Flashback Friday

About 5 months after Tony and I were married, he got an internship at a senator's office in Washington D.C. We packed our Honda CRX with all our earthly possessions (two suitcases full) and hightailed it out of Logan. Our adventures en route to the east coast and the four months we spent there I will leave for another post. On our way back to Utah the car broke down in Wheeling, West Virginia on a Friday about 5:30 pm. Unfortunately for us, the mechanic would not be in his shop until 9 am the following Monday. Wheeling is an old coal mining town and a shell of it's former
self which I'm sure back in the day was a flourishing, beautiful city. There are probably many nice parts of the town, which unfortunately we didn't see being trapped in one central location. The whole place seemed to be covered in coal dust and we were the ONLY guests at the rundown hotel. We asked the woman at the desk, who seemed amused to see a very young couple staying for the weekend, what there was to do nearby since we had no car. "Well, you've got a couple of choices," she said. "There's a Denny's restaurant and a dirty bookstore down the street." "Great!" I cried. "We love to read." She smiled widely and we headed in the direction she told us. Now as I mentioned a thick layer of dust was in the air and made everything look gray. We wondered how old and dingy the bookstore would be. I didn't mind as long as the books weren't too expensive and that they cleaned the inside of the store. We saw it up ahead. Tony stopped me in my tracks. "There's the 'dirty' bookstore." I averted my gaze from the line of X's all along the windows. Oh yah, she wasn't kidding-that was one DIRTY bookstore all right. We turned on our heels and trudged straight into the adventure of eating from a Denny's for the next 9 meals of our apparently immature and naive lives. So the moral of the story- no matter how gray and dusty the town is you're stuck in, only read the postcards...the bookstore needs to be cleaned.
ps...only one channel on the old tv set- I learned A LOT about livestock and tractors- really, it's come in handy...really...