After 100 hours or so I developed an obsession – I had to find the most random, most peculiar or just plain WTF products on the shelves of Amazon. I was in search of Sasquatch, the four leaf clover of humorous items. There was no shortage of inspiration, and so I was diligent in keeping a list to share my findings with Lin during breaks and lunch. Yet nothing compares to the bin I found with a value pack of condoms, a pregnancy test and the book What to Expecting When You’re Expecting. No joke. And now I share them with...

You know the feeling just before you decide you’re officially lost? First, you consider if you should just stay the course, then you decide that you really do need directions. If you’re lucky, for a brief moment, you may consider yourself fortunate that you are wandering freely and maybe even excited about being off the beaten path. Well, after a long goodbye with Brendan and Meg, we pointed Lucy toward Williamsburg and Lin’s alma mater, William and Mary. It was a quick tromp around the campus, full of plenty of sentences that began with ‘I remember when…’. But when we approached the Cheese Shop for lunch, we had arrived at our destination – exactly where we were supposed to be. The Cheese Shop had provided her a mountain of memories over the years while she attended W&M. We dined on specialty sandwiches with a side of Original House Dressing and bread ends. This place is famous for its dressing and has a reputation that goes far & wide, including Frommer’s Travel Guide. Ah, sweet perfection to satisfy a craving to re-live a favorite memory and to share it with someone else. Just a bit further down the road and we landed in Virginia Beach, VA where we were set to camp for three nights. It didn’t feel like the 39th largest city in the US, but we did feel the presence of several military bases. Although tourism is the major industry, it felt pretty desolate in mid-October. The most notable item of our campground were the Halloween decorations. With literally zero knowledge of Virginia Beach, we had arranged to tour another B&B for sale. This one was particularly interesting as it was just three blocks from the beach with high occupancy rates and very...

Well, it’s official. We are free to roam about the country once again. Our jobs ended yesterday and after a horrendous rain storm last night with tornado-like winds that forced us to get up and pull in our slides at 1am, we are soggy, and tired, but excited to be moving on to our next thing. We’re going to jump the timeline slightly here. Our hope was to post our last blog entry about “pre-Kentucky” before this one, but oh well. We should have some more time on our hands to write, now that we’re unemployed again. This post, then Raleigh/VA Beach/Fancy Gap, then our psuedo-exposé on Ama-hell – you can hang with that right? We arrived in Campbellsville, Kentucky back on October 24th, 2013. We had done a little research on the place before arriving so we knew only a few key facts, like the population – 9100, that it had a small University right downtown, that Amazon was the largest employer, and that the weather should be wintery, but on the milder side. Over the course of our two-month stay, we’ve certainly gotten to know her better and so to honor our temporary hometown on the day of our departure, here is a list of the top ten things we love about Campbellsville (and the surrounding area). #1. It’s located in Taylor County which they refer to as a “moist county” – which makes me laugh. That means some restaurants can serve drinks, but no other stores can sell alcohol. This might seem like a negative, but Campbellsville is located one half-hour away from Maker’s Mark, Allison’s all-time favorite distiller, in Laretto, KY. We visited of course and she got to dip her own bottle in the red wax. #2. It’s also...

Let’s see, where were we? It was October 9th, a grey day in Harpers Ferry, WV and Allison and I were staring at each other in the KOA parking lot mumbling swear words. We were locked out of the RV and it was still running. Allison quickly landed on a solution. A while back we’d broken the window lock on the large sliding window above our dining table. If we could hoist ourselves up that high (5 feet), we could slide the window open from the outside, pop out the screen and climb in. I tried using our little 1 foot stepping stool. Getting the window open and the screen off was no problem, but hoisting isn’t one of my finer skills. I was in favor of continuing the effort on our own. You know, saving myself the embarrassment of explaining to someone why my RV is running and I’m locked outside it, but Allison wasn’t in the sparing-me-embarrassment mood, so she went in search of a ladder. I tried to plead my case one last time to her back as she marched away. Then I just lowered my head, mumbled more shits and paced around the RV. Ali came back with the KOA guy and a ladder and insisted on going in herself. I’m not sure which bruise was bigger, the one on her shin from the window sill or the one on my ego, but at least we were back inside the RV. However, we still had the electrical problem, so we consulted Google and started making calls to several shops. Everyone was busy and offering us appointments 3 or 4 days later in the week, so after a quick consult with Meg and Brendan, we decided to just head on to...

Please lower your expectations for this blog post. I’m not going to be crafting my words carefully here because I’m halfway into my birthday trip. So I’m going to blow through this quickly before we venture out on the town for a fabulous dinner. We’re both terribly excited about having a meal that will last longer than 30 minutes. Being a slave to a time clock at Amazon has been a total awakening. We’re going to dine at Dudley’s on Short, followed by dessert at the Sky Bar and then go hear some live acoustic guitar music at the Parlay Social. WHAM BAM! Happy B-day to me! It was early October when we finished in Nashville, TN, which is when we had EXPECTED to be starting work for Amazon. So when our start date changed to November 2nd we suddenly had a whole month to fill up with destinations. We had missed visiting with my aunt Meg and uncle Brendan in Virginia on our first bolt down the east coast because we were racing to make it to the Bed & Breakfast conference in time. I really wanted to see them, they’d never met Allison, so that became our main priority. They live in the Washington D.C area so we plotted a fast route up that way. Two nights in Blountville, TN, two nights in Natural Bridge, VA and two nights in Harpers Ferry, WV and we stayed at KOA’s all along the way. WHAM BAM! We decided early on to join the KOA rewards program. We earn a free night for every 4th or 5th night we pay for and despite their somewhat inflated rates, you can always count KOA’s consistency. They have laundry, clean facilities, they decorate with fun stuff for the...

We’d only recently developed a crush on Nashville because of the television show on ABC. We have devoutly followed Rayna James, queen of country music and the cast of characters since the show first aired. Neither of us was ever a big country music fan before, though I did have a stint of boot-wearing, country line dancing 20 years ago. But one of the draws to the show is definitely the music and we’ve even made some purchases of those songs on iTunes, though I still wouldn’t call us “fans” per say. Let’s just say we don’t change the station now if we turn on the radio and it happens to be playing country music. So Allison’s most heart-felt desire for our week in Nashville was to hear as much live music as we could. We even had a mission to find the Bluebird Cafe, a place featured in the show often, because they hold “open mic” for up and coming musicians. As for me, I was just excited to wear my cowgirl hat everywhere. I’ve never really been a hat person. I’ve never loved a hat until this hat. A baseball cap is really the only thing I’ve worn often in my life, which I generally wear for a purpose, to shade my eyes from sun or to keep my hair from blowing all crazy in the wind. I don’t necessarily like the way I look in them and even though I stick my long pony tail out the back they can kinda “mark” me as a lesbian or at least a tom boy. Not my cowgirl hat. My cowgirl hat says somethin’ else and it makes me feel a certain way. Other hats I’ve tried along the way. We were in Nashville...