June 10 [Leave for up North]
June 10
Meghan must have rolled over sometime in the night, leaving me completely pillow-less. When I woke up I was on my side with my back towards her, and she had one arm on my gaskin and the other was under me.
She woke up as soon as I started moving around and ran her hand up to my stifle and then started petting me on the barrel, going against my coat but it was nice, so I didn't mind. I tilted my head back into her chest and she put her chin down on my forelock.
I let her pet me for a little bit then I pushed against her to get her to roll on her back and turned around so that I could put my head on her chest and when I did she reached up and ran her fingers through my mane.
When we were done snuggling and cuddling in bed I had to admit that I didn't have any food for breakfast except for the mixed chips and I think there was still one beer in the electric icebox unless I lost count last night. She said that was okay, we could eat later. She told me that the dining hall at college was still open, because the seniors were supposed to stay through until graduation, but she thought it would be sad and lonely to be virtually all alone there, and I agreed.
She went over to the papasan and sat down in that and looked out the front windows and I jumped up in her lap. She said if she had a brush, she'd brush out my mane, and so I got up and went to the bathroom and brought mine back (it was nice to be able to leave my grooming supplies in the bathroom and not have to carry them back and forth all the time) and gave it to her.
She made a big show of wiping it off on her shirt but I don't think she really minded. Then she brushed out my mane while I sat on her lap and she said she could do my tail, too, but there wasn't any way that we could do it comfortably on the papasan chair, so she sat on the floor and I stood in front of her and let her brush it.
While she was working, she asked a lot of questions about where we were going, and I had to admit that I didn't know. Aric and I had looked at a lot of places on the map, and some of them that I'd pointed to he knew what was there but there were a lot of other places that he'd never been to and some of them he thought would be good places to stop.
I made her keep sitting on the floor so that I could brush her hair, too, because I don't think it would have worked for us to get back in the papasan chair.
After that she got the rest of the way dressed and we decided that we'd walk to Nina's for breakfast because it would be good to have a full belly for the drive. I got an omelet and she had scrambled eggs and toast, then we walked back to campus together and she told me to call her when I was back in town and we'd do something fun together. And she said that she was going to bring over some fabric for curtains, too.
We kissed goodbye and I flew back to my apartment, just long enough to get my flight gear and my grooming supplies, then I went over to Aric's house.
His house was somewhat packed up, too. There was some stuff missing from downstairs, and when I went in his bedroom about half his things were missing and there was a collection of boxes on the floor.
He was asleep in bed, and I woke him up by yanking the blanket off him and then stretching out on his chest. Then I told him that it was time to get up because I was ready for the road trip and he said I was too enthusiastic for this early in the morning. I told him that it was nearly eleven, and he blinked and looked at his telephone and said that it was a good thing he'd packed everything last night.
I asked if there was anything I could do to help, and he said that he was ready to go, all he had to do was get dressed and I swear he took forever on purpose. So I said that I was going to fill up the birdfeeder so they wouldn't go hungry while he was gone and he told me not to steal any sunflower seeds this time.
I said that he couldn't stop me if he was naked, and flew out the window and down to the garage. Cause I knew he'd be watching, I took the bag right outside and flew it up to the feeder and dumped it in without taking any of the sunflower seeds from it, then I closed the lid and put the bag back in the garage where it went.
Then when I came back out, I shook a bunch of the seeds into the tray and ate the sunflower seeds before going back up to his room. I told him I wanted to make sure it was working properly.
He said that in all of his life, he'd never thought he'd have a girlfriend who ate out of birdfeeders, and he'd dated a rennie before.
I didn't know what that was, and he said that it was someone who worked at Renaissance festivals, which was sort of like the SCA event but bigger and with a whole lot more people.
So I asked if there were any of them in Michigan, and he said there was a big one in a town called Holly and I said that I wanted to go to it.
He told me he'd be back before it was over and it would be a lot of fun to go together.
Then he put on his shirt and patted his pockets to make sure he had his things and he said that he was ready to go.
He started Winston and said that the most fun thing about road trips was the trip itself, so he was going to make it his mission to avoid major highways wherever possible, and we'd just go wherever we felt like for the next week.
