The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [20]
Benjamin shut Authority off and yanked my road atlas from the pile of stuff suffocating the backseats. “A chance to redeem myself,” he announced, taking over the navigational duties. The trip to Beaufort would take an additional hour, thanks to the necessary backtracking.
We could at least take comfort in the fact that each of our trials carried with it a crucial lesson. For example, very few typos exist on beaches. And: Tents need something to hold them up. And above all, I now knew not to place blind trust in Authority again; I would always compare her routes against the maps. Though she’d mislead us a little here and there, never again would she send us so far astray. We paused for lunch along the way, making a shopping trip for supplies and eating peanut butter sandwiches in a grocery parking lot before heading onward. Beaufort was a little coastal town with a big heart and an exceptional Maritime Museum, wherein Benjamin scraped an errant apostrophe off the wall with his thumbnail.
Another spartan day for finds, but at least this time we went three for three, knocking us back over the fifty-percent correction mark. In retrospect, that day was also notable for our first run-in with an enemy whose name is Legion: CARS WILL BE TOWED AT OWNERS EXPENSE.
As I wrote my day’s blog entry, I reflected on my continuing struggle to find the places in most dire need of our typo-hunting services. I needed more text-rich locales than I’d been able to find yet. Still, at least Benjamin was on board with my mission, we’d be picking up the tent poles tomorrow, and we could once again claim to have corrected a (slim) majority of our discovered nemeses. We went out to dinner thinking our troubles had mostly concluded, powerless to resist the grotesque “thickburgers” that Hardee’s had been bombarding us with through highway advertisements for some time now. Alas, the worst was yet to be digested. For Benjamin, it turned out to be utterly indigestible. By morning he lay prone across his bed and skipped our second Econo Lodge’s continental breakfast. He retched to try to force the fast food out of his tract, but to no avail.
I realized then that my poor friend wasn’t used to consuming the mounds of terribly unhealthy food that an epic road trip requires. The Hardee’s tera-burger had been his grim initiation into the lifestyle. This seemed the culmination of our woes of the last few days, as if an accumulated sludgeball of ill luck were what was actually troubling Benjamin’s guts. If we could propel it from his system, I thought, we’d see an immediate change in our fortunes.
On the harrowing drive to Myrtle Beach, I thrice feared for Callie’s interior, but the burger remained lodged in place. Each Hardee’s billboard we passed made Benjamin’s nausea swell, and there were many, but when we cranked up the latest album by his favorite jeans-clad bard, Springsteen, some eldritch Magic helped quell his troubled stomach’s pains. We managed to arrive without the forcible ejection of any internal organs.
Once inside the city limits, we drove past lurid signs promising simulacra of whatever one desired. Dinosaur putt-putt! Medieval banquets (serfs and wenches included)! A rock-and-roll theme park! I hadn’t visited this particular honky-tonk since my dad led a family expedition here many years ago. Time had not moved on here; apparently the place was still catering to my prepubescent self. Our first stop in Myrtle Beach was the FedEx office, where missing tent parts had arrived ahead of us. We put them to use right away at a KOA campsite in a modest wood not far from the beach. After Benjamin and I erected the tent, which proved at least as easy as he’d told me two nights prior, he crawled inside it to die. It was late afternoon at that point.