Sunday, June 19, 2005
To Madison, Florida
On Friday, June, 10th, I awoke and went down to the treadmill. I thought the rowing machine and the elliptical might be working but again, they were not. So I just ran and ran and watched TV for a while and then it was time to go back up to the room and get our stuff packed up to leave the hotel. As usual, Eric had left early and I was the luggage caddy, which typically isn't a huge problem. Well, our room was in the corner of the third floor and while there was an elevator, my job was made more difficult by the fact that there was no luggage cart available. Someone -- or two -- had them sequestered in their hotel rooms, so it took me twenty minutes to lug all of our crap down to the car. That was probably Friday's low point. So, really it wasn't that low at all.
I met Eric for lunch in Monticello and we ended up dining next to a trash can (again), beneath a big tree. Our lunch of left-over Indian food (for him) and watermelon and strawberries (for me) was divine and we had plenty to watch on that overcast day. The clientele going into and out of this convenience store was uniformly working class and since school is out, there were children milling around the parking lot. At one point, a car pulled up in the alley behind us, waited a second, backed up four feet, and then the door opened. We wondered what was afoot, but all that was happening was that the overweight mother wanted to be right in line with the sidewalk before she got out of the car. As soon as the reached the store, someone in the car started yelling, but we couldn't make out the words.
Eric and I at lunch in Monticello
I cruised along to Madison, and went to the post office in that cute-as-pie town. I mailed my dad a father's day present and then went into the drug store. It had a restaurant in it and I whiled away some time while I waited for Eric to arrive. I had popped into the public library to check on lodging options, but it turned out that for the third time no one at the B&B in town, The Manor House, was able to tell me whether there was availability. That was getting old. So, I looked into other options and figured I'd run them past Eric when he arrived. I was sitting on the court house steps when he rode up and we walked over to the B&B and finally got the decisive answer that there were no rooms available. We went back over the courthouse and were loading up the bike and then a man and his wife stopped to talk to us. The husband was a bicyclist too and told Eric all about how their county was THE county for bicycle riding in Florida. I in fact had seen a poster on the chamber of commerce's window declaring such a fact. This man was very eager to hear all about Eric's travels and which roads in the county he'd rode. He told us to go down to I-10 and stay at the Holiday Inn Express -- the owner is a cyclist, he said. So, that's what we did.
We checked in, surveyed the darkening clouds, it started to rain, and we lamented the fact that we could not go swimming. We got in the car and headed off to dinner, after I worked on that ol' conference paper for a few hours. We decided to drive thirty miles to Valdosta, Georgia. And boy, were we glad we did! At first, when we drove over the bridge to Valdosta, it looked like all formerly industrial, fallen-on-hard-times cities. We went to the Family Dollar and Eric helped a man put the door back on track and then we headed through "downtown." That produced few dinner options for us. We drove to the other end of Valdosta and went in to a Winn Dixie where I asked the woman at the photo developing counter if I could see a phone book. There we looked for dining option, and found that in Voldosta there exists a location of Eric's favorite $3.99 wonder, Cici's Pizza. So being the classy people we are, we chose to locate the restaurant and dine there with all of the other Valdostans who know a good value. This Cici's, it turns out, was located in an area that pleased me, right near the mall, the TJ Maxx, a book store and a used book store, and other shops that I would've liked to have gone in to given the time. We had a grand time at Cici's and it happened to be a very busy night there. Families with children love it there and when we were at the Valdosta location, a group of championship cloggers were doing a fundraiser. They had made it to the Junior Olympic nationals (and we had no idea there was such a thing for precision clogging) and now needed to raise the money to go. They were doing it by bussing tables and wearing matching t-shirts at Cici's that night. Eric, in his traditional fashion at a buffet, "tore it up" (this is one of our favorite quotes from last year, when in El Centro, California, we heard this large family goading each other on at a Golden Corral to "tear it up"; "we didn't come here to eat salad!" one said).
