Time Zone: Eastern
Today's Weather: in the low 60ºs, heavy rain
Length of Trip: 4 days/3 nights
Next stop: Tampa, FL
Tours are turns and circular motions and so it makes sense that while you’re “on tour” with a show you feel like you are in perpetual motion. As with the tour of a national monument you hope that the route has been efficiently planned. If the producers had their way tours would no doubt follow logical, linear circuits. But, like so many other things in the USA, logic takes a backseat to demands of the market. The presenters want what they want when they want it and you’ve gotta get your show there at that time if you want to book their theater.
Thus the path wound by the average national tour looks not so much like a circle as it does a series of lopsided Xs. You leave Cincinnati and pass through Buffalo on your way to Rochester, then return to Buffalo, and then pass through Rochester again on your way to Providence. When you back-track like that over a short period of time it can make you a little crazy. Jonathan remembers a particularly harrowing week during his Cats years when he crossed the state of Iowa five times in seven days. It’s not the kind of thing you recommend to friends who ask for advice about road trips.
It’s this kind of attachment that the big corporate chains play on, patterning their stores and restaurants as uniformly as possible to tease out the sense that you’ve been there before. Prior to touring I might have argued that quality of experience would trump familiarity, but after having experienced the rush of emotional ownership that overtakes me when I pass by a truck stop where I bought a lousy postcard two months before, I understand more thoroughly the strategy of doing something poorly but always the same. Quality matters, but it’s a distant second to loyalty. This explains the strong followings enjoyed by even the most disastrous sports teams and the enduring popularity of well-known beers that taste like piss.
I remember walking the dogs on the tiny patch of grass and counseling myself to cowboy up. I’d slept in a Walmart parking lot, after all. I’ve always been cavalier about not needing much for comfort and now it was time to make good on those hardy assertions.
The place turned out ok. I didn’t sleep poorly. All the same, I was happy to leave.
Happiness can be as basic as knowing where to throw away the poop.
There’s definitely something dissonant about cooking pork chops and sitting down to dinner in a West Virginian parking lot but it turns out even dissonance is something to which you can come home. The grass may be mediocre and the beer may taste like piss but this place has been there for us. We’ve enjoyed ourselves there. Our lives have, in some small way, taken place there, and that makes this place matter to us, if not anyone else.
I have to admit that in my travels across the country I’ve been to better casino parking lots and I wouldn’t even doubt that there is a better casino parking lot in the state of West Virginia. But the free-camping Hollywood Casino parking lot in Charles Town, West Virginia is my personal favorite West Virginian casino parking lot, and if my friends or family were going that way that’s where I would send them.
“The truckers aren’t rowdy and keep to themselves,” I’d tell them. “And the drunk casino patrons drive on a road that’s well-removed.”
“Give my regards to the trash can,” I’d say. “And enjoy that lovely little patch of grass.”
Miles Driven with RV: 5143.3 miles
Days Lived in RV: 75 days
Camps Overnighted in RV: 11 RV parks, 1 Walmart, 1 Casino Parking Lot
States Camped in RV: 9 (TX, AL, TN, IN, KY, IL, NC, WV, MD)