Sometimes I have trouble following the plot of my own life. (Or: In Pursuit of a Paleontology Enthusiast Antiquarian Vampirologist.)

I’m not really big on the whole Manifestation thing, I’ll be honest.
That aside, I have noticed that, when I’m starting to feel like life is a little same-y, the universe is extremely willing to help. And by “help,” I mean send me on some very strange field trips.

I wasn’t the only one who’d been feeling like life was getting routine. My Handsome Assistant works very hard, and very long hours. It’s not a physically laborious job, but it’s the kind of work that’s both mentally demanding and continues to be a whole Thing around the clock. He even has trouble taking time off, so he finally said that enough was enough, blocked off some PTO, and we scheduled a small vacation.

I suggested New Hope, PA, because it’s the kind of thing that we both find fun and relaxing: No itinerary, lots of art and history, lovely architecture, ghosts, nature, and tasty food. It’s immediately adjacent to Lambertville, NJ, too, which is ludicrously packed with antique shops and art galleries. We could wake up whenever, go wherever, and no matter where we decided to walk, there was pretty much guaranteed to be something neat to do, see, or eat.

The vacation part is a lovely and relaxing story for another time.

While Handsome Assistant was in the shower, I was sitting on the floor of the hotel, charging my phone and idly tapping through a map of the area to see what looked like a fun destination for the following day.

That’s when I saw it.

“VAMPA Vampire and Paranormal Museum.”

“Permanently Closed.”

I took a screenshot and sent it to him for shits and giggles. There’s always something darkly funny in simultaneously discovering something cool, and that it has ceased to exist.

He texted back. We laughed it off. I pointed out a neat antique shop we could look at, and my tiny disappointment was forgotten.

Little did I know that VAMPA had continued to live in his mind.

Unbeknownst to me, the antique shop that I’d wanted to go see was located in a very large building — large and filled enough to make Google Maps get a little complicated. Locations were hazy estimates, at best. I didn’t mind, though. Everything was in walking distance, and what was an extra block or two?

Inside was a veritable treasure house of weird. The air was filled with the vaguely vanilla scent of old books, naphthalene, leather, and straw. I looked through strings of antique snake vertebrae, preserved hornets’ nests, bottles of peacock bones, old containers of patent medicine (some still half-full of highly questionable powders and jellies), and hand-colored German anatomical prints. Handsome Assistant and I got separated at some point, but I wasn’t too worried.

The “shop” was less of a shop than it was a marketplace. Each floor had its own set of vendors, including one guy who’d collected a very varied and impressive selection of crystal specimens. There were lovely slices of amethyst geodes, palm stones of every description, fossil specimens, spheres of every color, and even a large piece of alabaster marked, “Great for sculptors!”

I came away with a polished freeform moss agate and a sunstone palm stone, while Handsome Assistant chose a small sphere of tiger’s and hawk’s eye. (The gold of the tiger’s eye and blue of the hawk’s eye swirl together like the atmosphere of some strange and distant planet, shifting in the light in a way that’s honestly kind of mesmerizing.)

As we left, he turned to me in excitement.

“So,” he began, both handsomely and assistantly, “The vampire museum used to be on the top floor of this place.”

“Really? Huh,” I replied, neither attractively nor helpfully.

“Apparently the guy who owned it closed the museum, sold some of his collection, and moved up the road. He has an antique shop with dinosaurs in the front. You know what that means.”

I did not know what that meant.

“It means,” he continued as we walked, “That there’s more of his collection that he didn’t sell yet.“

After that, there was lunch and ice cream sandwiches. We got patio seating immediately next to a graveyard. I had a long and interesting conversation about veganism with our server. We were attacked by wasps. The whole afternoon got kind of hazy after a certain point.

Anyway, this is how we found ourselves in the car in the late afternoon, on the hunt for a large estate full of Dinosauria.
There was only one problem: We had literally nothing else to go on. No names, no street address, nothing.

“Just drive up the road. You’ll see the dinosaurs.”
That was basically it.

I think we drove on for about forty-five minutes with no luck. There was a museum, but it was neither vampiric, paranormal, nor paleontological, and thus of little interest to us at that moment. (There was also a really neat mossy green house with black trim. That was mostly interesting because we have to replace our siding soon and house exteriors are the kind of thing we’ve found ourselves starting to care about, largely against our collective will.)

I don’t know what compelled us to take a different route. It was probably just a desire to find a more scenic road back to the hotel. But that was when we saw it.

A very weathered wood sign near the road, simply marked “ANTIQUES.”

And an allosaurus.

We pulled into the gravel driveway cautiously. (I’m not sure why, it just seemed correct.)
The door was locked, its hours prominently posted.

“Wednesday, 11 AM.”

Handsome Assistant and I looked at each other. We knew now what we had to do.