Charlotte

I have directions to get to Charlotte next, on roads that will probably take me twice as long to drive on than the interstates, but that is the idea after all. Out of Charleston, I am on 52 for the first short leg, and I am not too sure I am on the right road a couple of times, all the strip malls and lack of signs throw me off – I guess this is the area I missed coming into Charleston – but my natural sense of direction and finely-honed sensitivity for roads and destinations, tuned over the last seven thousand or so miles, comes through and I am indeed where I want to be. I am driving through farm country, of which there is plenty in America, I have found out. Don’t be fooled by the sprawl of the cities, it is the farmland that dominates this countries geography. It sort of looks like it will rain, and having been caught twice unprotected, both with damp and miserable results, in Louisiana and Mississippi, I have learned my lesson, and I put on my rain suit before the sky opens up. I get to a junction in the middle of nowhere, and as I turn right off one road onto the next, I consider stopping at the tiny store at the corner. I am about one hundred yards down the road when my brain delivers the verdict to turn around and get some food and drink. Inside, a trucker is ordering food ahead of me, and he starts asking me about where I am riding to and I tell him, and I also tell him about my trip. Oo-oweee, he sings in his thick southern accent, if I ever got enough money to do that I’d probably have a heart attack. I laugh to myself, feeling rich all of a sudden, and thinking about getting such a massive quantity of money your heart simply fails. Interesting way to go. I eat my deep-fried porkchop, and chicken. The porkchop is delicious. It’s probably the first deep-fried porkchop I have ever had, but I sure hope it’s not my last. The trucker, as he is going out the door, calls into me and says I left my light, on, which means I left my key in the ignition, and the ignition switched on. I tend to do that a bunch, which is not a good habit. It’s asking for someone to steal my bike or to wear out the battery. Neither is a good option. I continue on towards Charlotte, trying to remember the sequence of roads I have to turn down once I get towards the outskirts. The sky is still gray as I zoom past the fields and the pivots, but it doesn’t feel like it will rain, and in fact, it’s not quite as gray as it was earlier so I take a gamble and take my rain suit off. When I get towards Charlotte, I find my way onto about half of the streets I need to be on before I get lost. There is Sharon Road and Sharon Heights and all sorts of streets with the word Sharon in them and it’s confusing as hell, and where the directions say go slightly left, the road bends right, and I’m just about to get real pissed off after taking some trial excursions down this road and that to see if that is the way I’m supposed to go when I finally get on the right track and find Ben’s apartment complex. Of course it’s gated, and so I pull up in front of the gate, in between the enter and exit gates when I get a call from Ben who is on his way back and he gives me the code just as some girl who is leaving tells me her code too. I’m finally inside and unload all my stuff just as Ben is pulling up, all spiffed up and dressed like a responsible adult, and I can tell he’s not fooling anyone but the kids he teaches, but they’re all he needs to fool so it’s all good. It’s been about a year since I have seen Ben, and in that time I cut my hair and he got a real job.
I meet Ben’s girlfriend briefly when she comes over with her roommate’s dog, and we make plans to meet up with her downtown after she has dinner with her friends. I sort of organize my stuff and we head into downtown Charlotte to get some food and drinks. There are all sorts of things going on in downtown as we walk to an Irish pub. There are bands playing here, and bands, there, and a street is blocked off and people are setting up tents and stuff. Seems pretty lively. We get some burgers and beer, and wait for his girlfriend to call and head over to another Irish bar for another drink and then hear from his girlfriend who is already back home and tried calling him a bunch, but that’s cell phones for you.
Ben has to teach since today is Friday, so I take my bike into town and try to find the artsy district that Ben said was somewhere down North Davidson, or so he heard, but I find nothing and turn around and head back to town. I walk around a museum, Museum of the New South, or something like that for a while, looking at a southern music exhibition, and a cool exhibition of Southern stereotypes in comics. By the time I am worn out of museums, I head back to the parking garage and am about to head back to the apartment, but it’s raining hard all of a sudden. I sit inside the parking garage entrance, and fortunately don’t have to wait long as the sun comes out within fifteen minutes. I get a little lost on the way back, accidentally getting on some highway for a couple minutes which sucks because my glasses are just getting full of spray, and the bottoms of my jeans are too. We take it easy this evening, since we have plans to go out on town with some of his young teaching colleagues tomorrow. We cook up a feast of baked chicken, pasta and garlic bread, and get some beers and just lie around.
In the morning we hang out at the pool for a bit. From the crowd out here, pretty much everyone in the complex, and it is a large complex, is our age, which is nice. Except for the dudes grilling and pumping out Billboard’s Top Ten from last year, but whatever. I spend a little time servicing my bike, and graciously decide to let Ben take it around the parking lot for a spin. He doesn’t crash it which means he did good as far as I’m concerned, and I think I sold him on the idea of buying a motorcycle. Nice. In the evening, a bunch of his teacher friends come over, and I forget most of their names within seconds of meeting them, but that’s just how I am sometimes. We hang around the apartment for a while, until a cab comes to get us, and then we head back to the same Irish bar Ben and I got dinner at the first night. It’s a fun night and the bar is packed. There is an upstairs which I didn’t know about the first time I was here, and they have a band playing covers of songs and it’s pretty crowded and hot, but they happen to sell drinks here to cool you down.