Erie

"We have met the enemy, and they are ours."

-Oliver Hazard Perry

A brief post again. P has the day off, which meant rolling out of bed as the sun rose, instead of in darkness. It makes for a quite late start, particularly after we read the paper together and roll our eyes at the madness of these last few days before the election.

Arnold Palmer's junk? Really?

That he's likely to win brings a certain despair. That's who we are as a country, obviously.

And this past weekend P and I drove into the belly of the beast, Pennsylvania, to look at a car in Erie.

In fact, Erie's a lovely town with a harbor shielded from tumultuous Lake Erie by Presque Isle, a long peninsula that offers protected lagoons and fishing holes on one side, and miles of beach on the other. But for the insane politics manifested by all the yard signs during our three test drives, I would've thought, "What a great place to retire, here on the lake."

But the signs, the relentless stupidity of the locals. It would be unbearable.

As for the test drives, we went there to check out an off-lease Audi Q8, which was nice but didn't roll our socks down. As we pulled up from that first test drive, we noticed a lovely Cadillac XT6, brand new for the same price. So we drove that next, and liked it although it was a lot of car for my lovely wife. Then Peg asked about the XT5 sitting next to us as we returned from our drive around the block. Right colors; right accessory package, smaller than the XT6. Less gizmos than the Audi, but we're old and don't really use the gizmos anyway. And it was the same price as the Audi, with five miles on the odometer.

So we ended up buying it, I think. They stuck a sold sign in the windshield, announced it was closing time for the dealership, and told us they'd do the paperwork and drive the car to us in Corning, three hours to the east, in the next day or so. We'll see how it goes.

As an aside, this was the oldest Cadillac dealer in the U.S., selling them since 1903. Who knew?

That evening we enjoyed the view out of our hotel window on the Erie bayfront, watched the Vols and the Dawgs win and ate takeout because P was under the weather.

Then the next day we rode out to Presque Isle, admiring town from the other side of the bay.

Toward the end of the peninsula ("presque isle" in French) we came upon the Perry Monument, recalling the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, whose little flotilla was built in Erie and sailed into the British squadron under Perry's flag bearing the words, "Don't give up the ship."

A badass. He wasn't even thirty years old.

Leaving Erie around lunchtime we wound through hills in full autumn flush, arriving here in time to catch the second half of the Bills game before Peg went to sleep and didn't wake up until this morning. The patient seems a little better today.

Now for a flurry of work mixed with running our checklist ahead of a departure from Corning for Boston on Thursday, then Boston to London on Friday night. Looking forward to being several thousand miles away on Election Day.