Brunswick to Birmingham

09 - 15 Oct 2019

Well, as is typically the case, Heather got through her list of things that need to be done before me. This causes tension because then the only thing on her list is supervising me on my list. Heather's mother came to the rescue by getting sick, so we quickly arranged flights and I ran her down to JAX to fly home. While maybe this didn't seem completely necessary at first, it turned out to be a good thing Heather was there. Health care in Las Cruces can be poor to just plain bad. After my experiences at the beginning of the year I know it's nice to have someone who's not hurting looking after you while the medical system is doing its thing, or at least should be trying to.

We had originally planned, first thing after leaving the boat, to go back to Annapolis for the boat show. Then Heather and I would drive to Kansas City, put her on a plane to PHX for her now four times a year appointments, and I would drive the last couple hours to Wichita for my meeting. Because of the fixed gap between the boat show and meeting, and the need to get Heather to her appointments, I was going to be in Wichita for almost a week and a half.

As for the boat show now, I wasn't really interested in going without Heather, and it added another couple days of driving by myself to boot, so we'll miss this one and catch it again next year.  I think we already spent enough time in Annapolis this year anyway, and certainly enough money.

Well now I also had to get to Wichita myself. It was an awkward distance for me to go in two days even with Heather, so I broke it up into three pretty easy days of six or seven hours of driving each. Also I could go straight to Wichita rather than the nearest big airport in KC.

I tried to work my boat list like I was still going to the boat show, and the extra days came in handy to actually finish up with the chores before I really had to leave for Wichita. I had arranged for an AirBnB there which was suspiciously cheap and was now already paid for, so I figured I would still get there by Wednesday and work on writing and such for the handbook meeting the next week.

I finally hit the road on Monday. South of Atlanta there is a liquor store with lots of billboards, and I needed gas anyway, so I stopped there. It's difficult keeping track of various state and county liquor laws, so I thought I would stock up with travel sizes while it was convenient. Inside they had all sorts of GA and experimental type aircraft hanging from the ceiling, including this guy who looked a little familiar.

The first night I spent in Birmingham AL. I went to the local Hattie B's there and picked up some takeout chicken because once I got to the hotel I wasn't leaving until morning. The area where the Hattie B's was was obviously working hard and doing pretty well at it, but it was sporty in parts of the center of town. The outskirts looked a lot like suburbs anywhere.

The next day in Alabama, farther down the road towards Memphis, I came upon this. It looks like this guy was hauling a long trailer that was in turn hauling a short but overloaded trailer that blew out a tire. He's lucky the whole parade hadn't flipped. Safety, people!



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