So I'm in Cleveland now. Here is all I know about Cleveland:

  1. People keep asking me if I've met Drew Carey. Ha ha ha. It is to laugh.
  2. I haven't.
  3. They're really sensitive here about their rivers catching fire. You say, "Hey, didn't the lake catch on fire in Cleveland?" and they grit their teeth and snarl, "That was years ago." Hell, so was World War II, but we're still interested.
  4. The beer here is terrible. All they like is lagers, and even those kinda suck. I wish I lived in Chicago, where the mob kept the art of zymurgy alive through Prohibition.
  5. In Cleveland, you can park anywhere you want as long as it's on the street. Including in the second lane of a two-lane road, urging sudden and near-suicidal lefts into oncoming traffic. The only time the cops seem to get upset is when you park facing the wrong way.

Really. That's it. Cleveland's kinda boring.

So why did I move out of Alaska? Land of frozen snow, ice weasels, and constant death?

Didn't you like Alaska?

Answer: I loved Alaska. The snow was a pain, and the spring melt of, oh, three feet of snow followed by half-melting followed by an abrupt refreezing following by more half-melting turned the entire city into an ice rink - I fell flat on my ass no less than four times, and I'm talking old Looney Toons "feet parallel to the ground SMASH' falls - but Alaska was wonderful.

I liked the small-town feel of it all. I adored the way you could drive an hour outside of town and be surrounded by such untouched nature that it seemed to wash straight through you, erasing all knowledge of cities from your bones; the way the immensity and timelessness of the mountains rising up on all sides of you made you feel small and powerful all at the same time... Like you were tiny and transient, but in your own way you belonged. It was glorious.

I miss the beer - for the record, Midnight Sun's Fireweed Honey beer is the finest in America. (Alaskans had an advantage over the rest of the country because they could completely ignore Prohibition, thus creating the most vibrant local beer scene I've ever been privileged to witness... And yes, I've been to Seattle.) I miss the halibut pizza, which sounds disgusting but everyone who's ever tried it has come to love it.

I miss the weekly Magic tournaments with my friends. I miss the fifteen-minute drive to a tourney, especially now that I have to drive three hours to the local qualifier. I miss the friendliness of the scene.

I miss the vibrant Dance Dance Revolution Scene, and I never even got to see it.

So in short, I adored Alaska and all that was there. It had everything a geek like me needed, except for maybe a good job.

So why did we leave?

Because Gini got a better job offer. Essentially, they said, "Hey, ya wanna move down to Cleveland for the same salary, yet live where $35,000 a year is $35,000 a year?"

Because you have to understand: In Alaska, milk is $4.00 a gallon. Gas is actually - and mysteriously - more expensive than the mainland, where they spend millions of dollars to pump it there via a small tube. You have to take out a bank loan for a candy bar. So $35,000 a year in Alaska is like living in a refrigerator box in Cleveland.

Plus, with her new amazing expando-salary, Gini could go to law school, and she could afford to support my career as a freelance writer. Off we went.

We sold the house, loaded all our stuff into a large U-Haul, and set off to drive down through the end of Alaska, through Canadian wasteland, and into mainland USA.

The drive was sort of beautiful, but scary. The best way I could put the feeling of utter isolation, the in-your-bones knowledge that You Were In Deep Wilderness, was this:

We didn't see a McDonald's for five days.

Five days.

The scenery on the way down was breathtaking and blurry. I say breathtaking because the road was a narrow strip of pavement that wound its way through a large and luscious landscape, filled with mountains with crystal-clear lakes at the bottom and swaying fields filled with heather and wheat. It looked like a beer commerical, except without the "Wazzup" guys.

I say "blurry" because my darling Gini decided that simply going at Mach 2 wasn't fast enough, and thus floored the pedal in a large, swaying U-Haul over pitted roads and muddy throughways. The slowest I ever saw her go in that U-Haul was seventy-five miles an hour, and that includes when she was backing out of parking lots. The mountains went - vowmp - by as she stomped on the pedal like it was a cockroach, manhandling this five-ton vehicle down roads the size of bookshelves. At times the only reason we didn't slide off the road and into the vast crevasses that lay between mountains was inertia.

"Honey," said I sweetly, "This is supposed to be a fun trip. Maybe we can look at scenery?"

It took five minutes to convince her that a stop might be pleasant, during which time we covered approximately twenty-three miles.

We stopped. Glorious lake? Check. Beautiful sun reflecting off said lake? Check. Mountain acting as stop? Check.

Mosquitoes circling in like organic hypodermics?

Check. Check. Check. Swat. Check. Swat. Check. Fuck! Check. Get back in the car, you idiot! Check. Check. Ow! Check! STOP THESE FUCKING THINGS!

