Author: C3PO. In January of 1994, my sister Cora had been living back in the Washington D.C. area for a while, and had a fiancé who had gotten a job at a university in Mississippi. So she pulled together a plan for filling a moving van full of stuff and moving down there with him. Naturally, this grandiose plan involved Vygis. His car at the time was the 85 Honda, which he had outfitted with an overclocked CB radio, so part of Cora's plan for Vygis was not only to get his help unloading the van at their destination, but to get Vygis' help with supplying her entire caravan of vehicles with CB radios so that we could all presumably communicate on the trip. And this he did; we had Vygis' car, my sister's tiny white Honda Civic, and the rental van (pulling another vehicle) all with CBs and leaving Washington D.C. together on a snowy day. Cora drove her Civic, and the fiancé drove the minivan. A mutual friend of theirs had been roped into going on the trip also and rode in the minivan; I rode with Vygis.
The carefully planned trip south took two days, with a stop at a hotel on the way. We drove through some beautiful sections of the East Coast, particularly Kentucky and Tennessee. We didn't end up using the CB radios for much, except for one incident where they ended up failing us hilariously. In the early part of the trip, we were all heading down the interstate, when Vygis decided that he would pull into a rest stop, but established over the radios that everyone else could go on ahead and we would catch up. After a bathroom break, he and I got going again and fired up the radio to contact the rest of the caravan. That's when we learned that CB radios have a pathetic range. There was plenty of chatter on the channel that we had selected to all communicate on, but no return to our calls for the caravan. After an interminable time, we caught up to where the fiancé had pulled over the moving van to wait for us; based on when he responded on the radio the CBs probably had a range of 1 mile! However, my sister was not with them. It turns out that she had decided to turn around and go back to the rest stop to try to find us. So, Vygis and I also turned around and went back up the interstate, occasionally paging for Cora. Eventually, we heard her on the radio. She was trying to contact us, but she was talking continuously into the microphone as she drove, not releasing the talk button. We could hear her, and we saw her distinctive vehicle coming down the interstate opposite us, but we couldn't break in. Her signal got stronger and then she passed us and her signal quickly faded. We eventually turned around and caught up again with the moving van and Cora and shelved all further plans to split up the caravan for the remainder of the trip.
When we got down to Mississippi, we got to the rental place that Cora and her fiancé had set up, helped unload the moving van, and stayed over one last night.
When it came time to leave, Vygis insisted that we first take this picture of him next to this Laundromat that he had found in the area. He simply couldn't believe his luck; not only was he a fan of the Highlander movie series, but since he had grown up in Highland, Maryland, and he had the goth trench coat look going, the name 'Highlander Laundromat' was like finding the 'Vygis' Laundromat. Vygis and I split up for the trip home. I had at the spur of the moment set up a cross country bus and train trip to visit some relatives out west, and Vygis and my sister's friend drove home together in his car. Vygis of course was having none of stopping on the drive back; he did the drive all in one day. My sister reported that their friend had his heart in his throat for most of the trip, as Vygis insisted on doing all the driving himself but seemed to drift in and out of consciousness for the last three or four hours of the trip. My trip out west turned out to be epic; I got a chance to visit the farther-flung members of my family all the way out to California, and Vygis was quite jealous that he hadn't thought to do something like that himself. And thus, when the summer of 1994 rolled around, he had a proposal for me...