Vacation In The Rust Belt

Friday, Missy and I packed up her shiny silver VW Bug and hit the road going north, hoping to get to her hometown of PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, within the usual 12-hour time frame we are accustomed to. If millions of people hit the roads this holiday weekend, we didn't run into any of them (as we had expected) and we made it to PA in record time, despite a couple of distractions...the first one being DEL TACO somewhere in SOUTH CAROLINA...



I had never seen a Del Taco in the South or on the East Coast before. Sure, there are plenty of Taco Bells, but it's not the same thing. You can't get fries and EL SCORCHO hot sauce from Taco Bell. Growing up in California, Del Taco is arguably as quintessentially Californian as say, IN-'N'-OUT BURGERS...feeling a bit nostalgic, I exited the highway and "forced" us to have fast food for breakfast...





We zoomed by the GIANT ASS-SHAPED PEACH in Gaffney, South Carolina, and managed to click-off these couple of photos...









We hit some heavy rain storms as we paid the entrance fee into WEST VIRGINIA...



Late in the afternoon, we were enticed to stray off the highway again by signs advertising the WAFFLE HUT - OPEN 24 HOURS...turns out that the Waffle Hut was a combo restaurant/gas station/motel and it looked really really sketchy. We gassed up and headed down the street to THE SADDEST SUBWAY IN THE WORLD for a quick bite to eat. The young sandwich artists there might as well had "FML" tattooed on their foreheads they looked so utterly defeated by life. I joked that our 6" Veggie Delite sandwiches had little chunks of coal in it. It was also the first Subway shop I'd ever seen that sold biscuits and gravy...







We stopped at the Welcome Center after having crossed the border between West Virginia and Pennsylvania. We freshened up and fished out Missy's cell phone, which accidently slid underneath the driver's seat. We picked up a bunch of pamphlets and called Missy's family to say we were about 150 miles away. Southwestern PA is part of COAL MINING COUNTRY, so the rest stop had displays and tributes to the area's hard working coal mining families...