This morning, I was stuck in traffic in Boston. Now I'm in western Cheektowaga, NY, which the hotel pronounces "Buffalo." That's okay. Twelve hours and more than 500 miles later, I just wanted to get out of the damn car, let poor Tabitha out of her bag, and eat dinner. If you read nothing else on this page, by the way, skip to dinner at the bottom of the page.

The final Boston indignity

The reason it took twelve hours starts on Tuesday. Rick already told you about our trip to Revere Beach, where Polar Bear Club members and future skin cancer patients were out for the first dip/sunburn of the year, and the Masshole driver who backed into us on our way to the 35-foot-tall Virgin Mary. We can't decide if this means Mary was looking out for us and made it only a minor accident, or that Jesus didn't want us infidels to visit his mom. Anyway, we went to do the insurance claim this morning, which involved a late start, one last Boston traffic jam, then me sitting in the car until 10am next to an "Expectant Mothers Only" parking space while Rick dealt with the paperwork. By the time we hit I-90, I was cursing the day I loaded my U-Haul to Boston in 1997.

Let me out

Eastern MA: Trying not to scream.

Central MA: Boring. I think we've even been to all of these rest stops.

Western MA: Everything turns green, hilly, and pleasant. Still, I whoop with glee when we pass the "Leaving Massachusetts" sign. That's when I know the crappy part of this move is really over.

Lost in Cooperstown

The New York drive was fairly uneventful. Cows, keeping track of license plates from different states (22 so far, and two Canadian provinces), looking at the map, horses, farms, farms, farms. At mile 224, Highway Dementia kicked in and we started conversing in animal noises. Animal noises with regional accents, even ("Moo, y'all." "Dude. Moo.")

We got off the highway to visit Cooperstown, best known for the Baseball Hall of Fame, but best known to craft beer wonks as the home of Brewery Ommegang. We think the Ommegang webmaster sampled too much product before writing up the directions on the website, because "right" is not spelled "left." We saw scenic Lake Something-Or-Other, Main Street (basically a baseball theme park), and eventually we found the place, which leapt out of a farm-farm-farm vista of houses and antique shops since it had a big, dramatic white arch in front.

**Beer Wonk Alert ** Normal people can skip the next paragraph

Brewery Ommegang was a bit corporate compared to other breweries we've toured -- even Sam Adams -- which isn't very in keeping with their love for all things Belgian (they were even recently purchased by a Belgian company, Duvel). It didn't help that today's tour guide freely admitted that he was management and that we probably knew more about beer than he did. We do. He was also the first person in the service industry to mistake me for a man on this trip, addressing us as "you gentlemen" until I turned around. Since he knew we were beer experts, it would have been good if he'd skipped the Brewing for Dummies part of the tour, but he apologized and said that if he skipped anything, he'd lose his place in the speech. So I got to hear, yet again, the difference between a lager and an ale. Zzzzzz. We did get to see the bottling room up close, which was nifty. He was a little stingy with the samples, but we did get to try a specialty brew, Three Philosophers, a dark and complex Belgian-esque thing that's only sold at the brewery. Ch-ching! Now we know why we put up with the inept tour guide. That, and the brewery had a cool cat :)

Speaking of cats, we're really proud of Tabitha. Every once in a while, she'd give a few meows from inside her carrier, but in general, she relaxed after a few hours and stayed quiet and mellow. Those of you who know her don't believe us, since Tabitha is such a little devil cat. But hey, she's been on a plane to and from Germany...she can handle a car. Right now she's busy exploring the hotel room and really damn pleased to be out of her harness and out of the bag. Not that she leaves the bag even when I keep it open. Kitty's agoraphobic, but that's another story.

The rest of the day after Cooperstown was just us trying to push on to Buffalo. Niagara Falls would wait until tomorrow morning, but we wanted to otherwise stay on schedule and get as far west as we'd wanted to (Niagara Falls is north of Buffalo). We made it at 8:15 and checked into the Best Value Inn, a no-frills and pet-friendly chain we'll be visiting again next Saturday at the latest. It still seems like the Taj Mahal to us, since we're used to camping and youth hostels, but this place has *cable TV*! (The Chris Rock Show is pretty funny, for what it's worth).

Dinner with the Greenfield AARP

The restaurant next to the hotel was out of business. The apathetic front desk clerk recommended take-out Chinese from a nearby strip mall, "Valu Plaza" -- yuck. There was also Wendy's, McDonalds, or Tim Horton's -- double yuck. Pizza place: out of business. First local-seeming restaurant we tried: stopped serving dinner half an hour ago.

At that "restaurant," which was really a somewhat depressing bar sparsely populated by middle-aged locals, we asked the bartender where we could eat at that hour -- almost 9pm, apparently after the outskirts of Buffalo start rolling up the sidewalks.

"The Deerhead Inn," he said, and gave us directions, smirking slightly.

"Inn, huh?" I thought. "Sounds a bit upscale. But let's look."

The Deerhead "Inn" turned out to be a blue, nondescript, house-ish looking building advertising liver and bacon and the Tin Roof Dixieland Jazz Band. We opened the door and in blasted a wave of old-time jazz music. I grabbed a menu to make sure the prices weren't inn-like (they weren't), and a teenaged boy sat us at a table for four.

We were slightly separated from the main room, but we had a good enough view of the crowd (no one under 50), the band (no one under 50 either; piano, drums, clarinet, big bass, and a trumpet player/wanna-be comedian that looked like Kurt Vonnegut), and the d