Last night, after a pan-cultural Sunset Park dinner experience of vegetarian Malaysian (huge chunks of tofu satay stuffed with shredded cucumber and sprouts and topped with a spicy curry peanut sauce) followed by ices from the Puerto Rican ice shack, Liz and I headed back to her place to listen to some country music and thumb through her weathered copy of Roadside America, two Negra Modelos by our sides.

Liz’s Roadside America was a constant companion on the many roadtrips she’s taken through the midwest and the south while she was living in Chicago. There are whole sections of the index scribbled over in bright yellow highlighter in the states of Kentucky, Arkansas and Wisconsin. She told me of the museum she and her friends visited that was in a functioning funeral home — a girl in Pippi Longstocking knee socks who was collecting an urn of her father’s ashes pointed them toward the basement door. The exhibit was apparently the hobby of the mortician upstairs: several taxidermied albino squirrels were situated in various anthropomorphic poses, such as a topless girly show parody.

I can only hope to see such things in my lifetime.

In a couple of weeks, I’m heading out to Minneapolis and Fargo, with a long drive between. Chad’s family is having a reunion-slash-birthday party for an aging grandfather in Rothsay, Minnesota, and we’re taking this opportunity to kick it in the midwestern region for a long weekend. Of course, this is more exciting for me than it is for Chad — after having grown up in the area, he’s seen all the titans of the Northern Plains and more giant Paul Bunyans than you could shake a stick (or an axe) at. But as a firmly rooted east coaster, my most compelling roadtrip experiences are pretty lame: Once, I think I burned some serious rubber pulling my mother’s Delta ‘88 Oldsmobile off the side of I-95 to photograph two of my college girlfriends in front of the “Welcome to Rhode Island” sign on our way to Boston. These Atlantic coast scraps of states don’t hold much by the way of roadside attractions, as is noted in the book. (That is, of course, excepting Florida, which seems to have more than its fair share of ridiculous crap to see.)

I’m also looking forward to thrifting in the pristine un-hipsterized state of North Dakota and expect to supply FedEx with my credit card number several times over in order to guarantee that, if and when I have an apartment whose floor area is larger than that of a dining room table, it will be furnished to the gills with pink sparkly plastic things from the 1950s.

In the meantime, tradition dictates that I spend this weekend at the New Jersey shore, living it up at the Dairy Queen and parading around in $2 flip-flops and a pair of boxer shorts with the local beach stenciled in over the baggy butt. I was hoping that I might increase my freckle count by several hundred, but the weather report so far calls for lots of rain and thunder. What’s there to do at the beach when it’s raining?

I guess we’ll find out.