Dinner was quite the experience to say the least. The ideal plans, as we set them out, involved going to the local laundromat, doing a couple of loads of laundry, and then coming back to finish off some left-overs for dinner.
Reality was, as ever, far more interesting. Our journey began when we realized that the local laundromat closed at 6 PM. This precipitated a search all over the island which culminated in the conclusion that there was no laundromat available on the island to people who wanted to do laundry after 6 PM who didn't live in the local trailer park. And thus, we expanded our search to the nearby town of Hampstead. After searching that town in vain, we stopped in at a local gas station where a goodly clerk did some phone work for Anna to find an open laundromat. Turns out we had two options: the close option that would close about 30 minutes after we got there, and the Wilmington option.
Going back through my posts, I find myself shocked that I have failed to express my disdain for Wilmington, NC. The place appears nice when approached from the west, but one is quickly confronted by the fact that the stupid city lacks any efficient way of getting through it. Every single fricking route is plagued by narrow roads, a plethora of stop-lights, poorly-engineered intersections, too many commercial venues, and bad signage. In short, the city is a standing monument to urban and suburban sprawl in all of its nasty glory. To add insult to injury, I quote the local tour guide that this to say about local drivers, as it lists tips in dealing with local traffic:
Red-light runners. Local drivers are bad about this. To protect yourself, look twice before going on green to be sure some knucklehead isn't trying to race through on yellow.
Turn-signal phobia. For some reason, many Wilmington drivers don't seem to do with those levers on their steering columns. Keep that in mind, and keep the rest of us in mind too: Please use your turn signals when changing lanes, and especially before making left-hand turns.
Anyways, by virtue of this explanation, it should be becoming clear to you that Wilmington is death to get through, and so it was. Thus, I was reluctant (to say the least) to return there for my laundry needs... but we had no choice.
You see, as a result of a bit of poor planning on our part, we had put the wet towels in with the sheets. Thus, it was either wet sheets or laundry in Wilmington. We chose the latter, and after leaving the condo around 6 PM, we found an open laundromat around 7:30. After negotiating the stupid washing machines, I sent Anna to go find food whilst I reveled in the fact that we seemed to have found Wilmington's equivalent of South Longview. Fortunately, I owed my best friend Tim a phone call, so I passed away the time discussing the finer points of our plans to see Star Wars on opening night (yes, I know, but I can't help it... I need to see the last one, and I'm praying... nevermind, you know what we're all hoping for.) Anna was back before I knew it with a disgusted look on her face and a McDonalds' bag in her hands (Anna hates the golden arches, so I knew things had to be bad.)
"It was the easiest place to get to and this area is really ghetto" was the first thing out of her mouth. I was fine... I've never really minded McDonalds', but she continued. "There was a homeless man who walked in and tried to bum food off of people." You are now wondering why I hadn't already left this area, and believe me, I wanted to. But now my laundry was almost done washing and I wanted to dry it before I left this horrific little grotto. But anyways, it was at about this time that I noted something else that was very unusual about this laundromat: it had a ratio worse than LU. So now we have the laundromat of down-on-their-luck ghetto-dwelling men? Wonderful. Just wonderful.
Anyways, we got out of there without any real incidents... and Anna even managed to talk me out of burning the whole city down. Let this be a lesson to you: stay out of Wilmington.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at May 16, 2005 10:17 PM | TrackBack