The longest weekend

Well, now.

The weekend was a grand adventure.

It also completely confounded whatever expectations I had. The short of it is, things have heated up a great deal with Kelly, but neither of us is quite sure what to do, since we live 250 miles from each other for at least several more months.

That's the short answer.

The longer description is a lot more fun. I drove down to North Carolina on Friday night, starting out actually around 7:00pm and somehow making it all the way to Nag's Head, North Carolina, on the Outer Banks, by midnight. This, even despite crappy weather the second half of the trip and moronic Virginia drivers the entire trip. That's 329 miles in almost exactly five hours. A nice extralegal average speed.

There was spectacular lightning once I got down toward Norfolk, to the point where driving was very distracting because the landscape kept flipping from night to day and back in the weird blue light. A big flash grounded out barely three hundred feet from me at one point on I-664 and sounded like a large bomb going off. The rain was quite heavy going down into North Carolina. The Volkswagen held up well, though, churning through everything.

I did neglect to stop and eat, and by the time I got to where Kelly was, everything except 7-Eleven was closed, and they had absolutely no food. No hot dogs, no taquitos, no cookies, no donuts, and the cowlike girl behind the register didn't seem to think this was unusual. I got an iced tea and left. I found the cottage in the dark and Kelly came out in the rain to help bring my stuff in. She set me up in the larger of the beds, reasoning that she's much shorter than I am and I can use the space.

Saturday we went wandering all over the place, over to Manteo (where we met a very nice cat in a pottery shop) and up and down the island. Dinner was a seafood buffet in Kitty Hawk, for which we had to wait about 45 minutes, time we spent laughing at pretty much everybody else who was waiting, too. The wait was worth it, though, because I got to destroy piles of crab legs, including Dungeness crab, which I wasn't familiar with, and these mysterious thorny crab claws which, though dangerous to handle because of the thorns, were tremendously succulent.

We then went back to the cottage and ended up fooling around, loud and long. It was amazing.

As I said, all my expectations were confounded.

In the morning, we did it all again, and it was even more amazing. We didn't get out to lunch until nearly 2:00. The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering on beaches, driving down to the middle of Hatteras Island (including a drive past the infamous Froggy Dog in Avon) and wandering around the beach-house area on Segways. I was a little disappointed that the big HT's batteries appear to be dying, because I was getting barely two miles out of them before Frowny Guy started complaining on the display. We got back to the house and plugged them back in.

Sunday night, we went out for a nice dinner at a place in Kill Devil Hills populated almost exclusively by loud blonde people in flip-flops, but at which I had one of the best steaks on the planet. If you're ever on the Outer Banks, be sure to stop at J-K's, it's amazing. However, you should remember to lock your car. I later figured out that I hadn't, and we came back out to the Volkswagen to discover that someone had unexpectedly borrowed the big iPod. Bother. Now I'll have to get a new one, I guess.

We went back to the house and Kelly pulled out some photo albums of pictures and reviews from when she was more actively involved in theatre, back before she started teaching fifteen years ago. I can without reservation tell you that she was absolutely gorgeous in her twenties and early thirties. Just unimaginably attractive in that way I like. The recent years have brought her stress and illness which have taken a toll on her, and it does show, but I could still see that she was the same woman and she'll be back.

We watched a DVD of High Fidelity, the John Cusack film from 2000. Kelly hadn't seen it before, but really liked it and said that she "could see why I'd like it." That's a rare thing... even rarer than the fact that she got almost all the little weird inside jokes and references in the script. Almost nobody I've ever seen it with did. No, I take that back. Exactly nobody.

I was exhausted. We slept; we didn't fool around... at least not until the next morning, and it was again outrageous and fun.

Oh, yeah. That was this morning. We talked and talked and talked, and went for lunch, and talked more, and took one more run on the Segways, and then it was time for me to go.

I was actually very disappointed.

The drive home was much tougher, since every moron Virginian with a car was out there fouling up traffic. It took seven hours to get home, and when I got here, found the cats had nearly run out of food and the house was rather warm.

So, here I am.

Stuck in the middle, but much more optimistic about where I'm stuck. Kelly and I talked a lot about the practical considerations of any relationship, and she seemed very concerned that I might think she was trying to take over my life or demand all my attention (which I wasn't) or that I was trying to pull away or say goodbye (which I wasn't, and am not). We agreed basically to make no decisions.

So, we won't.

When at Owen's in Nag's Head, don't order the shrimp and guts.

And at Forbes', avoid the chocolate-covered beach rocks.