One year ago today: October 26, 2021, Florida dog’s breakfast.
Five years ago today: October 26, 2017, lock-picking 101.
Nine years ago today: October 26, 2013, motorcycling through Georgia.
Random years ago today: October 26, 2014, batbike at Snapper Creek.
Today you might get in a couple of sessions, since I was on the road from 6:45AM to 8:48pm, which works out to something like 40 mph. I left Auburn, thinking to stop in the larger town of Eufqala for coffee. Wrong, all the mom & pops have been trounced by the hoax. It was some 40 minutes I spend driving up and down streets in Eufala before admitting the advertising was the usual bullshit and the Blue Moon café was bankrupt long ago. As for advertising, it seems to me you should not advertise a breakfast special if you don’t open until 10:30AM in the mornings.
Let me tell you the tale in semi-chronological sequence. It began as a perfect day. Cloudless after the overnight storm, I was zonked out under that cloudless sky for 9-1/2 hours. I told ya, memory foam is a huge hit with me and the doggies. So deep in sleep, I was, that I was reminded of the few times I’ve been under anesthetic. I was neither tired nor fatigued and I was out like a light. The GPS sent me down a host of side roads before connecting with 431. Weary of chasing around Eufala for breakfast, I stopped at this donut wicket. They don’t sell coffee, just donuts, but the lady took one look at me and told me to wait while she made me a coffee in the staff room. It tasted like mud and I savored every sip.
Eufala is mostly out of the mountains, but if you look far enough on some horizons, there are hills that say there are mountains nearby. I took the road to Dothan, then east on Highway 90, which not so many people know is there. There’s a town called Two Egg a few miles off the track, but I did not visit because it was across a river. I wanted this trip to be my first Nashville to Winter Haven jaunt where I did not set foot in Georgia. Mission accomplished. It adds 160 miles to the trip, which is correct as the furthest west point is 88 miles west according to the difference in longitude.
[Hwy] 90 connects with I-10 near Tallahassee and that is where the troubles began this trip. The signs kept saying all lanes were blocked at Mile 341. But there are no maps or GPS apps that say what exit that is near. (I’ve long been an advocate of preventing emergency vehicles from blocking all lanes. It just causes more emergencies. And the road signs are written by some millennial retard. Probably not one Floridian in a thousand could tell you the mile market closest to his house, and even then he’d have to figure out what it was from context. You’d be lucky if he could tell you the exit number. So what good five or so multi-million dollar digital signboards are with useless information is anybody’s guess.
European wedding fashions.
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The above report was from memory, now I will consult my notes and fill in the blanks. I spent the night in Auburn-Opelika. First night in the new camp bed If I never said, along with my rule about not pulling off the freeway unless the complete route can be seen in advance has a few spinoffs. One is that I will rarely turn around for something on the other side of the road, nor double back if I miss something. It may seem odd, but when you’ve been stung enough times by Florida, most people learn. Hence, I’m not stopping for coffee until I see a spot on my side of the road.
No coffee, I said screw this and went to the donut wicket I saw earlier. They don’t serve coffee but the lady at the counter said I looked like I needed one so badly, she made me one special from the staff break room. Now remember, this is after I drove some 40 miles to Eufala already, looking for a coffee. Even the McD’s and BK’s were on the other side of the divided highways. I got a look around Eufala looking for that coffee and the only breakfast place I found downtown did not open until 10:30AM. What kind of breakfast joint doesn’t open until almost noon? I don’t know and was not about to wait two hours to find out. I bought $43 worth of gas and a $2 local paper.
In the end, I did not find a place to sit down for coffee and read until 5:30PM in the afternoon. Few people I know are aware there is a road system in Florida between I-10 and the Florida-Georgia border. I was making good time (at first) so I looked around Marianne, Chattahoochie, finally stopping for a stretch in Quincy. Except for Quincy, which is huge by comparison, the other towns are backwater—with no restaurants except in bars and saloons. Sadly, the Biden administration put an end to an American tradition. I will always be convinced they did so because it was a cash-flow business they could not audit to the penny.
Pulling off the highway where convenient, I found myself in a Goodwill parking lot. A reminder folks, that Goodwill is not a charity and not a thrift. They only want you to think it is because they make millions reselling your donations. And there are no bargains left at Goodwill. Their prices have raise to nearly pawn shop levels, that is, 2/3 the cost of new in many cases. Somebody has systematically gone over every article and priced it on-line, that somebody being the inferior “efficiency experts” getting out of college these days. We also studied pricing strategies in my day, but it was a study of how foreign countries used it to gouge, it was never meant to apply to the American Way. It was always an option, but like metal staples on lumber tags, nobody was AOL enough to do it until now—and think it was his original idea.
I did not stop in Two Egg, even for a look, as it turned out to be 11 miles north of my route and I’m beginning to see ominous warning signs of a major freeway closure ahead. They have these massive overhead message signs, but it is unlikely anyone knows where mile market 341 is. My guess in south of Gainesville, so I get this brilliant idea. I’ll shortcut through that university town and use Highway 441 to connect with my old motorcycle route of 301. I bought $40 worth of gas, enriching the Gainesville economy and drove around nine miles, mostly on University Drive.
Folks, let me tell you something. Another era that’s passed is the “college babe”. It used to be a treat to revisit a campus and see the total babes everywhere. This changed almost overnight in 2002. Along today’s route I saw an estimated 180 women. Only 1 was anything like it was in my day. And it was obvious she just got there. The “older” ones were twenty and already packing on the pounds. Not one of them was sexy looking as the waddled down the sidewalks. Now I know this leaves me open to flak from the peanut gallery. Isn’t it amazing, whenever you state a strong opinion based on hard evidence, there will always be some idiot who pipes up suggesting you overlooked the basics, like how do you know these fat women aren’t great people. If that’s you thinking such, you are reading the wrong blog.
The problem with this shortcut is every semi-trailer in the territory had the same idea. All the streets were clogged by hundreds of big rigs. Possibly thousands of them. The Gainesville traffic lights are notoriously slow even by Florida standards. These big trucks are slow off the mark, so maybe twenty would get through before the light changed. It took me from 3:30PM to past 6:00PM to inch the few miles from downtown Ocala to the 441 turn off. I stopped for a snack hoping it was just rush hour. Grits. I had a craving for grits, but that another casualty of the COVID stunt. (In the end, I had to wait until I got home to make a pot of the real thing. Grits, by the way, are eaten with butter, cheese, or gravy. Never sugar, which is only done by unrefined people. Codicil, that does not include nacho cheese, there is no proper TexMex version of grits, it is White food, and if you think that’s not right, read the last paragraph again.)
This leg of the trip was 446 miles in 13-1/2 hours. Or, about 33 miles per hour. Let me bounce one statistic off you but this is for the whole trip, not just today’s segment. The time behind the wheel was 9-1/2 hours first day, 13-1/2 second day for a total of 23 hours driving time. But I drove to libraries and too scenic routes which are enjoyable. The statistic is that I hit 191 red lights on these streets. Say the average stop is a minute, that means I spent over 1-1/2 hours sitting a traffic lights, it was actually probably more because of Gainesville and Ocala. And that, folks, is the saga of my “summer vacation” trip of 2022.
ADDENDUM
I arrived home well after dark and there are signs another storm went through. The city still has not picked up the fallen branches from a month ago. There is some minor damage to my yard I did not notice before, mostly wind damage which I can fix in a few hours. Otherwise this place stayed fairly snug through it all, though I have not checked my 40+ year old shingles.
