.::thursday, april 27::.

Ah, our voyage begins... with our new mechanically-inclined friends at Jiffy Lube.

Early Thursday morning, I finished packing all my gear - including the 3-foot-tall stuffed McPedro - into my stylin' station wagon and headed to Martinsburg, WV to get a quick oil change* before I left for the 8.5-hour drive to Toronto for the Paradise Toronto Comic Con.

(*note: I can change my own oil, but like most people who can, I pay good money not to.)

To my utter surprise... well, there were two things to my utter surprise. One, transmission fluid isn't supposed to be brown. So an hour and $85 later, I discovered the second utter surprise: the people at Jiffy Lube are like, unnaturally attracted to giant stuffed cacti.

Meanwhile, McPedro is unnaturally attracted to dreams of one day becoming a mechanic. Here's our hero McP playing dress-up at the Martinsburg Jiffy Lube while they jack up my car. Signature Service, baby!!

Eventually we got on the road, snapping the obligatory tunnel photo on the way.

West Virginia turned into Pennsylvania, which turned into New York. I was headed for Buffalo, so I checked the sign: Buffalo, 94. New York, 425.

Wha?

70 miles closer to Buffalo, I realized that by "New York," the sign meant "New York City," and sheepishly resolved that we were NOT 425 miles from New York State, but rather we were IN it.

Several hours into the trip I followed a gas pump sign into the middle of nowhere, hoping to fuel up.

Many, many miles later, I found this abandoned gas station, which was closed a little more often than Sundays.

Somehow Meredeth (yes, the car has a name) managed to creep her way to the NEXT nearest gas station (one that had GAS in it), and we were on our way to...

An All 'America' City.

This was the landmark; immediately after Buffalo comes....