Bracey Junction, Virginia is weird

bracey
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

so I went to Greensboro, NC this past weekend for the NCAA tournament, GW was playing. More on that later. On the way back, we stopped for gas randomly at this place along I-85 just over the North Carolina line in Virginia. It was a very stange place. At first it looked like your normal truck stop place with all the weird crap they sell - figurines, leather vests, tapes, etc, but there was also a bunch of games in the entry where you put a quarter in and it drops and might push other quarters out, if that makes sense. There were also a bunch of video poker machines, about half of which were on but had "out of order" signs taped on them. And the weird thing was that the place was hopping. It was like 8 pm on a saturday, and every video poker machine had a random-looking person on them, and a couple guys were playing the quarter machines. We tried them and once got a bunch of quarters to drop into the place where you get your winnings, but when we reached in, there weren't any in there. So that was weird.

I bought some food at the shop and the girl behind the counter stared at my jacket, which says "SC Schwerzenbach" and seemed surprised I spoke English. Apparently the other cashier was smoking while she rang up my buddy, which was funny. Then I asked where the bathroom was, and she gave me pretty long directions to get there. The place was huge and kept going back and back into other rooms. I heard people talking off in corners and other rooms I couldn't see, and next to the bathroom there were 6 booths or so, every one with somebody in it filling out a scratch game ticket. And even beyond the bathrooms there were other rooms.

The whole establishment was sort of brown and grimy too. So I made my way out of the bathroom and through the maze of hallways and rooms, and got back to the front where my pal was trying the quarter game again with no success. While he was putting in quarters, a guy with a big tattoo on his hand complained to me that he heard the quarters drop too, and didn't get any. I said that happened to us too. He set off the alarm trying to get his money from the receptacle, but nobody seemed to be bothered by it.

Then after my pal used his last quarter, we left and we both said how weird the place was. I said I wouldn't be surprised if the place was a brothel or sold drugs or something weird like that too, and I was sort of worried that I used my credit card, as it was a sketchy place. I noticed driving out that all the signs were sort of brown and looked like they were from 1980s Europe, and the gas prices didn't match on a couple signs.

Anyway, I recommend going there, it was very surreal and odd. Sort of reminded me of a movie, like the weird bar in "From Dusk Til Dawn" or whatever that vampire movie with Antonio Banderas was. And there's also a whole other wing with a restaurant and apparently a bar, as the place is listed on Pubcrawler.com. Strange stuff. Here's the map of where it is.