gwax's rumblings

It’s Thursday night – tech­ni­cally Friday – and I’m sit­ting in JamesMatt’s liv­ing room, chat­ting with his room­mate. It’s pleas­ant here but per­haps I should back up.

Wednesday (Day 4), around noon, I packed up and left Austin. It was a lit­tle later than I had intended but being well rested was a pleas­ant out­come to achieve. Anyway, set­ting off from Austin, I set my GPS for Venice, LA and set out. To be wholly hon­est, dri­ving through Texas really isn’t all that inter­est­ing, espe­cially east­ern Texas. I don’t really have any com­plaints though; I’m really enjoy­ing the road, espe­cially the decent speed lim­its down here in the South (usu­ally 70mph, some­times 80mph). I’ve started lis­ten­ing, at Grace’s sug­ges­tion, to an audio­book ver­sion of the novel Cloud Atlas. Cloud Atlas is incred­i­bly engross­ing and, because of the nar­ra­tive struc­ture, at times rather infu­ri­at­ing; this infu­ri­a­tion later enhanc­ing the sat­is­fac­tion it pro­vides but I am not yet done so it is per­haps best to wait a bit before fur­ther reviewing.

After even­tu­ally leav­ing Texas, I entered Louisiana, which is so very full of swamp­land as to be quite impres­sive. I first drove across prop­erly immense swamp­lands dur­ing my 2005 trip to Florida and those swamps had noth­ing on Louisiana. The amount of water is both beau­ti­ful and stag­ger­ing. Anyway, work­ing my way across Louisiana, I even­tu­ally hit New Orleans. I drove through New Orleans and made my way for the tip of the Mississippi delta, the afore-programmed Venice, LA. I made it pretty far out that lit­tle strip of land before flood­ing halted my progress; so it goes.

It’s worth men­tion­ing that I’m not really so much mak­ing a slow trip across the coun­try to see the sights; that is a thing to do and it might be fun but it is not what I am doing; I am dri­ving from San Francisco to Woods Hole and dilly-dallying just a lit­tle bit along the way. As such, I didn’t spend much time in New Orleans as Atlanta was my next destination.

Proceeding through Mississippi, get­ting a bit tired, I started con­tem­plat­ing sleep. Eventually, I attempted to set­tle down at a rest area in the back of my car, with Baldr, for some sleep. Unfortunately, the rest area’s light and Baldr’s heat-induced heavy breath­ing made that a non-viable plan.

Slamming a 5 Hour Power and get­ting back on the road, I forged on. Finishing off Mississippi and push­ing through Alabama, I made it to Georgia in the wee hours of last night – Thursday (Day 5) morn­ing. Pushing on, con­tin­u­ing to lis­ten to Cloud Atlas, I hit Atlanta at about 7am; find­ing JamesMatt awake, we got some break­fast, chat­ted a bit, and then he went to work. Not hav­ing slept, I of course slept dur­ing the day. Matt returned in the early evening; we and his room­mates spent a while hanging-out; and now, every­one else hav­ing gone to bed, I write this before following.

Tomorrow, we make for Massachusetts, likely puas­ing (very briefly) in New York along the way.