Vacation Blog '10 - Day One

Let me tell you 'bout a story of a girl named Rose,
A sad landlocked Hoosier wanted sand between her toes.

So she grabbed her gnome and munchies and shoved 'em in the car

and headed down south to the Alabama shar

Shore, that is, white sand, white legs, white waves.

Dateline: Sunday, February 21st, 7am (or thereabouts). My neice Natalie and I packed up the rental car, an upgrade to a Dodge Journey. Between us, we had 2 laptops, two cameras, two cell phones, two ipods, 1 CPAP sleeping machine, 1 GPS (named Jason), and all of the corresponding adaptors, chargers, and connectors. NASA has nothing on the combined technology that is in this car!

A whopping 30 minutes into the trip, and we've stopped twice. Now, the first time was at McDonalds to get me some caffeine, and the second was to fill up with gas, but come on! We're still in Indiana!

Whew! Ok, the first rest stop we stop at, was in Tennessee. Gnarley struck up a conversation with the woman at the counter, and we could barely get him to get back in the car. She was dressed rather fancy for a job in a rest area. Hmm...

We drive on, jamming to the Sirius radio, mostly the 70's on 7, but also whatever DJ Natalie decides to land on. While we listen, she makes notes of songs I need to download to my ipod. She's a good secretary.

We cross over the Tennessee/Alabama border, and the first rest stop is easily identified by the NASA rocket by the road. Gnarley was very impressed and decided at that point that he'd have to investigate the requirements to becoming an astronaut. We didn't want to tell him that there was probably an age limit even if there wasn't a height requirement. Poor dude.

The next rest stop was manned by a rather dark guy. Frankly, Nats and I were wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible, but again, Gnarley strikes up this conversation. I'm not sure

where this chatty streak of his came from, but if we're going to get to the beach before midnight, he better curtail it.

We had to wake Jason up around Birmingham. Birmingham is the only city where I seriously considered hurting my mother once. We were driving back from the beach, on the Friday of Labor Day weekend one year, and while in Birmingham, we decided to take a side trip to see the statue of Vulcan and his naked butt (see the picture from the time, a couple years later, when Gnarley and Dad successfully navigated to Vulcan). Anyway, it was holiday/rush hour traffic, the construction, and Birmingham traffic is just awful. We had to just give up on Vulcan and mom lived to see another day. :)

After we left Birmingham, we noticed a distinct change in the trees along the road. There were all these tall skinny pine-like trees with no limbs for the bottom 2/3's of the tree. Nats texted Tom, her dad, my bro-in-law, and he was able to tell us that they were Georgia Pines. I asked why they were Georgia Pines, when we were in Alabama... and I don't think I got a satisfactory answer to that question. Either way, this leads us to a new feature to my blog. It is called "Dear Tom," and each day, I will ask Tom a burning question that Natalie and I have come up with during our travels. The first one will appear in tomorrow's column.

We made it to our hotel, the Island House Hotel, in right at 11 hours. We're on the 8th floor, and according to the desk clerk, we have the floor to ourselves. She just asked that we not run naked in the halls. I told her I'd try to control myself.

After hauling everything upstairs, we plugged our laptops on, checked out the wireless internet and I checked on my farm. We called our respective mommys to check in and then decided to venture forth and find some sustenance since the major food intake of the day was a big bag of cheesy poofs.

The woman at the desk suggested a restaurant called Cobalt. It was a little pricey to this Happy Meal woman, but the food was delicious. I had Cajun Chicken Alfredo with a glass of milk, and I was very glad for that milk, as the Cajun made its presence known very strongly.

At dinner, we discussed the fact that I didn't see the USA network on the list of television channels we get at the hotel, and how I didn't know if we'd survive an entire week without NCIS. But rest assured, dear readers, when we returned to the hotel, I double checked and we DO get USA. So you do not have to worry about either of us.

As we got comfortable for the night, Natalie sitting at the laptop, ripping music for me, I crawled into bed with the ads from Mom's Sunday paper, I folded up the crossword puzzle and my eyeballs told me it was time to go to bed. So the puzzle sits on the floor, my Darth Vader mask is on my face and it is time to go to bead. I'm sure tomorrow will hold more adventure and, hopefully, a lot of sun. G'night!