Leaving Trenton

I drive and get tired and lay over near Tampa at the Flying J truck stop. I looked for a place to plug into a local phone line to transmit this. It really would make my cutting edge road trip blog complete.

But the phones at the tables in the restaurant can't make outgoing calls except to 800 numbers. I know some tables have internet access phones but they're all occupied. The waitresses are a little confused about all this, that I want to eat my dinner with my computer plugged in. I ask if the driver's lounge has these hookups, and they think yes.

So I just eat instead.

Later I found that you call those accesses "data ports" - but they charge to use them. So I wouldn't have transmitted anyway.

Meaning the morning is now shark's teeth time! As bad as I want to go home, I can't just pass Bone Valley by.

I usually go only on Sundays. The miners are very nice about looking the other way as I wander about in the shark's teeth quest, but why push it? This time, I go to my favorite place, and the big fossil parking lot is empty of the big mining vehicles. They're all off in the moonscape, mining away.

And I see new piles of debris, chock full of neat stuff.

As I move down the road toward the parking lot I see a couple of guys working on a vehicle. I'm surprised. Finally I just say, Hi. They stare a minute and touch their hats to me and continue working. Seems they'd rather look the other way. So I take my cue, and although a couple more vehicles go by during the day - driving close by me - I don't do more than look up. Everyone seems fine with this.

Oh, neat stuff.

Finally I'm tired and thirsty and head on back out. I make my way through the countryside to the Duette Country Store and see two long lines of migrant workers at the registers. I sit back in the car, wait for the lines to die down, buy a 2-liter coke.

It's a tiny place. They kindly look away from my muddy bare feet. I see a snakeskin on the wall, tacked up like a stuffed fish. A big Eastern Diamondback rattler. There's a picture of the snake, alive, swimming around in the borrow pit behind the store. A cashier tells me, They had to kill her, she was living back there okay for a while but then she started chasing customers around.

Not good for business.

I get back in the car. It won't start.

Uh-oh. I sense the beginning of a Car Broke Down adventure.


Tree and wildflowers, Trenton