WHAT WE DID ON OUR FALL VACATION

 Rev. Ivan Stang with Princess Wei 'R.' Doe

The way we looked at it, the devival was just the excuse we needed to take the slackardly, slovenly road trip we'd wanted to take last Spring, when Princess Wei first retired from her Conspiracy job at Weather Control.

As so oft happens with SubGeniuses, we took so long trying to perfectly pack our van that we gave up and just drove the entire Slackermansion out of Cleveland, into Pennsylvania and down Route 6 towards NYC. Our first pictures show the Slackermansion, its driveway, the guard animals and (once the trip started) our difficulty steering this mobile 3-story house while dealing with obstructionist Pinks in our path.

Our first stop as tourists was still within Cleveland: the Zoo. I'd never been there. It's a good one as zoos go! The animals look healthy for prisoners. I remember admiring the Mountain Gorilla as he sat on his perch, calmly surveying we mere humans who filed by below him. I said to Wei, "Such noble creatures; how base we are to constrain these paragons of purity." At that moment the gorilla lowered his hand to just beneath his butt and shat into it. He brought his hand up to his face, examined the brick-sized lump of greenish manure (gorillas eat mostly hay and lettuce), and, looking at us with an expression of "I get to do this and you don't, DUMBASS," began biting off mouthful after mouthful of his own shit and, chewing and savoring each morsel, swallowed down the whole large gorilla turd as the cameras, ours and others', captured it all on video.

The whole operation was so graceful that it's obvious he puts on this show every afternoon. Audience or not.

After the Cleveland Zoo we stopped in Ashtabula to briefly interrupt the solitude of our friend and radio partner, Lonesome Cowboy Dave. Unlike the gorilla, he offered to share his manure. Such is the nobility and generosity of this veritable Dali of the airwaves.

Our plan was to drive Route 6 in Northern Pennsylvania, noted on all AAA's maps as a Scenic Route, and to camp in whatever nearby State Park our whimsy led us to. But it rained. It rained like 18 motherfuckers and was cold as a tea bagger's brain. It was like that pretty much all the time that we were on the road, EXCEPT such times as we chose to brave the elements. Then it would stop and the sun would come out.

Our first night, we crashed in a Super 8 motel in Warren, PA, on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest. We got to know Super 8s pretty well on this trip. Checkout is at 11 am, and 11:20 am is exactly when we checked out, each of the many motel mornings.

We established a pattern of leaving a motel and driving straiught to the nearest state park where we could avail ourselves of hiking trails, or as we call them, Privacy Trails. The fact that it was raining lightly all the time kept these trails clear of The Others. We were almost always the only people on the trail. We had total privacy, and did what SubGeniuses do when The Others are not around. For instance, Wei did something too noisy to do in hotel rooms: she practiced playing the Twilight Zone theme on her flute. After a while I made her quit, however, lest she be accidentally shot by Pan hunters.

We hugged trees. We are tree huggers. More accurately, we are living-and-nonliving-thing huggers. And sometimes we don't stop at hugging. Moss, lichens, dead leaves, fungus, and water oozing from rocks can all be just as interesting as trees, to the trained SubGenius eye and nostril. And ferns. Wei is a Fern Believer. We especially admire MUTATED trees and eldritch, twisting Cthulhu roots. She is able to see faces in tree bark and rock surfaces that no one else can, which I suppose makes them more huggable. We also admire certain human constructs such as dams, bridges, ancient graveyards, "rim overlooks" in parks, and rotting farm houses. Especially rotting farm houses, or barns -- or, best of all, motels. For some reason, every time I see a rotting, collapsing, "Life After Man" place by the roadside, I want to buy it and live in it. I guess it's because I'm making an automatic assumption that it would be dirt cheap.

(When I got home I started a new hobby: scanning the real estate ads for rotting, abandoned motels and office buildings. You can get a 9-unit apartment complex in the worst part of Cleveland for $24,000!)

The main eye candy, though, was the fall foliage. Pennsylvania highways have a lot to be said for them in the Fall. Our pictures impart some very slight inkling of the intense red and gold gorgeousness and gorgeosity of it all. Low-flying clouds in the misty mountains were another source of visual joy and spookiness.

We made the best of the Rimrock Recreation Area in the Alleghenies, and a modest little area called Timberdoodle Flats, home of the elusive Woodcock.

Around Bradford, PA, we started noticing a supermarket chain everywhere called "WEI's." As is so common with po'bucker signage, the apostrophe was left off most of these stores so they appeared to say "Weis." But We/I know what they MEANT.

