Lafayette, WINdiana

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Since I'm an old hack at this travel bloggin' stuff, I'll be blunt: Indiana is not a place you care about. You may only know it as a good place to be from, or the place where they hold the Daytona 500, or as a "fly-over" state, or as "one of the states that's near Illinois, and so on...thus, you may be wondering why I would choose to write about it as if it were a wondrous place full of mystery and myth, the earth from which springs the nectar of enchantment, or whatever. Well, I'm not going to do that, if you want that you should seek someone's blog about Thailand, or Ireland, or some other "land."

Indiana is a "land," though, it's smack dab in the middle of America's Heartland. This is where the bread and butter of America is eaten with a burger in between the bread and the butter. It's called a Butterburger. Look it up on the Internets. There are no wonders of the world here, unless you count a 2.5 mile stretch of pavement that looks like an unentangled infinity symbol . There are no kings or queens to speak of, unless you count the kings and queens of the road smoking Harley Davidson motorcycles up and down the main drag. There are miles of flat road, there are unwasted stretches of farmland, there are, surprisingly, no Shoney's restaurants, that I've seen.

I decided to move here with my girlfriend, who is going to Purdue to pursue a lucrative career in poetry. She is getting her MFA, and I couldn't be prouder. Purdue is in Lafayette, IN, about an hour from Indianapolis, and two hours from Chicago. I am writing this blog so that my family and friends, and anyone else who cares to look, can see what I'm doing and where I am, and what in the world I am doing in this god-forsaken place.

Kara (my girlfriend) and I have traveled out to visit the fair city of Lafayette in order to find an apartment, and as of 2 hours ago, we have one. But that's not all we've done since we got here. We have also slept in a motel. Let me tell you about it. Sorry in advance for the all-text, no-pictures deal, but both of my digital cameras have been stolen.

Our trip started in the dead of night in Seattle, taking a Shuttle Express van at the wee-est hour of 3:40 AM (too late to stay up for, too early to get any decent sleep) with a Shuttle Driver who deserved the ten dollar tip I gave him. He was on time, cordial, and actually very funny. He offered us a beer on the shuttle, and made the dead-eyed passengers guess who was ultimately headed where. And he managed to do all this in a way that was not annoying. In short, he made the unearthly hour bearable.

The flight was largely uneventful, just another uncomfortable, long sit in a phallus made of metal. The usual, as air travel goes. Upon renting the car, we discovered we had been bumped up to a Ford Escape instead of the economy car I paid for. Add to this that the Escape is silver, has a pimp sound system, and little dope-lights in the cabin in any color you like (I'll try to convey to you the dope-lights: little, adjustable-color LED lights located in the console, under the gearshift, and in the floor next to the gas pedal that make the inside of the car look slightly like a rave.) We were off.

We got caught in Indianapolis rush hour traffic, so our trip was delayed. Further was it delayed by my need to stop at a rest stop and smoke a cigarette, because I couldn't smoke inside the car or at the airport. Immediately we noticed that, even though we were standing right outside the door of this public rest stop, no one gave us the stank-eye or tried to shuffle us twenty-five feet from the door. God bless this place.

We finally got to Lafayette, drove around and got lost in West Lafayette, and decided to go back to our Super 8 room. At the front desk, we learned that the hotel was full up - there was to be a race called the Tough Mudder in a nearby town with a twelve-mile run incorporating an obstacle course complete with mud, a half-pipe ramp that you had to slide down and run up the side of, and electrified razor-wire. In the words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up. This is all hearsay, of course, but I am transcribing the hearsay verbatim. (The razor wire had little enough current, it was reported, not to cause lasting damage, but enough to make you not want to come in contact with it if you had already been in contact with it once.) We felt lucky to have made reservations, and luckier to be in the presence of such tremendous athletes as these, who would compete in the Hunger Games tryouts if they were to be held in a town near them.

We ate tapas-style at a Mediterranean restaurant downtown, and called it a night. We slept, finally, in the motel. It was awesome.

Much of Saturday was spent running around trying to find a place to live, but we did manage to have breakfast for lunch at a local diner (I had the 2X4, two eggs, two sausage, two bacon, two pancakes), and to view the Mighty Wabash, the river that divides Lafayette, IN from West Lafayette, IN. The city planners were forward-thinking enough to put Lafayatte on the east side of the river, so that West Lafayette could be built later, on the other side. We spent a little time at a park in the shade of a tree, and were told by our now-landlord that the Taste of Tippecanoe was to be held Saturday night. As it turns out, the weather had plans for lightning and thunder that probably canceled the three or four stages we saw being set up for live music. We decided to go to the Taste next year.

Today (Sunday) we got up at the crack of 10:30, missed out on the free Continental breakfast at the hotel, and ended up eating Burger King for brunch. We then oozed downtown in search of cheap thrills. We found none, so we went over to the college side of the river, West Lafayette, for cheaper thrills. We found some at a local record store (huge selection for such a small town, but then, it is a college town), though we made no purchases there, and headed up the hill toward Purdue. We browsed around some of the finer used-clothing and book stores, I bought a Bitch Magnet CD (actually, Kara purchased it for me because I got reamed on the car rental), and visited the campus itself.

This is a big-ass campus. No joke, I think it must have multiple zip codes. And though it is ostensibly a grid, many of the streets that run through campus are at odd angles to the grid, so getting around was more than a little zany. We fought the heat exhaustion by telling tasteless jokes that are better left out of print, which is basically how Kara and I interact at all times. We finally found one of the buildings she will be at, Heavilon Hall, better known as Heave Hall. We parked ourselves in the shade out front and got swarmed with ants. On the way we also saw some gigantic fucking hornets, but they weren't mad as their idiom would have had us believe, so we let them stay that way.

Finally wending our way back to the car, we ended up at the Super Target to check out My Little Pony toys. Kara loves MLP and I don't hate it, so I was happy to oblige, although I think that rumor about some stores pumping raw oxygen into their stores may be true, because I had the head rush of a life-time walking into Super Target.

So far the trip has been uneventful. They even cancelled the Tough Mudder today due to flooding and extreme weather, which makes me feel insulted for the expectant Mudders. Also, we saw some people on a streetcorner flying Planned Parenthood signs, which makes me think that maybe this place might not be so bad.

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