay tuned for the next installment…

Ahh…Pennsylvania.

The state in which:

Jess yells at the GPS.
We see a billboard for surfing. (WTF?)
I play a song for Jess that has a siren in it, but she thinks it’s real. (Oops)
We see these at a rest stop…

And Amish Pr0n. That’s right. Amish porn. We even made it a hashtag. #AmishPorn. Now sadly, at that point, we didn’t BUY amish porn. But we saw it. At least, we think we did. We were getting a little crazy at that point. I’m surprised we didn’t have someone stop us from getting in the car at the rest stop. We must have seemed drunk.

We also seemed to be chasing a Turtle. Yep. @the_turtle was driving to St. Louis, also, and was somewhere ahead of us.

Also at this point, “techs” came into existence. Jess was my window tech when I drove. I couldn’t figure out how to roll the damn window down while driving. We thought that was hilarious. Toll Collector Boy didn’t seem to see the humor.

Also in Pennsylvania (I warned you), we passed Shartsville. Much humor was to be had.

Then, finally, we were done. Pennsylvania was finished. We entered…West Virginia. … [insert record scratching noise] West Virginia?! Did that sign say WEST VIRGINIA?! Are we supposed to be in West Virginia?! Thankfully, yes. We were supposed to be in West Virginia. The best we could say about West Virginia was that it wasn’t Pennsylvania.

And then, Ohio. Where we caught a turtle. And saw zombie children. And possibly dead hookers. But first, more playlist:

“Hungry Like the Wolf” – Duran Duran
“Sabotage” – Beastie Boys

So we left off with impending disaster…

We had just stopped at Starbucks for some coffee. The guy behind the counter perplexed me. I was wearing a shirt that said, “Geek is the new black”. He asked me what kind of geek I was. Uh…the geeky kind? Is geek so cool now that we must define our brand of geek only to be shunned by “cool” geeks?

Anyway.

Jess was driving. I was passengering. We were slowly coming awake. I must take a moment and describe our ride. Many of you may know of Jenna. Jenna is Jess’ car. A totally cool MINI that Jess has seriously pimped out for autocross. Now one of the pimp-ations was tires. Jenna has got some bounce. And wouldn’t you know it, just before I took a sip of my MEDIUM (suck it Starbucks!) HOT coffee, we hit a bump. A bump that somehow popped the lid off of my scalding hot coffee and caused it to erupt all over me, my seat, the floor and my purse. DISASTER! Hence forth known as the “Coffee Incident of 2010″. Sadly, this happened not once, but twice.

We quickly drove through Connecticut, New York (“trailer!”) and New Jersey. Just before the Pennsylvania, we switched drivers! A practice drive for me from a McDonalds to a Starbucks and we were on our way. Just in time for Pennsylvania traffic. And Pennsylvania road signs, “Be Alert Heavy Truck Traffic”. How about some punctuation, PA? I think the road was getting to us. A few hours sleep, four plus hours of driving and we found road signs to be hysterical.

We stopped for lunch at the oh-so-lovely-but-ubiquitous Cracker Barrel. Where I was “sooooo hungry. Had to restrain myself from knocking an old woman out of my way”. And Jess was so hungry she forgot to use the NerdGirlRun hashtag!

The Nerd Girl Run playlist was born:

“Shut Up and Drive” – Rihanna
“The Road” – Tenacious D
“Every Woman in the World” – Air Supply (cuz that’s how I roll)
“Truly” – Lionel Ritchie (which Jess didn’t know. sigh.)
“What’s Your Fantasy?” – Ludacris
“Love Song” – Sara Bareilles
“Something About You” – Level 42

Coming up in part 3 – Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, more Pennsylvania and AMISH PR0N!

It’s been a week and I’m a little late blogging an IamLUG write-up, but what the heck. Conferences in general seem to mean more to many of us than just conferences, and IamLUG was no exception. So please forgive me if this post is more than just reporting on a conference. (And really, if you read this blog, you aren’t here looking for journalism or news anyway).

So, somehow, Jess Stratton, aka @mattandjess, now aka @NerdGirlJess on Twitter, asked me if I wanted to drive down to St. Louis for IamLUG. For now unknown reasons, I agreed. Oddly enough, I didn’t once look at what route we would take, or how long it would take, I just said yes. As time got nearer, Jess and I did briefly chat.

Me: “How long will it take?”
Jess: “Let me check. Google says about 20 hours. So we’ll do it in 2 days”
Me: “Okay.”

Later logistics included deciding who would bring snacks versus beverages. We decided the week before that I would drive to Jess’ house in Rhode Island on Friday. We would drive from Rhode Island as far as we could on Saturday, crash in a hotel somewhere and then drive the rest on Sunday. That’s as detailed as the plan got.

And so, following the plan, I arrived at Jess’ house Friday night. Late. Did I mention it was late? I think was 3AM or something crazy when we finally went to bed. And we got up at 5:00 AM. Yes, you read that right, 5:00 AM. So I could run. I ran. A single mile, in the dark. According to the tweets. Oh. Did I mention we tweeted this? We used the hashtag #NerdGirlRun (Nerd Girls do Cannonball Run or something like that). At 6:32 AM, we tweeted the beginning of #NerdGirlRun.

We exuberantly hopped in the car. And promptly drove straight to Starbucks. But hey, it was in Connecticut, so we felt accomplished. We snapped this pic, and took off…only to have disaster strike…