Once we were across the 131 Highway, he turned off on 9th Street and drove all the way to H Ave. and then went out that way, over the part where it turned to dirt and where we'd spent the night in the clearing in Winston. He had to zig-zag as roads ended as we went on—one thing about the back roads, he told me, was that they didn't always go all that far before they stopped, but that was what made it fun.
It was weird when we crossed into another county, all the roads had numbers, and as we kept working our way north they counted down, until we were on 4th Ave, then we went up 46th Street and wound up on 102nd Ave. He said it was because we'd crossed into another county and they had a different way of numbering.
I thought that would be kind of confusing, but I guess it made sense to humans.
It was kind of like riding on the train because there was hardly any other traffic, and we passed through farmland and woods and over rivers and by ponds.
I asked him if he knew where he was, and he said that he had no idea, but he knew that if he kept driving generally west eventually he'd reach Lake Michigan, and after that as long as we kept the lake to our left, we'd be going north.
That sounded like good enough directions to me.
We eventually did get to the lake after crossing the 196 Highway, and turned onto a road called Lakeshore Drive, which I thought was a good name for it. We were kind of back a ways, so we couldn't see it very much, but sometimes there were openings and there it was.
We ran out of road in Saugatuck, and had to backtrack to find a bridge that went across. Aric looked at his map and said that this was the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, and I thought that was kind of neat—we'd been driving for a couple of hours already, and now we were at the place where the river ended.
I was curious where its source was, and Aric said that he didn't know but he thought it must be this side of Jackson, because he said that the Grand River started in Jackson and we hadn't crossed that yet.
We had to do another detour around a big lake called Lake Macatawa, which was in Holland. He said it was named after a Holland in Europe, and that there was a genuine Dutch windmill there, and I wanted to go see it, so he checked the map and drove to Windmill Island, which is where it was.
We had to park and then go across a little suspension bridge to get to the island, and when we got inside everything looked pretty familiar but it was bigger than what I was used to. Aric started trying to explain what things were, but he was just guessing, and I had to explain it to him. He might be smart about machines but he didn't know anything about windmills.
He wanted to know how I knew so much, and I said that windmills were an important part of the Equestrian economy because that's how grain was turned into flour and practically every village had one or more and when I was a filly our teacher took us to visit one and the miller showed us around.
When we were done there, we had to go through downtown Holland before we could get back on the coastal road.
We stopped at a little park for dinner, and it gave me a chance to fly over the lake some and stretch my wings out.
He drove us a little bit further, all the way up to Muskegon, and then we went to a big park there that let you spend the night. There were people that had white wheeled houses which were called Arveys and also some people had tents and all we had was Winston, but that was all right. That just meant that we didn't have anything to set up.
He said it was the beginning of the busy season, and after the Fourth of July it would be pretty packed but there were still a lot of kids in school so there weren't that many families out yet.
He parked Winston so that the tailgate faced the water, and we walked around the park and down towards the water and he sat on the beach while I played in the water and made friends with a couple of kids who were building little towers out of sand that kept collapsing when the water hit them.
When it started to get dark, I went back and sat next to him, and we watched the sun set over the lake, and when it had gone below the horizon a few people on the beach started clapping. Aric said that was silly, but I thought it was nice. Maybe the sun does set every day whether you watch it or not, but there's nothing wrong with appreciating it.
Back at our campsite, we sat on the tailgate for a while and then I got inside and Aric closed it and climbed over, then pulled the big glass back window shut. There were sliding windows on the side and in the front that let a nice breeze in, and we snuggled up inside a pile of blankets he'd brought.
Stats
Page generated in 0.079 seconds
Total duration
1,090 users online
1,924,072 hits today, 1,996,409 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Had to look up an reference chart for those first few descriptions. "Where the hell is the gaskin?"
Lets just hope she doenst have a Benny over the Roadtrip.
Arveys.... Why not? She calls the other vehicles by name.
I have to wonder how many mistakes that were made early on in translation are still around.
It is confusing, it doesn't make sense.
