July 21, 2010 Happy Birthday Nikki!
600 miles 10.5 hours: Palm Beach Gardens to Marietta, Georgia.
So as not to clutter in-boxes all over the country, this vacation series is strictly opt-in. If you want to follow our travels, simply reply to this email and I’ll keep you on the list. Otherwise, this is the last email you will receive regarding this trip.
As you probably know, we are on a road trip from Palm Beach Gardens to Yellowstone and back. So far, so good. Bikes on the roof traveled well.
We are in Atlanta, specifically Marietta, Georgia, visiting with Laurie’s sister’s family for three nights.
In February, in anticipation of this trip, I went to the websites of all the states we planned to visit and requested tourist brochures. So much material came in I had to set up a portable file cabinet with hanging folders for each state, computer generated labels, the whole works. I also included printouts of our extensive itinerary, notes from the meetings with our well traveled friends, passes for Zion National Park, etc., etc. A wonderful resource. It is still in my office at home. Oops #1. That’s OK, I have internet and can still look things up and all of our hotel reservations are in my calendar on my mac and iPhone. Oh well, less to carry. Fortunately, I was tardy in ordering my National Park Annual Pass so I had it sent here. Had I been more efficient I would have left that behind too.
The good thing about this trip is that we have not left civilization (yet) so anything we forget we can still purchase along the way. Today we are shopping for sneakers for Laurie (Oops #2) and replacements for Laurie’s missing make-up and brushes (Major Oops #3 to #42).
Our car is so stuffed, it looks like we brought everything we own. (Obviously we didn't bring everything we own or we would have what we forgot.) We have an electric cooler for Laurie’s vitamins and sprouts which works both in the car and in a hotel so we don’t have to deal with ice along the way. I tossed the outdoor sensor to an indoor-outdoor thermometer into the cooler so we can see the internal temperature of the cooler on a display on the dash.
We stopped for dinner in Gainesville (which is planned as our last stop on the way home) but it wasn’t the Gainesville we were familiar with. We were just off I-75 and that area was pasture when we were in college. We ate at a pizza restaurant which is having a contest: You have to eat one of their extra spicy pizzas in 20 minutes with only two cups of water. If you win you get your picture on the wall and free soda for life (or as long as they stay in business). That’s a long drive for a Dr. Pepper. Unfortunately they didn’t tell me about the contest until after dinner. We had dessert at a yogurt by the ounce shop next door. More expensive than the one in Princeton, and another business I'm glad i'm not in. When you enter the shop they give you four empty “taste” cups but I couldn’t just have the tastes and then tell them I didn’t want any more so I made a little treat for the road. Laurie remarked that our car looks like it did when we left Gainesville in 1976 except then we were towing a trailer.
We had a nice day with the family today and I took a bike ride at a park with our nephew Stephen. (I only have capacity to carry two bikes.)
We hope everyone is well and we’ll send more news as things develop. We’re off to Nashville Friday morning.
Regards,
Steve & Laurie
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End of Road Trip Report # 01
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