Checking out of the condo instead of claiming our beach chairs this morning was a hard thing to do. Three nights is just not enough. Next time we will have to stay at least a week.
I decided to attempt a more scenic drive than the TripTik suggested. We headed west on Highway 98, through the town of Fort Walton, then through Navarre Beach and Pensacola. Navarre suffered a lot of damage both from Dennis and Ivan, and it didn't look like it was coming back any too quickly. We saw several buildings that were missing entire walls and/or roofs. The further west that we drove, the worse the damage appeared.
Pensacola was not much better. We stopped at a gas station in Pensacola that had no gas to sell. Several sections of the fishing pier across the bay had fallen into the water. The visitor's center was closed. Highway 10 and 110 were both under heavy construction.
Believe it or not, I thought I remembered this sign as we drove past, from my trip to Pensacola when I was 5 or 6 years old. Could this sign actually have been there in the '60s?Anyway, the whole town had kind of a creepy, ghost-town vibe to it, and we were all sort of glad to put it behind us.
Soon we were in Alabama. The directions to get to I-65 were a bit challenging, but we finally made it. There was a lot of damage in southern Alabama as well. This was mitigated by the fact that there's not a heck of a lot in Alabama to damage. It is a big, long, boring state with a lot of tall pine trees and not much else in it. We stopped at a Cracker Barrel for lunch in Prattville (just outside of Montgomery, and in case you're still keeping score, gas was $2.72/gallon).
The Hamtaro DVD had mysteriously been misplaced, but the two little ones made due by watching Teacher's Pet (with Nathan Lane) several times. After lunch, having grown weary of Nathan's Jerry Lewis imitation, I was miraculously able to relocate Hamtaro and gave it back to them.
The scenery improved noticeably once we crossed the border into Tennessee (again, this surprised us). We got into Nashville after dark, and checked into our room at the Springhill Suites. It's good that we made reservations ahead of time. As I was checking in, another man was asking the desk clerk if there were any rooms available anywhere in town. There were not. Apparently, this weekend there was a UT game, the Titans were hosting the Bengals, there was some kind of big NASCAR event, and the Grand Ole Opry was celebrating it's 80th anniversary. None of these things had any significance to us, but it did make for a crowded parking lot at the hotel.
We grabbed a quick dinner at the McDonalds at the corner, then returned to the hotel. I thought it was sort of funny that an employee of the nearby KFC was in McDonalds ordering a McChicken for dinner. It was even stranger when she came back and announced that her manager had asked her to order one for him as well. As we were leaving, we noticed an ambulance with its lights flashing in front of the KFC. We don't know if the McChickens were the cause, or if the staff had known something about the KFC cuisine that their hapless customers had not.
After dinner, Mom took the kids down to the indoor pool to swim for an hour or so, in an effort to burn off some of their untapped potential energy for the day. It seemed to work. It was the first time we did not have to beg them to go to sleep.
On to Day 10...
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