Bradford is a nice little town. The steak house is called "The Steak House." The diner is called "The Diner." Jesus runs a store on Main Street, "God Rocks Main Street," displaying psychedelic videos of His face in the window, but best of all Bradford is the home of the Zippo Corporation, makers of Zippo lighters (and rows of Zippo-shaped street lights in Bradford) -- and sponsors of the incredible giant-replica-Zippo-crowned ZIPPO MUSEUM!

That museum is the one place in PA listed by Roadside America (SubGenius-penned book-and-web reports on oddball roadside attractions) that we bothered to stop at. It was well worth it! You wouldn't think that Zippos would inspire such creativity and so many outstanding displays, such as a huge American flag made of custom Zippo lighters, but I would recommend this free museum to anybody. The tour climaxes with a mystery machine, the sounds from which, echoing through the building, had Wei burning with curiosity the whole time. This huge doohickey is like 10 Rube Goldberg constructions all going crazy at once inside a big glass cube, signifying nothing, but hypnotically active and noisy.

Back on Route 6, we made our way toward Wellsboro, home of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. We noted and photographed endless examples of rustic quaintness in many a small but historic matchbox toy-town: belligerent, warlike redneck bumper stickers; cutesey hair salon names; homespun cafe and antique store titles. We stopped to marvel at Kinzua Bridge State Park, where what was once the world's largest train bridge crossed a valley until 2003, when a twister knocked it all down in a most spectacular fashion.

By the time we made Wellsboro, freezing rain again prevented camping, and we lucked out by wandering into a place called the Wellsboro Penn Wells Lodge just in time to get what we learned was the very last available room in town.

Even though this was technically the end of the tourist season in the Poconos, there's one last big influx of tourists in late fall just for the incredible foliage as the leaves turn. But the rain was keeping campers from camping and truckers from trucking, so motels filled up.

As we did each night, we wandered around whatever town our motel was in, gradually attaining mastery and knowledge of the arcane Pennsylvania liquor laws.

The next morning found us in Tioga County gazing at the vista of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon (actually named Pine Creek, but called "Kind Prick" by wags) in Leonard Harrison State Park. It's... not really all that damned grand. The steep, twisting, torturous trails that fork off from the Visitor's Center are fabulous, though. They're mostly devoid of Others, and easy to hide in for SubGeniusly activities, like, you know, flute practice.

And yet, strangely enough, sometimes on the trail we would pass other oldsters hiking in the opposite direction, and a couple of times we caught unmistakeable whiffs of MARIJUANA! These bandy-legged, balding old tourists were waddling down these trails to smoke dope! The nerve! You aren't even supposed to smoke CIGS in state park, much less reefers! Yet people were doing that very thing. OLD people. No wonder there are so many benches built onto especially scenic parts of many trails.

We avoided getting caught up in curio gift shops or small rag-tag zoos, although we were sorely tempted. The decrepit barns were more interesting anyway -- the kinds of barns that Frankenstein's monster would hide in.

Everything is so historical and old-timey in rural PA. In the town of Troy, we encountered a big sign for a MASONRY company called "SMITH AND WILCOX." SubGenius insiders will recognize the incredible synchronicity of this one, revealing, as it does, in a certain way, the sinister hidden Masonic roots of the Church of the SubGenius.

The most gorgeous imaginable rivers would suddenly surprise you with vast industrial complexes, then suddenly it would be deep nature again. We passed one town that reminded me of Kern's Holler, because it LOOKED like Kern's Holler would look. This was near the town of Meshoppen, which is the home of "Sickler's Medical Supplies" and the actual, real-life Jellystone Park, where Yogi and Booboo live. (In truth it is a cloying Pink "family" campground.)

In a miraculous moment when we parked at a scenic view, Princess Wei noticed that we had a headlight out. We were able to fix it quickly. You have no idea what trouble that headlight MIGHT have caused us, and I won't tell you.

Just before Wei's cell phone mysteriously died, we had gotten the message that Rev. Sinphaltimus Exmortis and his family lived in the Poconos, on our path to NYC, and were inviting us to stay the night there. And so we entered the "Sexmortisland" area of the Poconos. The Exmortises live in a beautiful new house, custom-built according to their design, along a sparsely occupied country road that is, after nightfall, SCARY AS HELL!

In the daylight, the area is very pretty and not that scary at all. The inside of Sinphaltimus's house, on the other hand, only gets scarier and scarier the more you see of it.

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