¡Limpiaparabrisas! It means “windshield wipers,” but it is our new favorite expletive. It doesn’t make sense unless you shout it out with the correct emphasis. Come on, try it with me: ¡Limpiaparabrisas! Now don’t you feel better?

The other day at the market, I overheard a guy playing the riddle game with a store clerk. He was obviously planning on having a Cosmo party and needed vodka, Triple Sec, and cranberry juice. He was doing fine with the vodka and Triple Sec (they’re the same in both languages), but then he asked for “jugo de cranberry.” The clerk gave him the puzzled look that I’ve become sadly accustomed to. Then he began to try to describe it. I felt for him. How do you describe a cranberry? It seems in this instance if you had the vocabulary to describe cranberries, you would probably know the word for cranberries. He gets an ‘A’ for effort (“It looks like a grape, but it’s not a grape. It’s juice, but not orange juice or apple juice.”), but ultimately he lost the game. I should have interrupted and told him that the store doesn’t carry cranberry juice, but I really wanted to see what would happen.

The other day we were walking to the ecological reserve and we passed by a little square in front of a school. In the middle of the square was a man sitting on a toilet (pants on) getting his hair cut by a woman who was completely unfazed by this scenario. How had this come about? Did he make an appointment? Were they just walking down the street when the urge to have a haircut seized him and she just happened to have her scissors in her bag? Is Luis Buñuel hiding behind that tree filming this?

This concludes the disjointed thoughts section. Now for the news. If you haven’t already heard, Adam and I purchased our plane tickets home last week. Well, not exactly “home.” We’re going to fly into Miami June 10 and drive from there to Washington and then down to California. We just couldn’t resist having one final adventure on our home turf. Our tentative plan is to drive up the Florida coast to Savannah (which I have been obsessed with since I read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil many years ago), head over to Memphis to Graceland to see Elvis’s collection of jumpsuits and capes (seriously, they have an entire jumpsuit museum that you have to pay extra for, but I believe it’s essential), catch the 40 and haul ass through those middle states over to New Mexico and Arizona, maybe double back into Colorado, up through Wyoming and Montana, then over through Idaho to Walla Walla where Adam will pick up his truck and we’ll start heading down to California. Whew. Our goal is to evaluate the budget motel industry with an emphasis on Motel 6, see as many ridiculous things that begin with “World’s largest,” as we can, and eat some marvelous roadside food along the way.

Any suggestions?