It’s been another long day, and for the fourth night in a row I’ve proven myself to be incapable of sitting down to finally start typing until after two a.m., well and truly exhausted. (Tonight I actually got to my computer much, much earlier, but then I decided that meant it was time to figure out how to create and embed flickr galleries. I will not tell you how long this took, because it is embarrassing.)

I’m sitting on the porch of a lovely B&B in St. Augustine, Florida. Ty and the rest of the guests (their average age, if we exclude Ty as an outlier, being something around seventy) are all abed. (Ty’s excuse? He is smarter than I am and listens to his body when it tells him to lie down.)

Today was the first day that was less than idyllic, mostly because St. Augustine turned out to be a bit too Pretty– a bit too purposefully Quaint, as if the whole historic district has been maintained by a Disney affiliate– and it turns out that both Ty and I find this particular kind of Pretty/Quaint to be kind of demoralizing. Only it’s a surprisingly subtle process, the slow, insidious accumulation of this low-grade, jaded breed of weariness, and so it took us quite a while to figure out what was happening, why our silences were growing decidedly more pointed, etc. etc. But in the end we did, and we fixed it, and we have yet more plans in the works, plans I am fairly confident will make St. Augustine a memory to revisit rather than revile. More on that later, when I am less tired, with further photographic documentation.

For now, the HIGHLIGHTS of the day, which occurred on the road well before we even got to this oppressively Picturesque little patch of Florida. First, a few hours out, along the side of the interstate, we spotted a sign that led us to this:

On the off chance we have not personally discussed it, I will here state for the record that I love shit like this. Even before stumbling across Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” a few years ago and first feeling somewhat justified in my fascination, I loved shit like this. Biggest, Smallest, Tallest, Shortest, Bluest, Yellowest, whatever-est, I’m down. It’s just too fabulously weird not to enjoy. Because why do we do this? Why, as a nation and/or a species, are we so into the -ests?

And the smallest church in America? It did not disappoint.

It was, indeed, very small.

(??????!???!?!?????)

Another hour or so down I-95, Ty discovered an iPhone app (in case it wasn’t already obvious, this whole road trip is pretty much being brought to you by a combination of Apple, Yelp, Googlemaps, and Diet Coke) called “Roadside America” or something like that, and this app informed us that yet another hour or so down the road, we would be coming up on something every bit as glorious as this smallest of American churches.

Behold:

That there is a gigantic 7-up can. It is over sixty feet high. It was originally a water tower. And the most amazing part? It’s incredibly hard to find, even with three different kinds of maps/directions, despite its gargantuan proportions. I feel like I wouldn’t even know where to begin if called upon to camouflage a sixty-foot soda can, but whoever was in charge of this particular sixty-foot soda can did a really impeccable job. The exit number listed by multiple sources did not exist, so we had to (and by ‘had to,’ I mean chose to…) take the next one and circle back through a maze of strip malls and office parks, and then I accidentally told Ty (beatific, kind, indulgent, patient, long-suffering Ty) to turn well before we were supposed to, and on, and on, and on, and even after we arrived, and climbed out into the unbearable heat of some truly random and industrial-looking parking lot, telling ourselves and one another that this had to be the place, there was no other place, it was still nowhere to be found. Only after we passed a ‘No Trespasssing’ sign and turned a corner of trees and building did it come into view.

And then I took this photo. (And also another photo, which demonstrates the scale better, but that won’t upload right now, so whatever.)

And then we got back in the car and made our way back to the highway.

I may have read the Eco (and I may or may not have once given a presentation on Baudrillard during which I very nearly physically passed out from a combination of sleep deprivation and existential dread), but I still have no real vocabulary for explaining (or even understanding) why I found this utterly meaningless experience to be so satisfying (especially when it ended up being the simulation of historicity overlaid over the actual history here in St. Augustine that sicked me out so much).

What I can and will say, though, is that it makes me think I might actually be more American at heart than I ever fully realized.

I am totally stoked for the next -est.