The Road To Helltown

I took my new used Volvo on a road trip today.

I took the backroads to Helltown. My grandmother lives there. It's not as bad as the name implies, but it's close.
From Wikipedia:

Front Royal was also known as "Helltown" in the 18th century, due to the readiness of its residents to fight at the slightest provocation. This was possibly due to the abundance of rough and wild mountaineers and river travelers in the area who came into town looking for alcohol and women.

I graduated from Helltown High School in 1984 and it was exactly like that even then.

Today, it's just a ride in the country. A nice one at that.
It was seventy -odd degrees today, so I opened up the sunroof and tried not to think about global warming... I tried not to think of how much it would suck if my as-yet untested new car decided to break down.
The day was so pretty that I found it difficult to maintain a proper level of anxiety, in fact I really enjoyed the trip- it seemed shorter than I remembered.

My grandma is old enough to remember when Front Royal was still called 'Helltown', but she's hanging in there alright. We had a false positive on a medical test cause a huge panic recently, so it was nice to see her without having to discuss funeral stuff.
Really nice.

My grandmother was the first passenger to ride in my new car.

Grandma, meet my new car. It's from Sweden, it's 16 years old and I like it a lot.

That's nice honey. Do you have a girlfriend?

Yes, Grandma. She's Swedish and 16 too. I'm thinking of adopting and doing the Woody Allen deal. Sort of a pre-emptive strike on my mid-life crisis. Speaking of pre-emptive strikes, she's also helping me find WMD in Norway. We need their oil, you know.

That's nice, dear. Where do you want to eat?

I dunno- I hardly recognize the place- I don't know where to eat.

So my grandmother starts listing all the local restaurants, and I pick the second one- Vickie's - which turned out to be an all-you-can-gorge food trough that caters exclusively to FBI, DEA and Border Patrol agents, who apparently only eat foods that are breaded, deep-fried and served with petroleum-based gravies.
Even the salad bar seemed to have been lightly misted with WD-40.

If any "rough and wild mountaineers" showed up looking for women and booze, they had better find somewhere else to look.
Almost every table at Vickie's was occupied by uniformed men with close-cropped hair and holstered guns, hungrily wolfing down platefuls of food that would kill most civilians after a forkful or two.

There's a Federal K-9 Training facility just up the road where they train drug-sniffing dogs and stuff, but I had no idea there were so many different Alphabet Agencies using it. It was a bit unsettling sitting next to a table of FBI,CIA and DEA agents.
I wonder who the plainclothes guys are with? Most of the plainclothes guys look Latino- perhaps they are translators, maybe Border Patrol?

After lunch, I went to visit my dad. He has a new computer and Grandma wants me to show him how to use it. Grandma says he hasn't been drinking, but I dunno...he looks horrible, I suppose he always will- he's only 60, but he moves like he's 80.

He hasn't got the foggiest idea what a computer is or what it does. He's at the "what do you mean when you say 'click' ?" phase. After twenty minutes he gets impatient and loses interest.
Suddenly he's got somewhere to go. I wish he'd said that before I drove up.

I spent four hours driving to see him and he blows me off after 20 minutes. He has an antique auction to go to, he says.
Huh?
They still do that in real-life?
The plan was for me to teach him how to do eBay auctions, but now he's suddenly got a real auction that he just can't miss. Out of the blue.
Gotta go.
Bye.

I wish I could believe him but I don't.

There was just enough daylight for me to make it to Luray , which is where my Grandad is buried.
He's on a hilltop in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley, so I sat next to his grave and watched the sun go behind the mountains. The sinking orange sun, the trees wearing their fall colors...ahhh... a perfection found only in nature.

My Grandad has the best sunsets. I really wanted to talk about Dad with him, but I didn't want to ruin such a fine sunset.