I guess if tomorrow’s Day Zero and Friday is Day One, that makes today Day Negative One.
It took me about 4 1/2 hours to get from home to Duluth, Georgia. My jaw hurts from grinding my teeth when driving through Birmingham. Birmingham, your highways suck fairly badly.
But Atlanta – holy fucking shit. Atlantans, I ask this with love – where the FUCK are ya going in such a motherfucking HURRY at 3:30 on a weekday afternoon?! Christ Almighty, I’m not in a hurry to drive through Atlanta again. I’m hoping like hell the traffic’s not that bad on Sunday evening, ’cause the only thing worse than driving with people bumper-to-bumper riding each others’ asses on either side of me would be all that in the dark, after having spent the weekend walking 60 miles.
I have to go out and figure out where the park and ride in Alpharetta is from here, but I’m scared I’ll be immediately surrounded by scary fast-drivin’ ass-ridin’ drivers.
At least I have my handy directions written on index cards. As I told reader Fitchypoo last night, who incidentally is an Atlantan (but not one of those scary drivers I’m sure), I write each step of my driving directions on it’s own numbered index card, with the street name in bold, and "left" or "right" highlighted. I have directions from home to the hotel I’m staying in, from the hotel to the park & ride (where I’ll go to drop off the Jeep tomorrow morning and catch the shuttle to Day Zero), from the park and ride BACK to the hotel (after I check out the location tonight), and last but not least, from the park and ride home.
Incredibly anal, no? I just always like to know as much as possible about what’s going to happen before it’s actually happening. Maybe I have control freak tendencies…
Ugh. Weather.com is predicting rain for Friday and Saturday.
5:22 pm, Atlanta time. Fairfield Inn room 106, Duluth, Georgia.
You know, for an event that’s for a good cause and supposed to make me feel all happy, I’m certainly feeling mighty hate-filled and grumpy right now.
To find DeVry in Alpharetta (which is where I’ll park & ride the shuttle to Day Zero), which is 15 miles away, it took more than 1 1/2 fucking hours.
Here’s a map of where I fucked up:
You see, where GA-120 veers off to the right, it is NOT clearly marked with, oh, a big sign or anything.
THERE’S NO SHAME IN A CLEARLY MARKED ROAD, PEOPLE.
So I ended up going straight, and followed Kimball Bridge Road for some ungodly amount of time before turning around and going off to the fucking west. You see, I thought highway 120 had just kind of ENDED, and turned into Kimball Bridge Road, 3 miles before MapBlast said it was supposed to show up. Why did I end up going off to the west? I have no fucking clue. There was some stupid lame fucking reasoning in there somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was.
Anyway, I found the fucking place. Grrr. To be safe, I guess I’ll leave here (the hotel) an hour before the shuttle leaves DeVry.
My favorite street name of the evening: Redcoat Way.
I saw some serious fucking subdivisions, too. "Starting from $370,000", "Starting from $500,000". At one point, I ran across a "turn of the century riverfront community" with prices ranging from $700,000 to $2,000,000, and I almost swallowed my teeth.
Judging from the houses and the cars I saw in Alpharetta, I’m in the central point of Yuppie Hell.
9:08 pm, Atlanta time. —–
]]>