Short and Sweet

Listening to This American Life and Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. She mentions a few times about dragging her friends from this historical place or another and how they're always bored. How do you get the attention of someone that "HEY! I wouldn't be bored! I find this stuff just as fascinating and I'd even be willing to drive!"
I don't have a ton of money and cannot afford long trips on my own but I've been wanting to go out and travel to places like that and though all my friends are far more educated than I, I just don't think they'd be willing to "come with".
A trip to a funeral home where some historical figure was memorialized or buried would be fun for me. Spending 8 hours driving somewhere only to get there, look at a plaque and head back? Yeah that'd be me...if I could justify such a trip to anyone I know including my wife.
She, as with my friends, has her college degree. I haven't even seen the inside of a classroom since I graduated High School unless it was to visit an old teacher and catch up. She is more a lover of literature, art history, and all the inner workings of constitutional law that most find completely boring. She reads supreme court cases like most people read junk novels. Then again she also has a fascination with super diseases. AIDS, ebola, the honta virus, etc. The more vile, smelly, goopy, and overall disgusting, the better.
She can at least get my attention with this stuff. Well that and the art history. I tend to like reading more about history. Not just the facts but moreso the people. How did they live? How did they think? What kind of people were they and what might I be like in those times and situations? I like reading about philosophy. I read a bit of Freud and Voltaire. I tend to think most of the early philosophers were egotistical blowhards. Certainly after a statement like that it's obvious that I have not read much and there's still a lot to learn. However I just saw the movie "Kinsey" and for some reason that sent me back into thinking on a philosophical level. That of course got me to wondering if I've become an egotistical blowhard. Then I realize that just the fact that I wondered that and cared is evidence that even if I moved closer in that direction, I'm not there yet and certainly not beyond hope for avoiding such a catastophe. I beat myself up way too much to be conceited.

Anyways...how do I get on one of these "pilgrimages" where she goes in search of various obscure sites? I can drive, I love the macabre, I love history, I love fast food. OH and to say I don't care for the current administration is an understatement but to say I hate them is going WAY too far. So...what's keeping us from making a trip? First, Sarah's research for the book is done since...well...the book is out and I'm listening to it right now. Second, she's in New York. Third, I'm too afraid of rejection.

I might send her a short letter but I want to avoid being seen as some sick stalker and I don't want to get any hopes up...I am one of thousands after all. I'm no better than any of them.