Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones and a furry, feathery, and quite possibly scaly announcement.

We’re partnering with Rockfish Wildlife Sanctuary for our next nonprofit spotlight. That means the HB team will donate $2 to this incredible org for every new person that current readers refer to the newsletter.

Rockfish is a wildlife rehab and education nonprofit that treats over 1,000 injured and orphaned animals every year right here in the Cville area, with the goal of healing them up and returning them to the wild. That includes white-footed mice, great horned owls, baby songbirds, red foxes, and even skunks. Pics for proof.

If you haven’t referred a friend to Hot Bones yet, send them this link: {{ rp_refer_url }}

When you do, Hot Bones donates $2 to Rockfish on your behalf.

And if you have already referred someone, well you’re just the best. You can also support Rockfish by following them on IG to learn more about these lil creatures, or you can donate straight to Rockfish beyond the Hot Bones promo. (They don’t receive any state or federal funding.)

Welcome to the Hot Bones crew, Rockfish!

Do one long thumb scroll for more Cville-specific updates like local events, cool houses, and pets to adopt.

🐶 Speaking of: Marshmallow! Your dog grooming bill would be crazy, but it’d be worth it to hang out with this calm, gentle ball of fluff (Wheaten Terrier mix, 2 years old, 46 lbs).

🐱 Plus a mystery cat named Leo.

As longtime Hot Bones readers may remember, most of my wife’s family is in Nashville, and since G hates flying and I hate the people I am forced to meet while flying, we drive there for various holidays and special occasions. G does most of the driving, so those trips aren’t too bad. But this past week, I would be driving solo and meeting G down there, which meant I needed to find a way to stay awake for the 9-hour trip.

When I was in college, I would make the drive down 81 South without blinking. I went to a school called Sewanee, which is in a little town not far from Nashville, and I’d leave after dinner and drive all night fueled by six or seven Cokes and an aux cord. I’d get back to DC at like 3am, pass out with my shoes still on, and be ready to roll the next morning like nothing happened.

But I am now in my thirties and I am a shell of my former roadwarrior self. Where will I pee? What audiobooks won’t make me fall asleep? What food won’t make me feel bloated? What on earth will I do about my lower back.

The way things are headed, by the time I hit 40, I’ll need to be driven everywhere in a U-Haul with a chaise lounge in the back.

So in order to make this most recent trip to Nashville more doable for myself, I made a few 30-something decisions.

First decision: I’d break things up into two days, to take it easy. 8 hours the first day to get to Sewanee, 1 hour the next to get to G and her family. Perfectly balanced.

Next decision: Stick to French house pop and phone calls to stay awake. Anything caffeinated and I’d spend the day sprinting into rest stops, praying for clean toilets.

Hardest decision: Only bring sensible snacks. This is easier said than done. You want things to still be fun and whimsical (the wide open road just begs for Hubba Bubba and Doritos) but as a mid-30s solo driver, my options sadly narrow.

For example:

Since I didn’t really want to lose too much time on stops (or dying) this go round, that left just a few snacks suitable for the weak and pitiful. Mainly, gummy fruit snacks.

They’re delicious, they don’t make me super thirsty, they provide little boosts of energy just when you start to get sleepy, they still feel whimsical, they’re harder to melt than chocolate, and they go really well with the bedrock of my mealplan: a signature sourdough pb&j.

Also, while my college self would have loved to crush half a dozen Fruit by the Foot packs on the drive, there’s a burgeoning market for healthier options that actually contain fruit — rather than just fruit juice or, more likely, sugar, artificial food dyes, and the illusion of fruity virtuosity.

So I did a little Hot Bones snack test on my trip down. And I told myself that the reward for arriving safely in Sewanee would be one Fruit by the Foot, hopefully consumed while in a thick cotton terry bathrobe with room service on the way.

➡ Bear fruit rolls, apple + pear + strawberry + lemon

➡ Annie’s bunny fruit snacks, summer strawberry

➡ That’s It mini bars, strawberry + banana

I snagged all three options at Wegmans on my way out of town. They’ve got airtime right there next to the rainbow Fruit by the Foots and tropical tye-dye Fruit Roll-Ups and whatever delicious poison they put in Gushers. This is great to see — the tide is turning toward healthy and delicious fruit snacks! In fact, the global fruit snacks market (currently worth nearly $24 billion) is expected to keep on growing thanks to people’s increasing interest in minimally processed, clearly labeled, lower sugar snacks.

Translation: Orange slices may soon lose their title as the best afternoon pick-me-up.

And just to verify that the fruity brands I picked aren’t full of marketing crap about things like “natural flavors” (that could be pretty much anything), I used the food-scanning app Yuka (free, worth a download) to get a thumbs up before I hit the road.

Annie’s got a few dings for too much sugar and a limited-risk additive, whereas Bear and That’s It got nice green check marks because they are literally just made of fruit.

In contrast, Fruit by the Foot got a 1/100 grade and a big red circle.

So with science on my side, I queued up a discotheque playlist to a decibel that would rattle my ribs, put the car in drive, and took off for Tennessee with my little snacks in the passenger seat.

The only thing I failed to do was pre-open the packages so I wouldn’t have to rip them with my teeth while outracing someone with Florida plates. Made things more exciting at least.

💰 Cost: $4.79 for a pack of 5

🧑‍🍳 Ingredients: Apples, pears, pumpkins, strawberries, lemon, black carrot extract

🧨 Hot takes: This was my favorite of the three, mainly because it tasted like those ’90s fruit leather sticks I used to beg my mom to get anytime we went to Whole Foods. But in this case, the Bear fruit rolls are less likely to lacquer across your molars all day.

