Winter Wanderings 2012 - Day #5 - 1/31

This was just a long day of driving.  In Marissa's driveway, after the trip down & a couple of excursions to Evansville the van odometer read 293.8, now, here in Dothan, it reads 861 exactly, so I have driven 567.2 miles today.  The mild and overcast morning (and I had dry roads all day long) was nice for driving, and once the sun was to the west the evening was OK too, but the broken skies with intermittent brightness and gloom during the middle part of the day were very wearing on my old eyes with their slow iris reaction time.

I managed the whole trip with just two stops, both at MacDonald's for a fancy coffee, once with food and once without, plus a half-tank fill-up at the first McD, which was enough to get me to Dothan where I have now filled again ready for a fast start tomorrow.  I again shot myself in the foot mentally, forgetting that Alabama is on Central Time when I thought it was on Eastern.  I was feeling good about being 20 minutes from the hotel until Portia popped up and told me to run 94 miles before my next turn!  Then the penny dropped & that last hour or so seemed endless.

On the upside I never got lost or into an irretrievably wrong lane.  The hotel is nice, I have the corporate rate (the lowest available), the room is super - king bed, nice desk, armchair and ottoman and a nice big bathroom, I couldn't ask for anything more!  I decided I needed a reward for all that driving, solo, so I dined at Ruby Tuesday's on a "trio", shrimp sauteed in garlic, a crab cake that was 95% crab and almost no cake, and a lobster tail with drawn butter.  I even had a yogurt-based dessert, so all is well in John Priddis world.