Plucky Survivors See America 2006: Prologue
August 22, 2006
Welcome to the Plucky Survivors See America section of CancerChick.com! Mary and her good friend Rick, both esteemed travel writers, will be embarking on a 2,300 mile journey through the south central portion of the United States in September and this is where you’ll be able to read all about it.
Every day during the trip, Mary and Rick will be posting daily updates, photos, and even reviews of the things they see and do – everything from the Britney Spears Museum to Graceland and a few more serious things along the way.
To find out more about the trip, use the navigation on the right. You’ll find information, planned routes, photographs, and much more.
This is the Daily Updates page, the one you should bookmark and check every day to monitor our progress.
Plucky Survivors See America will begin on September 1st, 2006.
August 23, 2006
Seven days until Plucky Survivors See America begins! To be perfectly frank, we both need a break – Mary from her work and her school and that whole cancer hoohah and Rick from his work and his other work and then there’s always his work.
Our mantra: “The first cheeseburger will taste like freedom.”
This section of the website has been redone to include the latest information on our route and has been prepped to accommodate our daily reports. Use the links on the left to navigate through the journey for a preview.
Mini updates every day until the trip begins on September 1, 2006!
August 25, 2006
Oops, missed a day already. That doesn’t bode well. But did we mention how busy we are and how much we really need this vacation? Yeah, thought so.
Okay, so it’s less than a week until we’ll be winging our way from our home in Los Angeles to New Orleans and every day we question each other, “Why aren’t we leaving right now?” And there is no acceptable answer other than understanding that the anticipation of the copious amounts of wonderfully southern food we intend to eat builds with each day and will make it all that much more sweeter when we actually get to taste it. Find a metaphor there if you wish.
Meanwhile, we are nervously eyeing the Weather Channel about this little thing thousands of miles out in the Atlantic called Ernesto, which if you believe weather experts, could be hitting the US gulf coast somewhere around next Thursday as a hurricane of some category or another. Of course the primary reason we are watching nervously is because we can’t bear the thought of another hurricane hitting an region that has barely started to recover from Katrina much less actually recovering from it, but we’d be lying if we said we were not being totally selfish and thinking of how it could totally ruin Plucky Survivors See America.
Although we have already decided that, God forbid, something awful happens our road trip becomes a boat trip through whatever flooded area needs our help and we retitle it “Plucky Survivors Save America (or at least a little part of it).”
But we’re staying positive and are convinced that Ernesto will veer off, fall apart, or otherwise not be an issue primarily because it knows better than to mess with us right now. It’s been a long year.
More updates coming.
August 26, 2006
Take a look at this:
We swear this isn’t all about us because the thought of yet another hurricane hitting anywhere, much less the Gulf Coast region or worse New Orleans, is too much to even think about. But the fact that, according to the weather service, it is headed pretty much where we’re heading exactly when we’re heading there makes us wonder exactly how many puppies we kicked in former lives. We formally apologize to the people of the Gulf Coast because if Ernesto does hit it’s all our fault.
But a silly little thing like a possible hurricane will not stop Plucky Survivors See America, oh no. We’re still convinced that Ernesto and Mother Nature will come to their respective senses and send the storm out to spin harmlessly in the Atlantic ocean somewhere but if it doesn’t, we have back-up plans already under consideration (flying into a different airport, etc.).
Meanwhile, the pre-trip preparation continues with maps being printed, computers being formatted, travel size toiletries being purchased, and Krispy Kreme donuts being consumed. And before you ask, yes, that last one does have to do with the trip. It’s called training. We’re not shy about sugar, salt, pork-fat, and red meat in our daily lives but even we need to get our bodies in shape to deal with the the sheer quantity of said items we’ll be consuming on the trip. We don’t want to get the carbohydrate bends.
So we’re at 5 days and counting until the plane ride and another day until the road trip officially starts… weather permitting, of course.
August 27, 2006
We don’t want Ernesto to hit Florida. We want it to fall apart and go spinning out over the Atlantic. But we must say that this graphic from the Weather Channel is much more comforting than the one we posted yesterday, not only for our trip but for New Orleans.
Not much to report on preparation except that we’re putting together one hell of a road trip sound track. Among the titles of our “mix tapes”:
Tenuous at Best: A Plucky Survivors Soundtrack
Disco That Doesn’t Suck
Guilty Pleasures
Songs That Will Make Us Wish We Had Rented a Convertible
Pardon Me, Have You Seen My Angst?
Chicks Who Could Kick Your Ass
Eletrifying 80s (multiple volumes)
Delicious Disco (ditto)
That’s So Gay
Before Disco Came Along and Ruined Everything
I Dare You Not to Dance
Battle of the Sexes (songs with Man, Woman, Boy, or Girl in the title)
“Love” Songs (songs with “love” in the title)
You’d think that this means we actually have time to do things like this. No, it just means we aren’t doing something else important. Like packing.
