made it to manchester by around five, CST, today, after leaving brunswick at about 8:30 EST. the average speed according to my car’s trip computer was around 68 mph, but i later discovered that it’s off by a couple of mph — the gps unit showed me moving roughly three mph slower than the car’s speedometer. oh well. around 570 miles in 9.5 hours, including stops. 417 miles on 12.6 gallons of gas, and many hilly miles at that. and, bully for me, only one diversion from the goal, a local winery a little north of nashville called something that i’ll link to after i unpack the bottles when i get home and figure out the winery’s name again. they produced a decent port — nothing really special, but tasty enough, and only $18 a bottle — and some interesting wines, so i ended up with a couple of bottles of cabernet sauvignon and one of their ‘sumner queen,’ a sweet white dessert wine… well, they called it semi-sweet and didn’t say anything about dessert, but that’s what i’m figuring it for, because it was sweet. so there.)
bored now. john hasn’t emailed or called me back, so i checked into a ramada (“truckers welcome!” … it’s clean enough, but the bra i’m wearing cost more than the room for the night — and it’s not from the Angels collection) off US 41 (also known as lake shore drive, in northerlier climes). i’m going to go hunt down some food here before much longer. kill some time at the wal-mart or something, i dunno. i’m so going to kick his ass if i leave tennessee without catching up with him. called mom. she’s only got wednesday and thursday off work, so that pretty much means my choices are:- Drive 770 miles tomorrow, attempting to get to Rusk relatively close to when she gets off work at 11ish pm Tuesday;
- Screw around while driving 770 miles in two days, visiting the Jack Daniels distillery (conveniently close to Manchester) and anything else that catches my eye, arriving relatively close to when she gets off work at 11ish pm Tuesday.
i don’t know which one i’d prefer. the first would be a pain in the ass, but at least i wouldn’t have to pay for a second hotel room. and i could always spend tuesday working on mom’s computer or something. otoh, making it a real two-day trip would make it more vacationy. and i like vacationy. vacationy is better than stressful. but then there’s the sad reality that one can only look through so many antique malls or kitschy roadside whatevers before one’s head explodes. oh well. whatever. i’ll figure it out.
dammit john, you better call me.
