We spent the night at an awful Holiday Inn Express in Smyrna, Georgia. A couple of times during our brief stay there, we encountered a sickly, scantily-clad fellow who spent a fair amount of his time telling the hotel staff about the raccoons that he raised in his apartment. We ultimately concluded that he actually lived behind the hotel and he was just coming in to get food from the hotel's breakfast bar, but we never really figured out if the food was for him or for the raccoons.
While we were driving through Georgia, I caught a news story on the Macon, Georgia NPR affiliate about Macon's outgoing mayor, C. Jack Ellis. Apparently, Ellis has recently angered his constituents by sending an open letter of support to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Hilarious!
The second leg of our drive down to Florida was not so bad, with the exception of a huge tractor-trailer accident (and the ensuing traffic jam) just south of the Florida border. We ended up reaching St. Petersburg/Treasure Island very late in the evening and we stayed at a nice hotel/condo suite on the beach. The furnishings were pretty good – generally better than a hotel's furnishings would be – plus we had the benefit of staying right on the beach, which was a huge plus.
The next morning, we went out to the beach. It was the first time we had been to a beach since Gerakina in 2004. Prior to that, we had visited the St. Petersburg area back in 2001. The girls all had a really nice time playing in the water and on the sand. As for me, I actually spent a fair amount of time thinking about quantum mechanics and the probabilistic/deterministic controversy (so hotly debated by Einstein and Bohr, among others) while I watched the tide move about scores and scores of tiny grains of sand each time water rolled in and out. I'm sure this sounds strange to people, but this is the kind of think I think about when I am at the beach.
One of the things I like to do when visiting a new city is to visit a bookstore or two while I'm in town. On this trip, we went to Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg. It was a pretty cool place and it was just packed to the ceiling with books. In places where the shelves were overcrowded, the overflow was stacked in piles in front of the shelves. This is the kind of place where I could spend hours browsing. I scored a couple of interesting items there, including some volumes of the journal "Chinese Literature" for my collection (someday, I might be fortunate enough have the full run in my home library). I also came upon a 1937 copy of the booklet "China: The March Toward Unity" that seems to have something of an interesting history behind it. I'll write some more on that in another article.
Wednesday, we made it to Disney World to visit The Magic Kingdom. It made for a long day as Orlando is about a 2-hour drive from St. Petersburg. It was also an expensive day, especially when you consider we spent about $300 just to get into the park itself. And it was pretty hot too...I think the heat index for each day we were in Florida was over 100 degrees. But, I have to admit, Disney World was a good time, especially for the kids who were thrilled to meet characters and to go on the rides there. It was really something to stand in front of the Cinderella Castle. You know, I hate to make the comparison, but I'm going to do it anyway…It felt a lot like visiting the Parthenon in Greece because I had seen pictures of both of these places all my life but I had never really considered that I might see them in person one day. So that aspect of it is really pretty cool, I must say. Most people we talked with in the days leading up to the trip insisted that we stay for the fireworks show that happens each night at closing and, although it made for a long day, we saw it through and we took in the show at 9 PM that night. I had one of those clichéd moments as a parent when I glanced over at the girls as the show started. The looks on their faces made the long day worth it.
On our last day, we visited the beach in the early evening, but the tide had washed in so much debris and dead sea creatures that the whole area smelled bad. The girls couldn't handle the stench, so the adjourned to the hotel pool, but I stayed behind to look at the stuff that had washed up. I saw a lot of interesting stuff and I picked up some especially nice shells, including a really interesting half of a large conch shell that had a lot of barnacles and odd cracks and crevices from what looked like a long, harsh existence.
The drive back home was another two-day affair. We spent some time looking for peaches at several exits in southern Georgia. After striking out at a number of stops, we finally found a old fellow at a fruit and dairy stand a ways off from one of the exits. He seemed like an interesting character and I noticed some pictures on his wall of some professional wrestlers. When I asked him who was in the pictures, he told me in a very matter of fact manner that the pictures were of him with his brother back when they were a tag team called "Alaskan Hunters." I asked if they had wrestled for Georgia Championship Wrestling and he said that not only had they been in GCW, but in WCW and WWF as well. When I mentioned that I was a fan of Jerry Lawler's old Memphis Championship Wrestling show, he shared that the Alaskan Hunters had worked for Lawler back in the mid 1980's. I think that Alaskan Hunters actually held some championship gold for a while back in their heyday. So that was something of a brush with greatness, I guess. I got a batch of boiled peanuts from the guy in addition to the peaches, but I had never had boiled peanuts and I wasn't too crazy about them. Yuck.
The rest of the drive to Atlanta was considerably unpleasant. Around Macon, we hit a decent thunderstorm, and we could see lightning flash all over the sky for miles in several directions. By the time we made it through downtown Atlanta to Marietta, we found that the storm had knocked out the power at the hotel where we had made reservations for the night. They had auxiliary power, so the air and lights were running at about half power for the whole night. Those shortcomings, along with a less than stellar late-night dinner at Chick-fil- a made for an uncomfortable night. Luckily, I had the foresight to buy some wrestling action figures at a Georgia toy store earlier that day, so the girls and I played out a number of grudge matches between Super Crazy and Psicosis before turning in for the night.
The drive home through Tennessee and Kentucky went smoothly, but it was long and we were happy to get home. It all went well enough and the kids were really good to us on the long car rides throughout the course of the trip. We had some good times together and I'm sure we'd all gladly do it over again.
But the next time we go to Florida, I am pretty sure we'll fly there. A two-hour flight really beats the heck out of a 2-day trip by car.
You can view pictures of our trip here. (username & password required)
