On the Road Again

I've made more than a dozen major moves in my lifetime, plus a whole bunch of minor moves.  This is merely the latest.  Augusta, Georgia to Portland, Oregon.  It's nice to have company when you move.  This time I've got Dad driving with me part of the way.

Allow me to chronicle our trip so far:


Zero Hour was Saturday at 2:30 pm.  Having finished at the house, eaten lunch downtown, filled up on gas and weighed the car, we hit the road for Atlanta.  We got pretty close, too.  Then the traffic hit.

Now, you wouldn't think there'd be much traffic headed into Atlanta on a Saturday afternoon.  Unfortunately, they're doing something to the roads up there, and three lanes became one in a terribly inefficient manner.  We were in stop-and-go traffic (mostly stop) for a very, very long time.

Finally we reached an exit, and thankfully we could see ahead a bit and could tell that, even after the lane closures finally occurred, the interstate was still crawling for as far as the eye could see.  And that was pretty far.

We took the exit.

Now, recently in my Civil Air Patrol squadron, one of our Senior Members was explaining to the Cadets how the earth's gravitational pull and the moon's lesser gravitational pull affected the planning of space flights from the earth to the moon.  You've got to head a pretty good distance before the moon's gravitational pull becomes stronger than earth's.

The same is true with my GPS.  We knew roughly the direction to go on the back roads to get around the city to our hotel in Marietta, but not exactly which roads to take.  The GPS was constantly 'recalculating', but the gravitational pull of the interstate (if you will) is much stronger than that of the back roads.  We drove on guesswork for quite a while, until we finally got far enough northwest that the gravitational pull of I-75 took over, and the GPS became useful again.

That was fun.


Yesterday we made our way from Atlanta to Nashville, Tennessee, where we spent the night at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel.

Now, unless you're shelling out a whole lot more money than we were, a hotel room is, at the end of the day, a hotel room.  But a hotel is not necessarily a hotel.  This hotel is huge.  Endless corridors of rooms.  Tons of ballrooms.  Several restaurants and shops.  A radio station.  A FedEx office.  And most of all, the gardens.

Looking through a waterfall at part of the lobby.  Part of it.

This hotel has a couple of huge atriums filled with such things as tropical plants, waterfalls, koi-filled streams, trees, winding paths, a river, and an island.  Nothing any other hotel doesn't have, right?

This is *inside* the hotel, folks.

Yeah.

We got lost trying to find our room after check-in.

Once you've got your bearings, it's really not that hard, but there are about 10 different ways to get from point A to point B, and none of them are straight.

Oh, you know.  Just a little boat ride inside the hotel...

The ceiling is all glass in the atriums, and during the day that lets a lot of natural light in.  At night, they've got lights set up all throughout the gardens, but it's mood lighting - it's still obviously night time, and very pleasant.

I'm impressed, Opryland.  I'm impressed.