Comfort Inns have become a welcome staple on this tour. The rooms have always been clean, generously sized, and the staff helpful. Not an ad for them, but it is an endorsement. We stayed at a Comfort Inn again last night in Midway (a Tallahassee suburb), and it is nice to get a good rest in a comfortable room. In fact, I rested so well that I forgot to set my alarm and we slept in an extra hour until 7AM. The motel offered a decent hot breakfast, after which we loaded up and trucked back to Chattahoochee to continue our ride. We stayed on Highway 90 from Chattahoochee all the way to Tallahassee, and other than a few spots with no shoulder, it was a very nice road. Smooth pavement, light traffic, and courteous drivers. When we got to Tallahassee, I wanted to adjust the route some by taking the ACA route through town, then continuing east on 90.
That was a real nice plan, and as the saying goes, the surest way to make god laugh is to tell him your plans. Trying to get across town, we had road closures, road construction, bridge construction, no bike lanes, rude drivers, and we got turned into Florida A&M college on a road that looped around the campus with only one exit. We finally found our way back to Highway 90 and got out of town as quickly as we could. Once we left Tallahassee, the remainder of the ride was great. Scenic and smooth, the only thing missing was the tailwind we had enjoyed all morning. We arrived in Monticello and trucked 6 miles south to the Super 8 Motel at the junction of 19 and I-10. That will be our home tonight.
This was another day without photos. The picture I took a few days ago of Karen riding through the tree shaded road has just repeated several times. Each day lately seems to be a nice road under a tree covered canopy, with variations on the wind and temperature being the only differences.
Then there is father. Karen told me today that she thought he would find a way to totally tick me off 10 times by the end of the ride. This morning, he started out on the ride back to Chattahoochee by telling me that the mileages on the directions that I had printed for him were "way off". I lost it, and told him, as I do daily, that the mileages were estimates because we were not going to be following the mapped route and the distances I had were the best I could do. He looked at the instructions a few seconds more, then said, "Oh, that's a road number". He thinks he is funny, but I am so tired of the negative comments.
Then his second shot was the fact that he got up this morning and had taken no shower yesterday or this morning and he slept in his clothes. He was in the truck with his intolerable B.O. and his chronic, disgusting halitosis, and he was literally making us nauseated.
Third, at the first rest stop, as we pulled in we noticed that instead of parking in a sunlit spot to stay warm, father was parked in the shade with the engine running and the heater on (he obviously isn't paying for gas and doesn't care who is). As Karen and I were getting ready to get started again, father walked away saying that he needed to get a map in the truck stop. He took off with the keys and left the truck unlocked, in a truck stop. I would have locked the truck and left, but he has walked away from the truck with the keys laying inside it already on this journey. We had to wait several minutes, that we could have been biking, for him to get back. After 5 weeks, and both of us telling him, he still doesn't realize that the bike trip is the purpose of this whole journey. When we are bicycling, we are making progress toward our goal. When we are waiting on him, it takes away from our cycling time. These are things he could do WHILE WAITING FOR US. He doesn't get it, at all. So third item was the parking , and fourth was getting the map, which doesn't even have enough detail to show most of the roads we are traveling, and leaving the truck unlocked.
The fifth stunt today was his directions. He was waiting at the second stop, and told us that the next turn we made, a left, came to a dead end and then we had to go either left or right. I had him look at his instructions, and they said to make the left turn, then an immediate right. He is trying to create problems where I already have an answer. What he didn't tell us was that the road was closed a block past that. Had he told me, we could have rerouted to our planned route. As it was, we got detoured, got separated, and he got lost. We found our way back to highway 90, where I called father. He was totally lost, and we had to wait about 20 minutes for him to get to us. We were waiting in a Popeye's parking lot where the local gentry were threatening to run over us and yelling at us.
Then the sixth and seventh bonehead moves of the day. As we left the parking lot I told father to go 5 or 6 miles east on 90 and wait there so we could finalize the route for the day. We got about 1/2 mile out of the parking lot and father saw a sign leading to an earlier route we were had discussed. He turned off there and promptly got lost again. We waited for him (again) about three miles down the road on the crest of a hill, and he drove by a few minutes later. As he tried to stop in a busy traffic lane we told him to go on, thinking he would go 2 or 3 miles farther, as we discussed earlier, and wait. WRONG. He went about 1/4 mile and pulled in to a right turn lane of a busy intersection and stopped. We passed him less than a minute later and motioned for him to go on. Three miles later he hadn't passed us. My phone rang and I answered, and of course, it was him. He was lost and wanted to take one of the previously discussed routes to Monticello. I got mad, told him to stay on 90 and go east because it was our route, it was the shortest route, and it was the way we were going. He passed us a mile later.
He was waiting for us in Monticello. He was parked in front of a run down motel (known locally for the hanging suicide that had taken place there a few months earlier). Father said that the motel and the police station next door was the whole town and there was nothing else, the motel rate $45 per night. I rode about 2 more blocks down the street and found a restaurant and gas station, and noticed that the police station was actually the school administration building. The guy at the gas station said that we were just on the outskirts of town. He told me how to get to the other motels, the bed and breakfast establishments (including the haunted one) and the restaurants. I went back to the truck, we loaded up, and went to the Super 8 Motel.
I can't trust him, I can't believe half of what he says, and he refuses to do what we need him to do to make the ride comfortable and successful.
So Karen says, "I want to up my estimate" referring to the number of ways and times my father can tick me off on the remainder of this ride. No Chance. If she is keeping score, let her figure out his stunts.
Maps and numbers:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/238395366#.UI7nhhSLt5E.blogger
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