“Are We There Yet?”

There’s nothing like a little more rain to make a traveler feel, well, traveled.

Last night was a real experience, like the old days. In the midst of the tropical depression, the high-speed Internet quit at the hotel, leaving me half way through uploading all the high-res photos, and none of the story. Thinking back to how we did it in the ice age (okay, so it was only 6 years ago), I converted the pics in the story to low-res and uploaded them along with the story on dial-up.

It only took 10 minutes to configure the modem on my Powerbook and find a local dial-up number, since I had never used it before on this computer.

45 minutes later it was done, and so was I. We crashed for the night, planning on sleeping in and heading back home in the morning.

About 7:30 a.m. housekeeping banged on the door, wanting to know if we were still sleeping. “No, not any more!” I yelled back, while suggesting she return in 3 hours, when it would be feeding time for the ants living just inside our front door.

Remind me not to stay there again.

The front desk said they were “really sorry” the Internet wasn’t working, and blamed it on the “satellite being broken by the storm.”

I guess she figured I left my dunce cap out in the car.

She said they had “never had a problem with ants before, either.”

Strike two in the liar’s club.

After a refreshing dip in the pool, we had our final sleep in hotel beds.

Up early Sunday, we headed through Atlanta in the carpool lane at 75 miles per hour, anxious to get back home. With rain off-and-on, our forward progress was limited only by the ability of the wipers.

It was a small celebration when we crossed back into the central time zone — one more way of knowing our trip was almost over.

Watching billboards for some unusual place to eat lunch gave us Davey Crockett’s in Manchester, Tennessee. It met our criteria for the day — no drive-thru and some place we had never eaten before.

But, in the three miles leading up to the exit, we found Tennessee state troopers parked on the shoulder every tenth of a mile.

Was it a bank robbery? A terrorist act? Had Jimmy Hoffa been found?

Nothing of the sort, our bleary-eyed waitress advised us. It was just Bonnaroo, a Woodstock-like festival in the middle of Tennessee where tie-dyed shirts rule the day, and twenty-somethings played like twenty-somethings of years ago.

Finally, hours later, we pulled up in front of the house. According to the odometer, it was a mere 2,622 miles. My wife’s ultra-boring Honda Odyssey consumed 105 gallons of gas, for an average fuel economy of 24.97 miles per gallon.

That’s not bad for carrying photo equipment, computer equipment, suitcases, extra product, hose, bucket, chairs and who knows what else for our family of four.

The van was good, but it was a rarity. Throughout the trip, service at restaurants was overall pathetic. From the Australian-themed steak restaurant in Springfield to the sports grill in the hotel in Birmingham, it wasn’t uncommon to end up with food over-cooked or under-cooked, when we finally got it. And, we won’t even talk about the swell bar-b-que restaurant in Plainfield, Indiana, that refused to turn on the air conditioning for us.

I’m not sure what the problem is nowadays, but I expect more when I go out to eat.

At least I was surrounded by good folks, though. Thanks to Jim, Gary, Ken, Johnny and Mark for killing themselves with long drives, little sleep and nary a word of gratitude from anyone, including me.

And, of course, my family, who was pressed into service as trailer slaves to sell product, stock shelves and fill buckets so I could be up on stage, goofing-off, and shooting stories.

It wouldn’t have been possible without all of you.

Against my better judgement to speculate on the accuracy of this information, herewith is the preliminary route for 2006’s Power Tour.