Well, as many of you already know, I’ve made it to the sunny South for another winter. My plan was to stop by Panama City Beach on the way and watch John Hopkins do Ironman Florida. Congratulations, John, on your race!! Unfortunately, things didn’t work out for me to get there.

I had a meeting at 7AM last Friday and planned to have the car loaded and in the hospital parking lot ready to go. At the last minute (Wednesday) I noticed a transmission fluid leak (those things happen when a car has 144,000 miles on it) and took it in for service on Thursday. They couldn’t finish it until Friday at 9AM. The meeting didn’t get over until 9:20 and, taking a page from Jean’s “Book of Chatting” on how to exit a meeting, I didn’t actually leave to get the car until 9:40. Of course, with no car, I had to walk to the Jeep dealership to pick it up, drive back to Green Street to pick up things Jean wanted me to take, and head for the lake.

By the time I got to the lake and got the car packed, it was 11:22 when I pulled out of the driveway and got on the road. I made it 6 miles before I called Ron Lewis, a friend, and asked him to do a couple of things at the lake that I had forgotten. I made it all the way to Battle Creek (25 miles) before I remembered that I forgot to bring the spare garbage disposal (the one down here doesn’t work) and my Rodney Yi yoga CD. The strange thing was that I remembered the garbage disposal the night before and wrote myself a reminder note so I wouldn’t forget. I took the note with me to the lake and tossed it in the trash while I was packing because I thought I didn’t need it any more. I can blame the memory problems on the bike wreck of 2003, but it’s just geezerdom I think. 

On the way down I noticed a couple of interesting signs. No, not the Club Erotica signs that I talked about in some prior e-mails. The first one, somewhere in Tennessee was a medium sized sign that had only four words on it. It said:

EAT HERE        GET GAS

I had seen that sign in jokes before but couldn’t imagine anyone would pay money for a sign like that.

The other sign was near Lake City, Florida and was on a huge billboard. Saturday was the day of the Georgia-Florida game to be played in Gainesville. It said something like:

Florida boy seeks Georgia girl

I helped you get a ticket to last year’s game at gate 21  Call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX

When I read the first line my first thought was that it was the Club Erotica again. When I read the rest of it I wondered whether this guy didn’t ask for her name and number at the time and thought he had made the biggest mistake of his life or, if he was a real loser and this was his only chance for a date…maybe there were a hundred girls at gate 21 buying tickets (and every other gate for that matter) and he was taking a shot that one of them would call. So is it romance or perversion? You be the judge. By the way, I used Xs for the number so none of you would actually call him. You aren’t Georgia girls are you?

I went through Atlanta at around 10AM on Saturday only to come to a screeching halt. One of the overhead highway information signs that tells you how long it will take to get from where you are to some point ahead said “I-75 South closed 2 miles ahead..All lanes blocked”. So there I sat for 45 minutes. When traffic started moving and we got up to the spot where the highway had been closed, there was nothing there. Not a stalled car. Not an accident scene. Nothing!!

The rest of the trip went fairly well until I got 7 miles from the trailer park…Oops!!! I mean mobile home community. Traffic was stopped on US 19 and there I sat for another 30 minutes. I was able to make a left onto a “turnaround” and go back about a mile to Spring Hill Drive. I thought the streets were like Michigan where you could take some side streets past the accident, get back on US 19 and be on your way. Not so!!

I went as far as the first traffic signal and turned South. It took me into a neighborhood with curving streets and speed bumps every block. I have an OK sense of direction (unlike Pat and Diane) and finally made it to County Line Road (the next major East-West road) which I thought was past the accident that had 19 blocked. Again, not so!! The accident was another couple of miles South of there. When I got to the corner of County Line Road and 19, the police directed all the traffic North back to Spring Hill Drive.

As I was driving down Spring Hill Drive for the second time, Jean called to let me know how John had done in the race (she was giving me race reports all day) and she could sense my frustration. I called Mom to let her know I was going to be later than I thought and she got brother Bob on the line who talked me down some of the back roads and I came out past the accident. The accident had happened around 3:30 (it was 6:30 by then) and they were still in the clean up stages. I finally made it to the mobe (I spent my first 5 years as a CPA in South Bend, and mobe was the shortened term for travel trailers and mobile homes that were made by the thousands in and around the area) by 7:15 or so. That made it 14 hours on the road that day and I was whipped.

So that’s it for now. I’m here for the winter. I’ll be making a few trips back to Hastings for hospital board meetings.

Just (Finally Warm and Loving It) Jack