Mortal Prey and Indiana Beaches

For a day on which we woke up in a nasty motel in Dunkirk and covered 450 miles and three states in an un-air-conditioned car, it was a pretty darn good day. We got out of Dunkirk as fast as possible and drove about an hour to "PA line" i.e., the border of the northwest corner of Pennsylvania. New York, of course, is huge. But you always forget how huge PA is too. Anyway, we had breakfast in that little corner of PA at a restaurant called Cracker Barrel. Ha ha, what a place. How to describe it… fakish old west-ish general store geared toward both fussy grandmothers and long-distance truckers together with a no-nonsense huge portions diner. The place was packed. Apparently Sunday brunch at Cracker Barrel is a tradition thereabouts, and there we were in the middle of it. We decided we could wait twenty minutes for a table, though, and browsed the general store.

It was then that we stuck gold. All along we had been stopping at travel plazas, looking not only for penny squishers but also for someplace (anyplace) that sold audio books. That would be just the thing to make the long hot drive go faster, right? But can you believe it, not a single one of the big travel plazas on the long long NY thruway had place selling audio books. They had the same fast food places, coffee places, ice-cream places, and little convenience stores (also gas stations and bathrooms). Understandable (I guess) that none of these would sell something as fancy as audio books. But there were also stores in almost all of the travel plazas dedicated to "travel accessories", which were apparently limited to sunglasses and CD cases. There were also big racks of DVDs for sale. But you can't watch a DVD while you are driving. If you can sell a DVD, you can sell an audio book--can't you? Apparently not.

To make a long story short, the Cracker Barrel did have audio books--even a discount section. After long negotiation, we settled on Mortal Prey, which brilliant work of literature you can read about here. The Cracker Barrel actually runs a sort of lending library of audio books. You buy one for $30 and return it for $27. Then you can buy another one for $30 again. Eventually, though, they get discontinued for one reason or another. Then they end up on the discount shelf. That's where we got Mortal Prey, half off.

Then we had an enormous, delicious breakfast ("do you want the grits with that?") and hit the road. It turned out Mortal Prey ended up on the discount shelf because it was missing disk 1. Well, disk 1 is a much smaller loss than disk 5, right? We started in on disk 2, and had no problem following the story because any information of substance is repeated five or six times. And the beginning of the story was easy to deduce, since it was a fairly straightforward revenge plot! But interesting enough to keep us listening straight through to Indiana, with a short break for lunch in Ohio. (By the way, it is really hard to find vegetarian food in Ohio. Even Applebees doesn't have any.)


We ended up in Chesterton, about 45 minutes outside of Chicago. We could of course have made it to Chicago, but it was Sunday (7/2) and we couldn't pick up our lease or keys until Monday morning. So we had called ahead and made a reservation in Chesterton, Indiana. Of course, when we finally did get to the hotel (it was an Econolodge), they were unable to find our reservation for a king bed non-smoking at the rate of $64 + tax. It was the clerk's first day to be fair. Also the wireless was broken. He offered us two double beds for $75, but we weren't interested and went to the Super8 across the road. No wireless there either, but at least we managed a queen bed for $65. Also, we discovered that Chesterton is the home of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
Yep, sand dunes on Lake Michigan. We drove down there just before sunset (it was only about five minutes away), paid the exorbitant out-of-state park fee ($10--come to think of it, about what we saved by changing motels), and wandered about on a nice, sandy, life-guarded, dune-ridged beach. A beach in Indiana. Of course the water wasn't salty, and in the distance we could see the smokestacks of Gary. But it felt pretty nice after all that driving (and sniper-murdering on the audio book) to stretch our toes and watch the sunset.