Well, in a way it does, but...
That actually makes a lot of sense in a society where 1/3 of the population can control the weather. Forget water wheels, just hire a passing Pegasus or two.
Pegasuses.
Pegasuses.
Great beginning for the little roadtrip, it has already got that somewhat removed feeling to it.
How come it took Moses 40 years to lead the Jews from Egypt to the Promised Land (300 miles?) but Sacajawea was able to lead Lewis and Clark from Washington to the Pacific ocean (3000 miles) in 3 years time?
Because being a woman, she would stop and ask for directions
Also, back in Equestria Celestia lowers the sun every day. The pilot implied that if this is public, most Ponies don't see it. Still, there could be a daily ceremony. Like the pledge of allegiance to start school days.
Aric's little jaunt reminds me of when I missed a turn trying to get out of Alabama (this was before GPS units were widely commercially available) and had to basically just head in one direction and hope I ran into the Interstate.
And now I have a GPS and that will never happen again. Because when you've had as many car problems as I have, it's not the journey, it's the destination!
i wonder what celestia would think ...
i bet Silver would be happier(?) with one way reflective foil
The fiend! Surely there is no greater insult to any Equestrian, there is no option now but all out war!
I can't help but think Megan is getting a free show in that position.
Oh, we're getting this out in the open now? AWESOME! Drama incom-!
Oh...
So, no post-drama snuggles.
7475001 That's one of the great things about this story and this character. There's more than one way to interpret Meghan's question, and Silver took the naive interpretation.
Time will tell if that was the correct one.
If I'd known Silver Glow was coming to Holland, I would have waved. Or possibly stowed away in Winston.
Also, assuming they took the Blue Star Highway/A-2 bridge rather than the I-196/US-31, they were, sadly, a few years too late to see the Keewatin, which I think they both would have liked.
7475823
See, this is why I love this series, it's fandom, and the fanfiction it produces. I'd never even heard of the Keewatin, let alone that it had been moved. (Props on the Wikipedia link, btw)
TANGENTIAL LEARNING!
7474303 It probably grew out of each city-state having their own numbering or naming system for their roads. Otherwise you might see a road in Ponyville numbered "317740th street" because the numbering system starts in the center of Canterlot, and every dirt path is sequentially numbered from there.
<I must keep track of all the numbers!)
Twilight would love that.
7477363 It simply depend on under wich juridiction a road or street is. Smaller road and streets are under a municipality's juridiction and their name (or number) will change as soon as you leave said municipality. Road of larger importance will be under a larger entity's jurdiction.
As a whole it cannot make sense unless we unify the road and street naming.
From an administrative point of view, it make sense.
From the point of view of making an understandable map, it doesn't.
7477632
Heh, who needs ID cards when you've got butt labels?
7477765 I think we had something similar in Pikie Pie vs the TSA
7477471
Again, same. In doing research for stories, I've ended up reading a boatload of poetry, learning about Pakistan, theater terminology, and all manner of horse information.
7477807
Still more worried about Aric to be honest... people who don't like human guys with a pony girlfriend will be more common I think. When The SG is back in Equestria, he'll still be that guy you heard about from your uncle who knows an old lady down on the corner of that street where he maybe lives... oh and if you really want to know you can find the facebook pictures and youtube videos. Don't think he's realized that yet.
Cedric and Aquamarine on the other extremity? Persons who can punch you through a door (or buck you through the tree it was made from) tend to get away with much less hassle.
7477930
I was talking about humans, since the original quote was also about humans.
The default for humans is the female form and some features get modified or suppressed by the Y chromosome. This is made apparent from males who suffer from complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. Even tho they have XY chromosomes and should technically be males, they have female genitalia and often appear even more feminine than individuals with XX chromosomes.
7477958
We eat quite a wide range of things, but mostly stuff we took from other countries. The fish and Chips shop on the corner is run by the Geovanni family, there are also Chineese and Indian (Although most of the actual curry dishes were created in the UK) take aways on almost all streets as well as Pizza.
As I'm in Scotland you can add Haggis and Porridge to the list.
