An Autumn Road Trip in Summer

September 16, 2011 – It was meant to be our last road trip of the summer, but in some ways it ended up being our first road trip of Autumn. A couple of weeks ago, we headed to one of the most northern parts of the state of New York for a day to see a few sites for a project I’m working on. The pins in our Google map included a tomb, a mansion, a castle, and some giant metal statues. A pretty decent Saturday, I think.

Of course, in between those pretty cool sites was about 16 hours of car time, and often the only things to look forward to during those hypnotic stretches of rubber meeting the road are convenience store stops, copless highways, and the odd alien abduction.

Every once in a while on a road trip, the spaces in-between end up being better than the destinations. This wasn’t one of those times. However, the “getting there” did end up being creepier than the sites on our agenda, which is strange considering that the project that motivated this trip was a book about the macabre.

Apparently, we ended up on a Halloween scavenger hunt without realizing it. We encountered everything from dead bats to derelict farms to vomiting monsters to headless angels. Like I said, a successful Autumn trip, despite the 90 degree day and the absence of colorful foliage...and as long as you conflate Autumn and Halloween, as this entire blog tries to do.

There is no moral to this story. There is also no story to this moral. And that’s fine. It just makes it extremely difficult to segue to the below pictures of those creepy spaces in between:

Dead bat in a mausoleum window. Our Jacob Marley,
if you will...the first sign of creepy things to come.

This pic comes with its own caption.

There's creepy, and then there's
creepy-cool. This grave monument
falls under the latter category.

Actually, this mansion was on the itinerary,
but I don't think I'll ever get to use this pic otherwise.

Bulemia is tragic
no matter who the victim.

It's been a long time since
I've had to clamber through barbed wire.

I know. I never thought the Amish were creepy, either,
until I learned that they were genderbending alien seducers

Are you sure, TomTom?

Me and an oddity to be named later.

You can almost count in the back of your throat
all the murders that happened here.