We used to drive back and forth between NC and PA when I was a kid, in the winter we'd avoid the mountains and skirt DC instead. In the summer we'd go through WV.

Exactly.

It's because they're not designed to understand language.

The thumbnails of these look like weird flowers.

How frozen north are you aiming?

Sorry I missed this, I've been spending most of my days in bed...

No but I so very rarely leave the house these days and if I do it's to go to the local small town Aldi so I'm unlikely to be in places where these sorts of events take place.

Haven't you ever heard of the 'lizard brain' lol

Word from those who knew Sir Terry is that NG ramped up the apparent relationship between them after ST's death (when he couldn't set the record straight) and that they weren't close and ST didn't enjoy working with him. So there's that.

Shelters comes between Plains and Caves.

Auel suffers from lack of a good proofreader and editor, especially for the last two books, but the way the story finishes makes the religion aspect more obvious.

I discovered Ayla as a teenager, and was irked by the 'inventing everything from peanut butter to blowjobs' aspect until I realised that what was being depicted was the shift from an Earth-based spirit religion to an anthropomorphic one, with Ayla as the catalyst.

We had a drain-related emergency three weeks ago which required me to do a lot of bailing, and I'm only now recovering. Since my second bout of covid in June, I've been pretty nonfunctional to begin with but that seriously knocked me on my arse.

Unable to open that link.