The inside of the U-Haul cab was now dancing with about fifteen mosquitoes, with a hundred more pressing in on the outside eagerly, wearing little bibs and clutching tiny forks in their maxillary palps. We spent the next hour merrily swatting these tiny black specks of death, slowing to a leisurely pace just under light speed while we desperately tried to preserve what blood was left in our bodies.

I tried to convince her to stop again later that day, but she saw another mosquito on my face and swatted it. Hard.

So we drove like maniacs, staying at fleatrap motels that had long since ceased to attract fleas. Eventually, we got out of the wilderness and began driving through actual Canada - a place peopled by, well, people.

Here is what I learned about Canadians: They are, perhaps to a man, the friendliest people on earth - and among the most incompetent. Canadians apparently believe that signs pointing to major thoroughfares belong three feet before the beginning of the road, and not a moment beforehand, leading us to make at least three abrupt, U-Haul-tilting righthand turns that we could have made easily given a moment's notice. We were given cheerful directions twice; both times were wrong. At a restaurant we later referred to as "The Cheese Shop," I was proudly told that they had just about every beer.

Guinness? Nope.

Heineken? Nope.

Beck's? Well....

As it turned out, the bar had four beers: Bud, Bud Lite, Molson, and Canadian.

Now, I'm not faulting the bar for having a pitiful beer selection... But claiming that they had everything when they had fewer beers than I currently have in my refrigerator seemed a bit much.

Also, this was the weirdest bar I've ever been to - which is saying something. For one thing, we thought it was a strip club, and the only reason we stopped by was to ask if there was a restaurant in the area. We went in, and discovered it was a bar that served the usual Fried Bar Fare, but decided to stay because it was Happy Hour and all the drinks were doubled. Hey, good enough.

There was a gaggle of young folks next to us, obviously a cluster of couples, and you couldn't see the tables for the drinks plastered on it. (I have been known to exaggerate for effect, but in this case I am being absolutely literal.) They were drinking and whooping it up, and one girl was on a cell phone, having snatched it away from her boyfriend a microsecond ago, and saying joyously, "You know, it's great taking it up the ass! I love anal sex!"

Her boyfriend noticed our mild stares of astonishment, and looked at us cheerfully. "She does, ya know," he said contentedly.

Well!

We continued drinking, and eventually the people at the table gave us their extras - three drinks in all, and apple-flavored. Then the Twosome walked in.

They were in their mid-forties, and one of them was fairly attractive... But someone had forgotten to tell her that she was in her forties, after all, and parts of her were beginning to sag. As such, she was wearing a midriff-baring Britney Spears outfit, and her midriff poked over it just a little too much - like a bicycle tire with a tad too much wind. Her boobs also had sunk a little bit, like a leaking rowboat that was still afloat but was going to go under within a day.

She could have been really attractive, even at her age, but she had dressed like a teenager to show off her body - and her body seemed to resent it.

I wondered, idly, whether she had lost some kind of bet.

Her friend, also dressed rather scantily, had a face like a cancerous frog and a body that would have put Roseanne to shame.

Oh, and she was short. Those of you who know me realize my preference is zaftig and short, but this was one step away from Ursula, queen of the oceans.

They immediately began to try hitting on every single man in the place. Gini peered over with interest. "Look," she said in awe. "It's an evil Ann Murray!" They set up shop and began literally yelling at men as they went by, guzzling drinks and grabbing guys in an attempt to Get Some.

No effect. They were kind of scary.

The anal sex lover sauntered back in haughtily, chastising her boyfriend. Apparently he had had a Body Shot off of an attractive waitress, licking salt off of her cleavage in the final step of some tequila-related ritual, and she was all in a huff. She yelled, he fawned, she screamed, he justified, she huffed off, he followed plaintively. This continued throughout the bar as they brought they travelling argument to all customers in a marvelous impromptu display of performance art.

In the meanwhile, a third woman, who looked like an experiment in claymaking gone wrong - but also dressed like Christina Aguilera - began talking to us about her family and how alcohol poisoning in the womb had made it impossible for her and her brother to get drunk no matter how much they had, but the medication was good and why was no man here interested?....

It occurred to Gini and I that this woman was so lonely and so desperate that we could have probably negotiated a menage a trois on the spot... And shuddered.

The two other women had set up shop - they had bought two rows of about eight beers and eight liquors, and were waving men over like sailors flagging down ships to have a drink with them. Men looked over and nervously shuffled off. I think they would have cheerfully had a beer with Anne Murray - who, despite her best attempts to sabotage her body, was still kind of babeish - but they were afraid of getting stuck with the Incredible Ms. Toad's Wild Ride.

The travelling argument troupe wandered in, this time to pick up her cigarettes just before she left her philandering, Body Shot-licking, frantically-apologizing boyfriend for good - and Gini and I both saw it.

This arrogant, sex-crazed woman who was not afraid to cause a public scene to humiliate her boyfriend - and could get away with it because she was cute....