7477890
My old History teacher docked points for simple spelling and grammar mistakes. Yeah, I accidentally wrote "hearsay" instead of "heresy," but it was obvious what I meant. Gimme a break, lady!
Still, that was my best subject and I was a bit of a teacher's pet towards her. At graduation, she approached me and handed me a small check as congratulations. Maybe for making her laugh when I called King Pepin the Short (Charlemagne's dad) a Hobbit.
One time, we were given a mound of modeling clay and told to make a reasonably accurate 12th Century Norman castle. I was a bit of a jerk to the girl who thought it should have cannons (which weren't used in Europe until 200-some years later), giving her a scolding lecture, then the teacher scolded me for not bothering with architecture and taking bits of clay to make small model animal corpses to catapult over the walls to pollute the defenders' water and spread the plague. :)
7477890
Unless you get into the Apocrypha where the Grigori angels fell in love with mortal women (particularly attracted to their hair, for some reason) and spawned a race of evil, cannibalistic giants that the Great Flood was intended specifically to exterminate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Jubilees
7477651
When I went down to Florida for my cruise I had an extra day before my flight back home where I drove around and did nothing.
I saw a wild parrot and an iguana sitting next to each other and I was the only person to freak out and start taking pictures.
Tomatoes were once thought to be poisonous because they are related to nightshade. We eat them today because Thomas Jefferson (3rd president, among other things) liked them & often served them at dinners. Tomatoes are also related to tobacco. IDK they were poisonous to horses, but it doesn't surprise me.
Going HIE, there are probably a lot of missionaries in Equestria. I don't think I've ever seen a story about that. Or a Peace Corps on EQ. You have to wonder what they'd make of Scientology.
7477918
*Looks up Hightops*
Oh yeah, that might be a problem. It's still doable with a longer "pull" but slipping it on without hands is impossible.
For boots, you'd have to manually release the tension and "step off". It was easier when I wore cold weather boots (with inlaid felt, so it was looser, anyway) compared to normal leather boots. Been a while since I wore one. :V
7477505 Solanine is toxic to humans as well. The tomato fruit has none, but the rest of the plant does.
Raw potatoes have a little in them, unless they're in the sun when growing and turn green... then they have a lot and can make you quite ill.
7477061 Ah no I wasn't able to get that Jeep. I called to see if he had it still and he said that he already sold it.
Oh yes, very good point. That's when the loneliness will really sink in.
Well so far this little jaunt around the peninsulas sounds really fun!
7474168
Stick around, and you'll not only get to learn equine anatomy, but also fun facts about different types of harnesses.
7474178
Or die of dysentery.
7474185
And of course that's how it's pronounced.
7474239
I would expect lots of them. Heck, Biblical scholars are still debating translations. Although maybe it's easier when you have a language that is being spoken and can potentially clarify face to face what you mean.
Although it strikes me that a significant challenge would be that there are things that neither language actually has words for.
7474303
In Kalamazoo County, east/west roads are lettered (A Ave, B Ave, and so on; halfway roads get both letters [KL Ave]) and north/south roads are numbered (10th St., 11th St., etc.). Nice and logical.
In Van Buren County (right next to Kalamazoo County), they did it one better. East/west roads and north/south roads are numbered, and those are the block numbers. If they're east/west, they're avenues; north/south are streets. So if you're looking for 25048 14th Street, you'd know to look between 25th Ave and 26th Ave. And that's all well and good until you're driving wrecker and your dispatcher just gives you the numbers and not whether it's the street or the avenue . . . 14302 23rd can be two different places in the county.
7474317
Yeah, that'd be one benefit to windmills. Likewise, they probably never bothered to dig irrigation canals like we've done, because you just need a couple pegasi to push clouds over your fields when they need water.
7474432
Thanks!
Road trips up north are the best road trips. Although I will say that Possum Trot, KY was a fun destination on a road trip south.
7474458
At least they weren't applauding Alaska.
7474518
I don't think that they do it every day (although maybe some do), but they certainly would have special occasions where they would, like the Summer Sun celebration.
7474519
I've navigated that way before. Or come up on a sign way out in the boonies pointing to two different towns that you've never heard of, and then finding them on the map and figuring out where you are based on that.
