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SOMEWHERE IN NORTH CAROLINA -- Sturgeonville, Virginia, may be populated with lovely people or raving, gibbering hellhounds. We don't know. We didn't see one living soul during the couple of hours we were there.
Either the few dozen locals were all away doing whatever it is they do during the day when we visited, or they fled in fear or dismay at the sight of two very scroungy-looking Yankees doing a happy dance around their own car.
Frankly, I wouldn't blame the Sturgeonvillions if they opted to avoid us. We were rather giddy. According to our mileage meter, Sturgeonville is halfway between Fort Kent, Maine, and Key West, Florida, and we were celebrating hitting the midpoint of our road trip down historic U.S. Route 1.
During the past two weeks and 1,212.5 miles down Route 1, we've met witches and whirlpool survivors, smugglers, sailors and spies. We've experienced snow and ice (Caribou, Maine), torrential rains (Portland, Maine), mega-fog (all of Rhode Island), major mugginess (Alexandria, Virginia), one small tornado (Poolesville, Maryland) and a really swell total lunar eclipse.
And we're learning that slow is mostly good. Slow speeds, slow roads, slow food and slow down and talk to people -- those are all fine things.
The problem is: We suck at going slow.
Yes, we admit it, after all our boastful talk about avoiding the sterile evils of the interstate highway system, there have been a few times when we've been jealous of the cars speeding effortlessly down Interstate 95 while we crawled along U.S. 1 behind a lumber truck or a school bus or some other heavily laden vehicle.
It took us eight hours to get from Mystic, Connecticut, to New York City on Route 1, a trip we've often made in just under two hours on I-95. But there is a benefit to going slow -- we know just where we are on Route 1.
We've driven past peoples' houses and along their towns' main streets. We've peeped into little parts of their lives, their garage sales, their church socials, their harvest celebrations, their conversations over morning coffee.
We know almost exactly the moment when we're in another state, sans any "Welcome to ..." signs. For example, crossing the border earlier today from Virginia to North Carolina, we saw hundreds of little tufts of cotton snagged on the grass on the sides of the road. And we knew that we were, once again, elsewhere.
I'd bet a week's salary there was no cotton on the sides of I-95.
We've also learned to slow down and say "Hello" and "How are you?" to the people we meet. A couple of weeks ago, back in New York City, a half-hour or so spent chatting with a stranger about her hip-replacement surgery, or his long-hoped-for vacation to Florida, would have been unthinkable. New Yorkers don't have time to chat.
In fact, wasting people's time with idle chatter in NYC is the height of rudeness, so we've had to learn that most people don't see politeness as an affront.
Adapting to slow food hasn't been a struggle. We'll take a piece of homemade pie, a plucked-fresh-from-the-sea lobster, old-school-style barbecue or long-simmered chowder over prefab food any day.
The only go-slow lesson we're still struggling with is bloody dialup Internet access. Yes, we do remember the days (not too long ago) when our new 56K modem thrilled us with its dazzling speed. Now we are spoiled rotten.
Accessing the Net or sending files over dialup is like chewing on tinfoil -- annoying and damn close to painful. It's sure hard to resist hopping onto one of the many unsecured wireless networks that our sniffer program finds pretty much every day. But that wouldn't be nice. And we're learning to be nice, right?
Apart from staying off other people's networks, we have broken all the other rules of sane road tripping.
We have no handy cooler in the back seat filled with beverages. Instead, we start snapping at each other when we get thirsty and continue to quibble till we find a place to buy something to drink.
We don't pack any healthy snacks, either. Nor do we have damp washcloths in little plastic baggies to wipe our sticky faces and hands when we indulge in some horribly unhealthy treat.
But there are some rules you just don't break, at least not more than once:
Rule 1: Make use of any accessible bathroom, whether your bladder is demanding relief at the moment or not. Your mother was right -- you will have to go later.
Also note that "any accessible bathroom" means just that. Don't be prim and wait for a bathroom that doesn't appear to harbor germs, weird unidentified goop and perhaps even a random goblin or two. Remind yourself that the next available bathroom will be worse.
Rule 2: Surrender all control of your hair. Whatever the weird water doesn't do to it, the wind and those tiny bottles of hotel shampoo will.
Actually, you're going to look like crap for most of the trip. You'll get a jolt of fear every time you happen to glance in the rear-view mirror and realize yes, that's how you really look. Remind yourself gently that you will look like your better self again someday, but for now you don't, and guess what? It doesn't matter.
Rule 3: Pack your own pillow. As the promiscuous among us may already know, when you're switching beds every couple of nights, your brain spends a lot of time wondering where the hell it is. Slipping your own pillow from home under your head seems to trick your brain into believing it's safe to shut down for the night.
Rule 4: Things on the map are always farther away than they appear. Driving a couple of hundred miles on a non-highway like Route 1 can take up the best part of the day. Don't plan on making time on a slow road.
Here's to the next 1,212.5 slow miles and whatever wonderfulness they may bring.
(Michelle Delio and photographer Laszlo Pataki are midway through a four-week, geek-seeking journey along U.S. Route 1. If you know a town they should visit, a person they should meet, a weird roadside attraction they must see or a great place to fuel up on lobster rolls, barbecue, conch fritters and the like, send an e-mail to wiredroadtrip@earthlink.net.)
