A Day in Silent Hill with the Amish Stallion

I went on a fun road trip on Friday that got its start in an interesting way. My friend Frederick is a bright guy not overly challenged by his job, so he'll often text me throughout the day. We were going back and forth last week and we got to talking about ghost towns one day. I said that we should go to one and Frederick enthusiastically agreed. I was like, "I was just kidding, but okay!"

So, I did a little digging and found that Centralia was within driving distance.  Centralia was an influence for the look of the Silent Hill games and movie. I posted a link on Facebook to Centralia 's wikipedia page, with the comment, "...we're going to see a ghost town, sir!"

A mutual friend of ours, Phil, saw the post and expressed interest. He's the same Phil who comments here occasionally and maintains an excellent blog about Legos and geekery over here.

He's known as the Amish Stallion in some circles, but more on that later.

Phil wanted a crown on the horse, but that's needlessly ostentatious. He's been hanging out with the English too much and he's taken on many of their ways.

I headed over to Frederick's house after dropping Lily off the bus. We watched some music videos on VH1 Classic and then headed out to the diner where we talked about the trip. Phil had a little further to drive and he was going to meet us there.  Strangely, I mostly know Phil through the blog. We moved in the same circles and even had a lot of the same friends as young adults, but we never really hung out. I think that's what I like about living in the modern, networked world. Acquaintances can become friends years after the fact.

Actually, I remember the first time I ever met Frederick and Phil. I was in the local mall with my future wife, talking with a friend of ours in the Babbage's he managed on the day the mall celebrated Halloween. I forget exactly what we were talking about, because a guy dressed as a mad doctor caught up to the guy dressed up as an escaped mental and plunged, I want to say it was a turkey baster, into the fake red ass cheeks the mental patient was wearing. I might be fuzzy on some details. It was a good decade and half ago, and it was, as you might imagine, a rather odd experience.

Frederick and I were talking about that when we were at the diner:

"When I first met you. were you trying to stick something up Phi's butt or was it the other way around?"

"No, you had it the right way the first time."

Phil showed up, we stopped at a local store because they had Lego minifigures at a decent price, then it was back to Frederick's house for some chocolate covered bacon and then piled into his jeep for the trip.

Silent Hill was famously foggy and we had a chuckle as we approached and saw the Fog Area sign.

 We noticed that there were a bunch of windmills nearby, presumably to keep the fog at bay.

I guess it worked.

It wasn't what I was expecting. When we had been walking around for a little while, Phil commented, "Cabin in the Woods was scarier than this place." A lot of the houses had been demolished, so the town didn't look abandoned as much as undeveloped.

As long as we're referencing Silent Hill, "There was a town here. It's gone now."

My mother-in-law asked me if it looked post-apocolyptic, but really, I think the best word to describe it is one that Phil used, picturesque. It was nice. It was peaceful, in the same way cemeteries are peaceful and I liked it for much the same reasons.

We walked around, and saw some smoke coming from the ground, which was neat, but none of it was visible in the pictures I took. Frederick had better luck recording it on his camera as a video though. We poked around for maybe 90 minutes before heading back.

We passed a surgery clinic in an outlet mall and I snapped a picture from the car. I can't imagine how desperate you'd have to be to go there.

We stopped at a Cabela's, because Cabela's is always neat. It was here that Phil revealed his dark secret. He moonlights as a producer of low end Amish pornography. Oh, he'll probably come in here and attempt to obfuscate the issue, but that's the long and the short of it. You may know him through some of his more adventurous endeavors:

• Hester and Patience have a picnic
• A Taste of Prudence
• 2 Girls, 1 Trough
• Rump-springa

Overall, it was great fun and a trip I'd be willing to make again. It was fun really meeting Phil and Frederick gets massive kudos for running with something I had suggested as a joke.