Day 116-118 - Atlanta to Miami (Photo's Added)

Logistics:

Miles Driven - Wednesday - 134 (left Melissa & Guys about 1 PM, drove from Atlanta, GA to Macon GA)
Thursday - 377 (Macon, GA to Tampa, FL)
Friday - 276 (Tampa, FL to Miami, FL)
Weather - It did stop raining Wednesday, cleared up and finally started to warm up to maybe the high 60's. Continued to get warmer, 70 by FL, 80 by South FL
Camped at:
Wednesday: Camping World just south of Macon. (Yeh! I finally got to replace some broken things in the Rig!)
Thursday: Made a reservation at a nice campground near Fort Meyers, but was unable to drive that far so we stayed at a rest area just south of Tampa.
Friday: We're at Miami Everglades Campground now, hot tub, swimming pool, etc. etc. etc.

Musings:

I think I'm almost caught up with the blog now, will try not to start falling behind again?

Lousy holiday traffic trying to leave Atlanta, took about 2 hours to go 30 miles. We only made it just past Macon, partly due to not leaving until after lunch, partly due to the traffic. This will be offset some by the weather, it's forecast to be 80 F the whole time we'll be there... (Cancel that, big cold front came through, was +80 F through New Years Eve, 50 F after that)

More accidents on I75 in FL, second one near Tampa was some sort of rollover accident complete with heliocopter, with the heavy holiday traffic, each accident seems to cause serious slowdowns, probably because there is so much holiday traffic on the road to begin with, but we finally got to Miami safe & sound.

Narrative:

My son, Michael, is a teacher in the Miami area. Since he'll have to go back to work after New Years when the Christmas Break is over, we're going to hit the freeway for the 700+ miles from Atlanta to Miama. I'd like to get there by Friday night (normally quite achievable, but we're talking about me, who rarely make over 100 miles per day on this trip!). So anyway, I'm going to try driving hard the next couple of days and just pretend I don't see anything worth stopping for.

BTW - we visited Melissa again this morning (12/26) before she left for work then hit the road. It was fun getting to see her again and meeting Guy and some of his family. We didn't do any other sightseeing in Atlanta, but those are the tradeoff's. Family is important also.

We stopped at the visitors center just after crossing into Florida - LOTS of people come here for the holiday break and the huge parking lot was full. We took out enough time to update our travel maps - Florida is the 1/2 point of the trip - so this one is a pretty big deal for us.

12/29/07 Update - we did finally make it to Miami safe & sound. It was so hard driving by all those sightseeing activities, I think we've both come to enjoy stopping and learning about all sorts of different things. We did make one side trip to the beach at Sarasota (took a lot longer then I expected). There were a lot of brown pelicans and turns (forked tail, unlike seagulls). They were both diving for fish, quite interesting. Mom took a few minutes to play in the sand, which was very soft. I spent my time trying to get photo's of the pelican's diving...

We also stopped in the Everglades once and saw plenty of alligators. This was actually at the visitors center for the Big Cyprus National Preserve, which is on the north end of the everglades. We also saw lots of birds while driving through the Everglades, they aren't very far from our campground so we may make a day trip back there just for fun.

Mike came by the campground last night, it was nice seeing him again. He is off the next several days so we'll be able to visit quite a bit. Not sure how much time will be left for blogging, but as usual will fit in what I can...

Will try to catch up on this off and on, pool should be open now, so we're heading off for a morning swim...