Bonus: Each pack comes with a trading card featuring a cool creature like a sea turtle or a peregrine falcon. I assume these are meant for children but I held onto mine for dear life from Staunton to Roanoke as a friendly talisman.

🗾 Road trip whereabouts: The reason for me needing to tightly grip that peregrine card was that most of driving on 81 is just imaging the opening line of your obituary.

Driver dies when enormous metal culvert flies off truck directly ahead, piercing her windshield and killing her instantly.

Driver perishes when a series of office chairs unhooks from the truck 10 feet ahead, exploding the windshield and perforating her heart with swiveling wheels.

Driver perishes when a cow flies through her windshield, making the rest of the trip a moo point. [that reporter will soon get fired]

💰 Cost: $6.49 for a pack of 10

🧑‍🍳 Ingredients: Plenty. Organic rice syrup, organic cane sugar, organic tapioca syrup solids, organic pear juice concentrate, water, pectin, citric acid, sodium citrate, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), organic natural flavor, organic sunflower oil, organic color (organic black carrot, organic black currant extracts), organic carnauba wax

🧨 Hot takes: Really excellent candy that didn’t make me feel guilty about eating candy. (It’s organic!)

Again, food science has really perfected the gummy-in-teeth issue, because these little bunny snacks were a good two-bite energizer without causing any loose filings.

They come in small packs and the only self control I had for not eating all 10 was that the rest of the box was in the backseat.

🗾 Road trip whereabouts: I got a double jolt of energy as I enjoyed these jaunty bunnies around Bristol because I remembered the insane story of G — my wife — driving our 2006 Subaru Outback northward on January 5, 2021 after spending the holidays with her family.

“Huh, lots of pickup trucks on the road today,” she must have thought.

“And American flags.”

“Also men with buzzcuts and no necks.”

So Bristol holds a special, fear-inducing place in my heart as the starting point for G’s unintentional convoy with the Proud Boys to Washington. Hundreds of alt-right, fuming trucks and one little “love is love” Subaru stuck in the middle.

If I’d had these sooner, I would have recommended she toss a few bunny gummies into their cabs to lighten the vibe.

💰 Cost: $7.99 for a pack of 10

🧑‍🍳 Ingredients: As the name suggests, strawberries and bananas. That is it.

🧨 Hot takes: Big fan of these mini bars because they taste healthy but not prohibitively healthy. They’re a quick fruity hit to prevent hanger and road trip sleepies, and then you’re ready for your next thing.

🗾 Road trip whereabouts: So close to Sewanee now. This is the part of the drive where the scenery gets dramatic — lakes, rivers, mountains after hundreds of miles of flat scrub — as you whipsaw through Chattanooga, briefly into Georgia, and then up 1,000 feet to the top of the Cumberland Plateau into cooler air on central time. There’s something energizing about being in the last hour of a long drive, but also a real risk of losing all momentum right at the last gasp.

That strawberry banana bar helped with a final push, so that I could roll up to campus after over a decade away and be greeted with two of my favorite sounds: bugs and bells.

You’re driving for 8 hours and you get a single CD to play. What’s it going to be?

A quick follow-up from last edition, to give you more viewpoints on steam train enthusiasm. Here’s a cool video that shows the glamor of the outside of the 611 historic train as it rolls through Cville:

And if you want to know about the inside of the train, re-read last week’s newsletter.

May your first snake sighting of the summer be less airborne.

I have to remind myself this every time I see a black snake, but these guys are not satan. In fact, they’re good for our ecosystem because they’re non-venomous and help control mice and rat populations.

💅 Girly girls got style: Darling x Dashing is hosting a popup vintage market to address all your girlypop needs, including jewelry, suncatchers, and stickers.

🔭 A fine night for science: The next Big Science Show is this Saturday night at Holly’s Diner, where you’ll learn from actual scientists about their work, in this case binge drinking and early onset Alzheimer’s, as well as chip technology and “smart” devices. The learning starts at 8pm and the kitchen is open late.

🏠 Historic house of the week: 1940s craftsman cottage with a twinkly light front porch, renovated kitchen, huge fenced backyard, and a highly specific cactus collection on the deck (2 beds, 1 bath, $399k on Ridge Street extended).

🏡 Cool rental of the week: 1 bed, 1 bath apartment in a historic building with a second story porch, built-ins in the dining room, a one-of-a-kind kitchen sink (in a good way), and a one-of-a-kind bathroom sink (in a bad way). $1,630/month in north downtown.

🍕 Hey free food: The next event in C3’s clean energy transition action series is a free community dinner and town hall on Tuesday, July 7.

💼 Job of the week: Project Manager at Sun Tribe (no salary listed, HQ is right off the mall).

💾 Remote job: Virginia Field Coordinator at Appalachian Voices ($50k - $57k).

🥈 Doubly good news out in Ivy: SugarBear ice cream is officially open in the shopping area where Selvedge is, and if that isn’t fun enough, the Ivy recycling center now accepts lithium batteries (that’s what’s in most portable tech devices, like phones, these days). More info on drop off here.

🩷 And lastly, we’ve got a few more Hot Bones pocket tees for sale, if you’re looking to spice up your summer wardrobe with some salmon pink. Can confirm it will make you look tanner than you are.

Have an event or rec you’d like to share? Hiring? Interested in advertising? Share any and all info here.