Day 2 - Trudging the Happy Road to Atlanta

---

---

Today was expected to be a long and uneventful day. It was long. It was mostly uneventful. Actually the hotel was very comfortable and we both got a good night's sleep. We were up at 6:00am, no special feat for Jody, but certainly an effort for me. But, we're on a trip and I don't want to spend most of it sleeping. We try to get up at 6, showered and breakfasted by 7 and on the road by 7:30. This gets us a jump on travel time before it gets too hot. Today didn't really matter about the heat, because we expected to spend most of the day on the bike. This is the longest travel day of the trip, and the map showed close to 400 miles between St Augustine and Stone Mountain, just east of Atlanta.

Unfortunately, I didn't notice that my MapQuest map was set up for shortest distance instead of fastest time, so the path had us traveling directly through the heart of downtown Jacksonville. Fortunately, the Garmin lady was setup for fastest time, and I noticed quickly that she was directing us west to bypass downtown Jacksonville. This did add both time and mileage to our trip with the final distance being more like 438.4 miles!

While the hotel accommodations were excellent, it didn't come with a free breakfast, so our first stop was McDonald's right down the street. We hadn't been to a McDonalds for a very long time, so this was our first encounter with the wall sized touch screen for self-ordering. Always willing to do whatever I can to avoid human interaction at a retail level we gave it a shot. In theory, the ordering was relatively easy, and when we were done, we selected a table card and they delivered the food to our table when it was ready. Almost like a real restaurant. Unfortunately, they only brought the food - no coffee. So Jody tried first to attract the attention of a human with no success. Next I gave it a try, and got them to make up our coffee. Unfortunately, Jody ended up with sugar in her coffee, when she always has cream only. So with a few hiccups, it didn't work too badly. I suspect, given time, this will become the norm.

After breakfast, we headed out for our long grueling day. It's not really THAT grueling - we are retired, on vacation, and we ARE traveling on a motorcycle. Life is good! So for the first hour or so, I listened carefully to the Garmin lady as she steered us away from the nightmare of downtown Jacksonville. But eventually, as she started heading north, I thought I would try to correct her back to my original course. So for the next few hours, it was a battle of wills between myself and the Garmin lady, where occasionally I would win a skirmish, but mostly she was winning the war. As I looked at the scenery of northeastern Florida and southeastern Georgia, it donned on me that her route or my route had exactly the same flat, straight, boring roads and the same boring view. So I gave up and surrendered to the superior persistence of the Garmin lady. We just followed her route and now that we are in Atlanta, I have no idea what path we took. There must have been hundreds of route numbers, streets, small rural Georgia towns, but once we made it a little further north into Georgia, the hills began to appear and the roads began to curve and the scenery got much better.

It was getting around 1:00, and Jody was getting hungry. She's an awesome traveling companion, but I have found that she travels much better if she has plenty of water, iced coffee, and something to eat in the afternoon. So we made a quick stop at McDonald's for some iced coffee - hopefully as we get further north Dunkin' Donuts will be easier to find. She just has a cheeseburger and a small fry and she is fine. I don't know what I was thinking, but I had a Big Mac and a regular fry. I don't usually have much for lunch, especially if I've had a big breakfast. And I guess I just forgot how bad McDonald's food really is! Lesson learned, next time if Jody wants a cheeseburger, I'll stick to a McDonald's Sundae. It's not as filling and besides, ice cream - even soft-serve- is always good! By the way, they put sugar in Jody's iced coffee this time also.

While we were at McDonald's there was an incident. The girl who was taking our order - this McDonald's didn't have the fancy self-order computers - kept having trouble entering our items and had to have the manager come over to help her a few times. The whole time she was complaining to the manager about how she hated working the register out front, and how she should be kept in the back away from the customers. I guess she just kept going on and on after completing our order because Jody said when she looked back, the manager fired the girl on the spot and she just left, got in her car and drove away!

In the end, we arrived in Stone Mountain around 5:30, tired after a long days ride. The original plan was to grab some dinner and head over to Stone Mountain Park for the 9:30pm fireworks and Laser Light Show. But it was a long, hot day on the motorcycle, so we just wimped out, had dinner at the Applebee's across the street from the hotel and turned in for the night. I was able to fix Jody's microphone on the bike though. It had been acting up since we left, cutting in and out at the most inopportune times. Luckily, since we had headset problems on our last trip, and we had some problems with Jody's headset before we left, I bought a brand new one before we left so I could replace it on the trip if it gave us trouble. The hotel we are staying in is a Days Inn with exterior doors so the bike is right outside our hotel room door making it easy to make repairs.

Tomorrow will be a busy day. The plan is to head to downtown Atlanta to visit the Georgia Aquarium, then head up the road to the High Museum of Art. Afterwards, we will head over to Stone Mountain Park so we can catch the Laser Light Show. We're here 2 nights, so while we will be busy all day, there's no travel time and we just return back to the same hotel. No pictures today, I'll try to make up for it tomorrow.

438.4 Miles Today

552.6 Miles Total

14.742 Gallons Today

14.472 Gallons Total

---