We returned to Madison and our Holiday Inn Express and by that time the rain had started to come down heavily. There was a tropical storm afoot and there was concern that it might develop into a hurricane. That meant that Eric decided that we'd get up at 7:00 the next morning rather than 6:00 and that we'd then assess the situation. We went to sleep amidst the screaming, hooting, and hollering of a family of three young children with their mother in the room next door. The boys were there for a baseball tournament that looked like it was going to suffer a rain postponement.
I met Eric for lunch in Monticello and we ended up dining next to a trash can (again), beneath a big tree. Our lunch of left-over Indian food (for him) and watermelon and strawberries (for me) was divine and we had plenty to watch on that overcast day. The clientele going into and out of this convenience store was uniformly working class and since school is out, there were children milling around the parking lot. At one point, a car pulled up in the alley behind us, waited a second, backed up four feet, and then the door opened. We wondered what was afoot, but all that was happening was that the overweight mother wanted to be right in line with the sidewalk before she got out of the car. As soon as the reached the store, someone in the car started yelling, but we couldn't make out the words.
Eric and I at lunch in Monticello
I cruised along to Madison, and went to the post office in that cute-as-pie town. I mailed my dad a father's day present and then went into the drug store. It had a restaurant in it and I whiled away some time while I waited for Eric to arrive. I had popped into the public library to check on lodging options, but it turned out that for the third time no one at the B&B in town, The Manor House, was able to tell me whether there was availability. That was getting old. So, I looked into other options and figured I'd run them past Eric when he arrived. I was sitting on the court house steps when he rode up and we walked over to the B&B and finally got the decisive answer that there were no rooms available. We went back over the courthouse and were loading up the bike and then a man and his wife stopped to talk to us. The husband was a bicyclist too and told Eric all about how their county was THE county for bicycle riding in Florida. I in fact had seen a poster on the chamber of commerce's window declaring such a fact. This man was very eager to hear all about Eric's travels and which roads in the county he'd rode. He told us to go down to I-10 and stay at the Holiday Inn Express -- the owner is a cyclist, he said. So, that's what we did.
We checked in, surveyed the darkening clouds, it started to rain, and we lamented the fact that we could not go swimming. We got in the car and headed off to dinner, after I worked on that ol' conference paper for a few hours. We decided to drive thirty miles to Valdosta, Georgia. And boy, were we glad we did! At first, when we drove over the bridge to Valdosta, it looked like all formerly industrial, fallen-on-hard-times cities. We went to the Family Dollar and Eric helped a man put the door back on track and then we headed through "downtown." That produced few dinner options for us. We drove to the other end of Valdosta and went in to a Winn Dixie where I asked the woman at the photo developing counter if I could see a phone book. There we looked for dining option, and found that in Voldosta there exists a location of Eric's favorite $3.99 wonder, Cici's Pizza. So being the classy people we are, we chose to locate the restaurant and dine there with all of the other Valdostans who know a good value. This Cici's, it turns out, was located in an area that pleased me, right near the mall, the TJ Maxx, a book store and a used book store, and other shops that I would've liked to have gone in to given the time. We had a grand time at Cici's and it happened to be a very busy night there. Families with children love it there and when we were at the Valdosta location, a group of championship cloggers were doing a fundraiser. They had made it to the Junior Olympic nationals (and we had no idea there was such a thing for precision clogging) and now needed to raise the money to go. They were doing it by bussing tables and wearing matching t-shirts at Cici's that night. Eric, in his traditional fashion at a buffet, "tore it up" (this is one of our favorite quotes from last year, when in El Centro, California, we heard this large family goading each other on at a Golden Corral to "tear it up"; "we didn't come here to eat salad!" one said).
We returned to Madison and our Holiday Inn Express and by that time the rain had started to come down heavily. There was a tropical storm afoot and there was concern that it might develop into a hurricane. That meant that Eric decided that we'd get up at 7:00 the next morning rather than 6:00 and that we'd then assess the situation. We went to sleep amidst the screaming, hooting, and hollering of a family of three young children with their mother in the room next door. The boys were there for a baseball tournament that looked like it was going to suffer a rain postponement.
# posted by jnewwave @ 6:38 AM 
