Local Color

I did an 8 mile section of the AT today, but I'll talk about that over in my AT Journal at Astrogirl.

After Tino picked me up, he wanted to eat at the mall food court.  This sounded great to me (which is unusual, but there's nothing like hiking in cold weather to make you hungry), so we went to the sad little mall in Winchester.

Food was eaten, and then we went to Sears to buy a workbench for Tino (he changed all the fluids on the Miata today, and a need had developed for tool organization...and he needed some more metric wrenches).  We proceeded to the pick up area, where the following conversation was sparked:

Nicole:  yeah, that's the truck

Sears Guy 1:  the Wagoneer?

Nicole:  yup.

Sears Guy 1: I had me one o' them once.

Sears Guy 2:  Yeah, so did I.  What happenned to yours?

Sears Guy 1:  Well, I really beat the thing up and then I lost it one day when I went muddin'

Sears Guy 2:  What, you just left it there?

Sears Guy 1:  Yeah.  I mean, if you can't get that thing out, how could I get someone else to get it out for me?

Sears Guy 2:  Man, I never lost anything bigger than a Ford Escort muddin'.

OK, so mudding is some redneck pursuit in which it is apparently possible to lose an entire vehicle.  I related this to Tino, since all he heard was the line that ended in Ford Escort and he didn't catch the word "muddin'".  I asked if that's meant what I thought it meant.  It does.  Tino claims this is incredibly entertaining, but that he never had a car he was willing to subject to it.

He then asked if I'd ever noticed a rusting car stranded in a ravine, and I said yeah (in West Virginia, as it happens).  That's apparently how these cars come to be there.