Pfft, I used to have to stop my old truck frequently to reset the shift linkage. If you missed the shift from first into second, you were going under the hood to fix it. Hell, one year I used up all my AAA tows (yes, there's a limit to how many you can have in one year).
7474577
I think she'd appreciate it.
Can you get that in curtain form, or only in the stick-on sheets?
7474789
Or for Meghan to roll on her back and offer up the best pillow known to both mankind and ponykind.
Yes, she is.
7475001
Nope, not this time.
7475823
I didn't know you were in Holland. Huh. Another Michigander!
They were also too late (as I just discovered) to see the City of Milwaukee in Elberta. Had Aric known, they could have seen it in Muskegon. And yes, they would have taken the Blue Star Highway bridge.
7476907
I know, right? Every day you learn something new. Heck, I didn't know anything about the Keewatin, and then when I read the Wikipedia article, I realized that I'd seen it in a movie.
7477363
I think that most of Equestria's roads are still unnamed, and most houses are un-addressed. The local mailmares just know where a letter addressed to Berry Punch is supposed to go.
7477389
And for what it's worth, I got to learn a lot about that, because the road I live on has both a local name and a route name. Well, actually, it's got a lot of local names, and that was the problem. It had to be re-named, because in one township it was called five different things*, and the new 911 system just can't handle that. Heck, there was one guy that came to the township meetings who had different street names for his barn and his house. And you can't name it for the route, because the state can just pull up the route road signs and move them somewhere else if they want to.
__________________________
*and two more, when you cross the county line, which I can see from my driveway.
7477765
I would think that when Equestria gets around to issuing official IDs, they'd have a head shot and a butt shot on them.
Actually, one thing I've wanted to put in a fic is that when a pony covers her cutie mark, nopony knows who she is. So, for example, in the Rainboom episode, the numbers taped over their cutie marks legit made them unidentifiable to everypony.
7477786
There might have been. Remember, only the Ovis embassy laminates passports.
7477796
If you ever need theatre lighting information that's about 20 years out of date (although some of the stuff still remains applicable), send me a PM. I spent a few happy years as a lighting designer and master electrician at Kalamazoo College.
7480924 Here in Montreal streets are "east/west " and avenue are "south/north" (with quote marks because the shape and angle of the Montreal's island make it more South-West/North-East and South-East/North-Wes). But all the streets changes name when you pass from the "old" Montreal city from before the municipals fusion to fused neighborhood. Not to mention most streets have an east and west pendant, the demarcation beetween the east and the west being the St-Laurent avenue.
So you need to specify east or west for a lot of streets and in many case you to specify wich borough you are talking about.
Yeah, in a way all of this make sense, from an historical point of view, but it can get get confusing...
And of course some of those are also numbered provincial road. At least those are mostly constant. Mostly. And logical too.
7477921
Yeah, that's going to be the kind of thing that will stick with him for the rest of his life, like it or not.
Anyone who got physical with Aquamarine or Cedric would very much regret it.
Actually, fun fact time: when I was researching how hard a horse can kick, I found a case online of a girl who got kicked hard enough to leave a hoof-print on her liver.
7477956
Out of curiousity, do you know why male horses don't have nipples?
I'm not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination, but the mechanic in me sees the practicality of having some options turned on and others turned off by hormones during the developmental process (which is similar to the way that they build certain parts of cars, FWIW), and given that most male mammals do, it strikes me as curious that horses don't. Does the differentiation happen a little bit sooner, or does the process work a little differently in equines than is does in anything else, and if so, I wonder why?
My former girlfriend was studying hereditary blindness in chickens, and I remember her having charts of DNA from which she was trying to determine at what point in the chicken's development things went wrong.
7478012
Ah, yes, the two staple foods of Scotland. I actually brought a big box of porridge back from Scotland last time I visited.
It's funny that the only parts of a sheep that you don't eat, you turn into a musical instrument.
7478069
Oh God, I'm such a bad speller. Thank heavens for spellcheck.
That's historically accurate.