To be continued…
August 28, 2006
The update for the day is fairly simple:
We intend to try to recreate this when we visit Dinosaur World in Arkansas.
3 DAYS!!!!
August 29, 2006
We’re at less than 48 hours before we fly off to New Orleans to begin Plucky Survivors See America and we have to admit that mixed in with our excitement is a great deal of hysteria. And not good, “Oh my God it’s The Beatles” hysteria. We’re talking full-blown, panic-attack style hysteria because we both have so much to do before we leave and not enough hours to actually accomplish them even if we completely eliminate sleep.
Neither one of us has even thought about packing yet and Rick is convinced that at some point tomorrow night he’s going to be standing in front of his very full suitcase weeping because there isn’t enough room to pack the shirt he got while delivering pizzas for Domino’s in 1985. “You never know!” will be the echoing refrain.
Mary, on the other hand, is considering postponing her packing meltdown because she just doesn’t have time to pack and may just bring clothes from the New Orleans house. But we’re both convinced that will also end in tears, so expect a shopping trip somewhere in our futures.
Meanwhile, Rick has finished “The Plucky Survivors See America Big Book o’ Fun,” a full notebook of maps, itineraries, alternate itineraries, restaurants, alternate restaurants, restaurants near where we’re going to be but will have to go out of our way to get to, confirmation e-mails for hotels and rental cars and the like, alphabetized lists of the music on the 39 CDs he created, car games, information for a scavenger hunt, and more because apparently someone gave him OCD for his birthday.
Are we there yet?
August 30, 2006
People aren’t believing Rick about the “Big Book o’ Fun.” There will be proof. There will be pictures, oh yes. But you’ll have to tune in to the actual road trip reports for evidence of its existence. Sort of like a yeti.
Anyway, tomorrow is the big day as we fly to New Orleans and eat entirely too much food before heading out on Friday for the real beginning of Plucky Survivors See America. Neither one of us has really processed the fact that a) we’re doing this and b) it’s tomorrow but we’re now starting to grasp just how real it is. Sort of like the Big Book o’ Fun. And yetis.
Meanwhile, Mary recently noticed that, since she hadn’t done much (or any) of the planning (for a travel writer, that’s a vacation!), she wasn’t actually sure where all we were going. She thought she might try to find out and then thought “Eh. Why bother. Rick knows.” But she did glance at Rick’s proposed budget and observed “$20 a day per person for food? Are you nuts? Have you met us?” Stay tuned to see how closely we end up adhering to that financial plan, or if we blow it the first day on extra Natchitoches meat pies.
We’ll have one more update from New Orleans about flying and car rental and eating tomorrow night and then the real fun begins on Friday.
No seriously, are we there yet?
August 31, 2006
Three good signs for Plucky Survivors:
1) Because we’re going to spend many hours in the car driving through the Deep South we of course decided to learn Italian via 10 audio CDs. It made sense at the time and even if it isn’t precisely useful where we’re going (or anywhere outside of Italy, we suppose) we looked forward to finding out how to say “Does that come with gravy?” in a romance language. And so as we sat in LAX, we overheard a woman behind us say to her husband “Can I look at the New Orleans book?” Mary turns around, nearly discretely, and sure enough, it’s Frommer’s Portable New Orleans: A Full Post-Katrina Update. Always modest, she promptly claims authorship. And where are these fine people from? Italy.
2) Mary reads an article in an old New Yorker (she’s catching up) and it mentions Yetis. How often do you read about Yetis two days in a row?
3) The distinctly un-literary beach read book Rick read on the plane had gratuitous slams against Britney Spears. And what’s our first stop?
Searching for signs that weren’t there? Silencio! Wait… is that Italian? Or is that Spanish? We haven’t listened to the CDs yet. We’ll get back to you.
The flight was smooth as was baggage claim although it’s probably a good thing that Mary didn’t discover until later that the unlocked lock on her checked bag had been cut off and the bag unceremoniously searched by people looking for, oh, we don’t know, a bottle of Fanta we suppose.
Traveling in plushy style in a full-size rented Buick (The Plucky-Mobile) we arrived at Mary’s New Orleans house to a boisterous welcome from house mates Nettie and Diana.
A typically fabulous New Orleans meal followed at Ralph’s on the Park, where we were joined by Ti Martin who reported, amidst much raucous alcohol fueled conversation by everyone at the table, that we are mere weeks away from the re-opening of Commander’s Palace and even though that has nothing to do with this trip, we’re still taking it as a sign because it’s food.
Finally a visit with Poppy Brite (author extraordinaire) and then back to the house for some last minute packing hysteria in our penultimate hours.
See you from Natchitoches tomorrow night! Plucky Survivors Starts…. Right now.
