the sisterhood of the traveling rex

We are loading the Rexmobile for a week on the open road. She is dented and scraped but eager to tear up some non-TDOT asphalt, and I am quite ready for some travel that doesn’t involve dodging bolts of lightning at some thirty thousand feet. Mrs. Camino agrees, I think. We have only flown together once, and I’m pretty sure she grew tired of the way that I kept saying our flight number over and over preceded by “the downing of”. It just sounded so plausible with that particular series of numbers for some reason, and she knew it as well as I did. It was a TV movie waiting to happen—and not of the Tony Danza variety.

This Sunday marks year five of our happy matrimony, and we thought that we would celebrate by heading east to visit my chain-smoking and poker enthusiast computer whiz of a little sister in Virginia for a couple of days and then bum around the general east coast area the rest of the week. We have a condo reserved for the first part of the week. After that, we go improvisational.

But there are drawbacks. Carl Weathers and Bukowski will have to be boarded for the week, and the way Carl is looking back from across the suitcase is breaking my heart. He knows that with luggage comes change, and changes are not often made with the consultation of dogs. Mrs. Camino will soon be leading him in to the boarder while I stay seated behind the steering wheel of a loaded Rexmobile because I might get emotional, and sad goodbyes do not make for confident dogs.

But there must be packed luggage before we can render the Rexmobile loaded, and Carl is useless in helping me decide on the tastefulness of Hawaiian shirts after Labor Day.

It is better to have Hawaiian shirts and not need them than to need Hawaiian shirts and not have them.

Benjamin Franklin said that, I think, and he was right. The man responsible for fire departments, the Franklin stove, Poor Richard’s Almanac, and the rest would have certainly appreciated a shirt sporting palm trees, hibiscus flowers, and the occasional native in a dug out canoe.

That settles that.

We’ll be on the road this afternoon and then probably stop and stay over in some creepy little mountain town to break the trip up. There should be Internet access and updates along the way, and I hope to present photographic evidence via our new digital camera upon our return.

Adios.