Red Light District

With the roar of the interstate drowning out my headphones, I clambered over the safety barrier, to retreat to the ditch while I walked.  In the dark, I stumbled over rough, unfinished drainage canals, and the wet undergrowth slapped at my legs.  I trudged on for a while before realizing I was never going to get any closer to my destination, and that walking across an interstate is a much stupider prospect than walking across a highway.  Defeated, I re-oriented myself for the return trip. There, beyond some trees, I saw the white lights of a parking lot. From there, I could just cut along the back of the commercial district.  Simple. 

To reach the trees, I traversed a broad plain, clear-cut in order to put up the massive power lines now hanging over my head.  Then, I had to fight my way through the brush. Branches tripped me, thorns tore at me, and dead wood sprang at me like a lash. Finally, I saw the parking lot. On the other side of a ten-foot chain link and barbed wire fence.

It was at this point that GWAR started playing on my headphones, as I fought my way back through the thorns and tripwires. Then, under the power lines, I stepped knee-deep into a... well, honestly, I don't even have finish the sentence. "Knee deep" very rarely carries a positive connotation, after all. Nobody ever steps knee-deep into strawberry shortcake.

Anyway, I try again at another point along the interstate, and this time I manage to climb a hill so steep that no one worried about putting up a ten-foot fence. Here, five feet was sufficient. I managed to vault that, and dragged myself to the hotel about half an hour later, utterly defeated by the suburbs of Baltimore.

The next day, I got in the rental car and drove to my intended destination - a strip mall which I had seen from my hotel window, half a mile away. 

America doesn't have a love affair with the car - it has a domination fetish.