Strange places

Published by Helen | Filed under Music, North Carolina, Out and About, Travel

I haven’t been able to take a decent road trip in a long time. I spend so much of my “vacation” downtime in Philadelphia that even the backchannel routes I take to get there are becoming overly familiar. In those cases, it’s easy to take for granted the journey, especially when the destination has so much energy.

I’m presently in semirural North Carolina, just far enough outside of Charlotte, talking up all our creative pieces. from Etsy and knitting to comedy to public speaking and radio broadcasting with Xiane. I’m here while my son is hanging out in Chapel Hill with his friend.

It’s great hanging out with another retired DJ who’s contemplating going back behind the decks in a virtual environment. I just wish I had a better mixer than i-Tunes at the moment. While my focus remains primarily 80s alternative music (in fact, I registered http://dontyouforgetabout.me yesterday during the .me domain rush while everyone else was trying to get meme.me and aweso.me and all those other .me puns), I there’s a lot of other music I really love, everything from trip-hop and dub to bluegrass and old-timey. Plus I’ll always be just a touch of gothy punky gothpunk because, well, I am, even if I’m showing up in Good Housekeeping next month.

Oh, yeah, I’m showing up in Good Housekeeping next month, speaking of strange places.

And strange places brings us back to the point of this post: When I go to Philadelphia, the path is well-worn in my memory, soothing and comforting. In particular, some portions of the journey still trigger the memory of my journey out of Virginia in 1999, of learning to walk and fly on my own, and it’s a feeling of victory, of redemption. Those are good feelings, but nostalgic; and the drive to Philadelphia is mostly a chore to get to the only place that loves me as much as I love it.

But random road trips like the one I’m on now, where on a whim I decided to visit a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time (and last night, also on a whim, landing in BeckySays’s living room where we chatted until the sun had nearly gone down), and where every turn brings new discoveries–and I didn’t have the camera out today to catch such gems as the dollar store version of a car dealership where no car is more than $995–it’s trips like this where the journey is the destination, and as such, are the best kind.

Follow me on Utterz for media posts tomorrow as Xiane and I visit Asheville, NC.