Day 7: Land of the Freaks, Home of the Braves

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Driving Cross Country - August 29th to September 6th
From: New Orleans, LA
To: Atlanta, GA

Five States Traveled:
Louisiana
Mississippi
Alabama
Florida
Georgia

Total mileage: 488 miles
Total mileage to date: 3,021 miles



So I wake up at 9 AM to turn off my alarm before it beeps. We're sleeping in today. I get up at about 11 AM and walk downstairs to grab some coffee at Starbucks. Now fortified with my regular caramel macchiato, I wander around the Old Quarter for about an hour, buy some schlocky tourist junk, and wonder how they fit so many people into these narrow streets during Mardi Gras. From ground level, Bourbon Street is a very small place. It's bizarre to see a four star French restaurant flanked by a sex shop and strip club on one side, and a gay bar and tourist t-shirt shop on the other. Strange zoning. Eat, drink and be merry? It's really hot outside and even the construction crews that are swarming everywhere right now look a little tired. There are a lot of renovations and painting going on. Getting ready for Jazz Fest in October? Hungry and hot, I walk back to the hotel and pack up.

We check out and drive out of New Orleans. As we enter Mississippi, Bug comments that the Welcome to Mississippi sign looks exactly like that for Missouri. Just after the state line, we pass NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center, the largest rocket engine test facility in the U.S. It's also the headquarters of the U.S. Naval Oceanography and Meteorology Command. It would be neat to pull over and take a look at their visitor center but we're off to a late start.

Crossing the Biloxi River, we run into a huge cloudburst where visibility drops to zero and idiots start causing near-collisions. We're only in Mississippi for about 60 miles so just before the Pascagoula River delta, we pull over a truck rest stop to each have an Abita Turbodog beer. Check off Mississippi. A few minutes after we pull up, the rain starts again, so I get out of the car and bask in the summer rain. Getting soaked in warm weather always reminds me of backpacking trips as a teenager --- always a good place in my mind. Bug got some pictures of me acting like an ass in the rain.

In Mobile, Alabama, we pull over for a late lunch of real southern food. Authentic. Yes, that's right, we stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken store. More grease. Stop number 23 on the great American lard continuum. Past Mobile, we swing south off Route 65 to a small town named Atmore, which is right on the Alabama-Florida border. We drive 50 yards into Florida and turn around at a local Piggly Wiggly supermarket. Add that State to the list. These little detours to add another state to the itinerary crack me up. Welcome to Florida. Woo hoo! Ten seconds later, you are leaving Florida! Woo hoo!

Bug is scoping the luxury European sedans as we drive. It's amazing how far away he can differentiate between the Mercedes models. As we head north to Montgomery, it becomes cloudy and overcast. Before we cross out of Alabama, we pull over at a rest stop. Check this state off the list. The weather is cooling down, which is a welcome break from the muggy heat near the Gulf. It's night now and the XM radio is back on. The comedy channels keep us awake and laughing, especially when comedians start ragging on States that we've just visited. They have two "XL" channels" that are hilarious. I suppose the "XL" stands for Extreme Language. Two to five minutes segments of comedian routines provide variety, however, and the Crank Yanker routines light up the night. When I get back to DC, I'm going to write an email to XM praising them to high heaven. The service subscription is only ten bucks per month and you can cart around the receiver from home to any car. Hmm.

And now we're back in the Eastern time zone and about 10 miles out from Atlanta. This is a HUGE city. It seems more like two or three cities that just grew like amoebas and morphed together. The downtown skyline is pretty impressive. It kind of reminds me of Philadelphia. Except for the cracker jackasses that put Peachtree Street right next to West Peachtree Street nearby Peachtree Place. There are strings of cursing coming from the front seat. There must have been one solitary peachtree standing on a hill and every road around it was named after it. I know we're in Georgia, but good gravy man! How about a little creativity. There are probably tourists still wandering in circles around this area. I think that they're afraid that General Sherman is going to come back and try to burn his way through Georgia again. These confusing street signs are an obvious ploy to confuse the Union Army. It's so clear now that I wonder why I didn't see it before. Mental note --- take my meds...

We check into the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Midtown Atlanta. Our room once again has an easy number to remember. It's 411. We've lucked out on room numbers on this trip. We've had 2727, 1111 among others. This hotel room has an Aeron chair in front of the desk. Nice. And comfy to sit in. But it's time to find food. Elf needs food badly.

So we cross the street to Jock and Jill's Sports Bar to grab some dinner and cheer the Redskins to their 16-13 victory over the Jets. There's one solitary Jets fan in the place wearing his team shirt, being drowned out by a mass of anti-Yankee sentiment (I suspect that he's an advance scout for Sherman's army). After stuffing ourselves to repletion, we wander out on the town for a few hours and head back to the hotel at about 3 AM.

Back in our room, we hop online to check email, etc. But there's no traffic going throuh my network card. It turns out that the high speed router/hub bolted to the bottom of the desk relies on a wall socket for power that gets killed when you flip off the wall switch. What tech-school-trained monkey wired this room?

We're still wide awake, so we flip the idiot box to this wacked British movie called "28 Hours Later." Retrovirally-enraged monkeys infect the population of England, which is quarantined and left to die. These modern-day zombies have blood rec eyes, uncontrollable urges to kill, and highly infectious blood that creates new zombies within 30 seconds (come on, film ain't cheap! - can't sit around filming people slowly getting sick). These zombies run around in jerky motion while screaming at the top of their voices. Strange. But the cinematography is pretty good and different than conventional Hollywood films. When the movie's over, I go to brush my teeth and come running out of the bathroom screaming like one of the infected monkeys. Bug threatens to kill me. It's a credible threat at five in the morning. Finally, we doss down for the evening. Er, um, morning. The sun comes up in a few hours and the drapes don't close all the way (there's a four-inch gap). Who cares. Brain commencing shutdown procedures in five seconds, four, three, ...

 

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