Well, this was Anne Murray twenty years ago.

Soon enough her looks would start to slip, her friends would decide she was too much effort to hang around with, and she'd be stuck in a bar with her ugly friend buying drinks in an attempt to get somebody so she could feel attractive again.

Yipes.

We left before something else happened. Because we knew it would.

And our final opinion of Canadians was formed by this:

So we're driving out of The Town Of Desperate Women and we want to pick up some dinner before we go. We figured hey, we'll snag some on the road, mainly because our U-Haul is gigantic and we don't want to try to park it in the narrow roads of Ontario. We're not expecting much, being in the middle of nowhere. So we stop at one place and are stopped at the door by a big sign saying "NO FOOD - RESTAURANT CLOSED DUE TO INSPECTION." We lurch to a halt but are waved in by a young woman who says, "Oh, don't pay attention to that - that was over at 5:00!"

It is now 6:30. They have yet to remove the sign.

We ask for a menu and are told that they don't have one yet, but they have everything. (Shades of The Cheese Shop.) We're really champing at the bit for steak - and considering this place is advertised as a steak place, we're figuring fine, we'll order. Turns out they don't have it. "We just opened today," she says apologetically. "A lot of stuff isn't in."

Okay, think we, adjusting our taste buds appropriately; we order a set of chicken fingers with fries, covered in gravy. Mmm.... gravy. Suddenly we're ravenous for gravy and big, fatty fries dunked in rich fatty gravy.

She returns. "We don't have gravy."

"Or fries," she adds.

They don't have customers, either. We leave to a very angry look from the proprietor, but what the fuck did she expect? We were willing to try twice, but why the hell are you even open if you don't have anything?

Before we left, I used the men's room. Two urinals out of three were broken, one smashed in pieces, the other duct taped together and filled with running water. "Happy opening day!" I muttered.

So we drove down to the next place. Big sign by the side of the road. "RESTAURANT," said it. We pull in, seeing that it also says "BAKERY" and offered a free loaf of bread with every fill-up. Certainly a unique proposition, and I was saddened to remember that we had filled up at the last stop. Still, we'd buy some bread for the road.

We walk in and see tables... But note that no one is eating.

"Excuse us," we say, "Is this the restaurant?"

"No," says the woman with an irritated huff, as if she can't quite fathom why people are walking in all day and asking these exasperating questions, "We serve coffee and ice cream. Nothing else."

We looked outside. "RESTAURANT," reassured the sign... But nothing else seemed to back it up. We drove off.

We had no theories on this inexplicable advertising. Maybe, we hypothesized, "Restaurant" has an entirely different Canadian meaning, and can flexibly be applied to ice cream parlors and, by extension, gas stations that serve gum. Perhaps these Canadians tip vending machines. Or perhaps this was a building with delusions of grandeur, a building that was silently imploring its owners that it could be more than a mere capucchino-and-chocolate rest stop - it longed to be a five-star mention in the Zagat's guide, ached in every beam to host an Emeril Lagasse session, and as a result it silently attached a sign to it saying "RESTAURANT" in an attempt to convince the surly waitress within that there was a burning need for haute cuisine in the middle of fucking nowhere.

In point of fact, there was. And yet apparently we were not to find one. We vaguely considered ordering a butternut pecan cone in the shape of a steak, but figured it best to drive on. We were hungry, though. Very hungry. And cranky.

So when we pulled in at the third restaurant, we were wondering what could go wrong. As it turned out, nothing; when we told the proprietor of our troubles, he laughed and said, "Yeah, I've been getting some business from them." And the place had a full bar and a reasonably large menu for a diner, so we were happy. My wife ordered a White Zin.

"A what?"

"A white zinfandel? It's a wine." The waitress stared blandly. "A kind of pinkish wine."

"Oh," she said, looking about nervously - this kind of posh, newfangled vintnery technology had apparently not reached here. "We just have red wine and white wine." Her face brightened. "But I can mix the two of them for you if you like!"

My wife declined.

The meal, incidentally, was quite excellent by road standards - a fine cut above Denny's. And also incidentally, I'm not mocking the waitress's attitude - she tried her best to salvage a meal, which is an admirable thing. We tipped her well, never you fear.

Let me say in Canada's defense that when our U-Haul broke down in the middle of nowhere, a very nice Canadian family on their way back from a family reunion drove us twenty minutes down the road (at fifty miles an hour, despite Gini's attempts to get them to accelerate to just under warp speed) to a pay phone, waited for a half an hour while we negotiated with a rather dense woman at U-Haul, then drove us back all the way to our truck, wasting an hour and a half out of their lives but helping us immensely.

This would not have happened most place in America.

In short, the Canadians are beautiful, gorgeous, and kind people. But I'm not eating at anyplace that promises Canadian cuisine unless I want it with sprinkles.

NEXT: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do