I remember one time building a wooden fort, and winding up buying all the round toothpicks in my hometown. Also one time I built a 1:87th scale thousand-footer for a class project, which took a lot of cardboard, and wound up being too big to take to school--it wouldn't fit in the back of our station wagon.
And speaking of school memories, did you ever get to make model planets with plaster around a balloon? I did Mars.
I don't remember that particular book. The only one from the Apocrypha I remember is Bel and the Dragon, which is one of my favorites.
Also I happen to have a copy of The Lost Books of the Bible, in which Jesus makes clay animals and then brings them to life, and makes up for Joseph being a terrible carpenter by miraculously stretching or shrinking boards to fit.
7478137
When I first moved into this house, I discovered blue-spotted salamanders in my backyard, and I thought they were fake until I touched one and it ran away.
7478236
Which makes the Simpsons episode with Tomacco that much more apt (and it's another thing I didn't know until just now).
I was going to do a missionary in Equestria story, but I abandoned it when I realized that I didn't know enough to not turn it into a parody. The very unfinished start is HERE.
7478274
Especially if you've got the ones with the little inflater in the tongue.
You know those quick-eyelets in lots of kinds of boots? I used to be able to take the laces one-handed and zig-zag them up. I ought to practice with my shop boots and see if I've still got that skill.
7478306
<looks at tomato-greens salad nervously>
Given all the things I ate in the garden as a kid, I'm kind of surprised I never got solanine poisoning.
7478609
Pity.
Last one I looked at, the only things that were salvageable on it were the windshield frame and hood. No wonder it was so cheap!
Probably one day of "oh, it's so nice to have an apartment all to myself," and then. . . .
It's an amalgam of 30 years worth of trips up north.
7481004
Although for a while in Lansing, they had signs telling you that I-69 was changing from a north/south road to an east/west road, and (depending on your direction of travel) they were on opposite ends of Lansing, so you could be eastbound, and the opposing lane was southbound. They eventually got rid of those signs, probably because it confused people.
They also finally numbered US-127, rather than just have exit numbers when you were in Lansing, and otherwise not have any. And of course Michigan isn't the only place they did that; used to be on the Ohio Turnpike and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, they just numbered the exits 1-whatever, rather than number them for the mile marker that they were at.
7497825 I've been to place where they still used (and are maybe still today) the numbering system. When you've got exit 67 a, b,c, d, e and f. It migth be a good idea to change things...
7497844
The current standard in the US for highways, is that you number for mile markers, starting from the southernmost or westernmost part of the highway, and you add letters as needed. The highest I've ever seen is C, but I suppose that if you had more than three exits in a one mile stretch of highway, you'd have to go higher than that. I personally would be re-thinking what I was trying to accomplish if that were the case, becuase you know with that many exits back-to-back, you're going to have traffic chaos.
What they do in Lansing sometimes when there are a lot of them fairly close, is they have one big master exit that runs parallel to the highway, and cars get on and off that as needed, and that seems to work pretty well. That's what 496 does for Cedar, Larch, and Pennsylvania roads.
7501472 Same here, the zeroes are the south and west border, but as far as I know, we don't have any exit with letters.
Well, I suppose that since mile are longer then kilometer it would make sense to have a few exit per mile in urban area, but it would still make for a very cramped highway with a lot of traffic generated by the entering and exiting cars.
Of course that solution you've talked about in Langsing IS a good way around that, we have it in Montreal and it does work well enough.
That's the one weird thing about America. They have so many places named after other places they feel compelled to specify which one.
Random American movie:
>image of the Eiffel tower
>"Italy, France"
Me: "Well... duh."
7502340
Go Habs!
7864106
We have many weird things.
Did you know that there are over 50 cities, towns, and communities named Moscow?
None of which are actually named after Moscow, Russia.
7864106
Well, yeah, because we're bad at coming up with names, so we stole other people's. And then we didn't always spell it right, which is why you have the Mackinac Bridge that goes to the Upper Peninsula from Mackinaw City.
Italy, France?
8017573
When I lived in Indiana, I was not too far from Russiaville, and apparently that wasn't named after Russia.