The Longest Day
Yesterday was a long day.
We spent Thursday night in Chapel Hill (actually, right outside in Carrboro). What a nice area. I told Angie we really need to come back sometime and stay for awhile to check everything out. (A full-timer I once met told me you need to be in a place at least a month before you really know it inside and out.)
I’ve always loved college towns, especially big college towns. There’s always something cool going on, or a neat place to see. For example, without even trying I found Weaver Street Market when I ran out for dinner supplies. Ended up dropping $160 dollars on all sorts of cool organic stuff.
Anyway, we spent Thursday there because it was close to the airport. Frank had a 6:00 AM flight, which meant leaving at 4:00 AM to be sure we got there with enough margin to get through security.
So our day started at 4:00 AM. I managed to catch a few winks when I got back from the airport at 6:30 AM, but then got up so we could hit the road by 9:00 AM. We needed to make it to Richmond Hill for the weekend and it is roughly a 6-hour drive.
In my infinite wisdom, I scheduled us to be on the road all weekend. But what I forgot is this weekend is the WritersWeekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest. We run it every quarter and need to be online from Noon Saturday to Noon Sunday.
The problem was we have to be in Loxahatchee, FL by Monday and there is no way that will happen if we don’t drive over the weekend. So we had to hump it here all day yesterday. We’ll leave here mid-afternoon tomorrow and hit Florida by evening. Then we’ll be back on schedule.
We try as a rule not to do driving days over 3 hours. The boys just can’t take it. And, of course, that means we can’t take it because of the incessant whining.
Fortunately, it wasn’t all that unexciting. We saw a big car crash:
that led to a major traffic back-up (in the opposite direction, thankfully):
and we saw the largest ethnic stereotype east of the Mississippi:
We got here about 6:00 PM and proceeded to have incredible trouble getting online. And satellite was out of the question because there are a clump of 60-foot pines blocking the patch of sky I needed to point the dish at.
The wifi here is from NomadISP. They have some sort of wacky networking. Things that normally work were breaking (and still are today). We began to get concerned that we would need to change campgrounds, or at least get a hotel room we could work out of, so the contest would go off without a hitch. But by late evening we were able to get a stable connection. And aside from a few burps, our essential services (web and email) are working.
There are a few things I’ve noticed on this trip that are very different than out first trip back in 2004. First, wifi is everywhere. The weird circumstance today is to find a campground without it. Second, it is pretty reliable. Crappy coverage seems to be a thing of the past. And finally, it is mostly free. In fact, we only encountered two campground where the wifi was not free; and those campgrounds both use NomadISP and both had flaky connections when we were on them.
Thunderstorms are rolling in tonight, so we plan to just hunker down and wait it out until we leave.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:23 am
South of the Border! My daughter and I stayed overnight there once–just to say we had been there. Ick! (Although the gift shop there is a treasure trove for gag gifts.)