by Alan J. Claffie
Not much to report from today as we had no side trips planned and none taken. The goal is to get into the Gaylord Grapevine in the early afternoon tomorrow so the day's task was to get as close as reasonably possible without overdoing it or driving into deer-dodging hours. And we wanted to be in front of a TV to see the end of American Idol.
So we're here in the Holiday Inn Express in Bryant Arkansas where the Little Rock FOX station is going absolutely berserk because their local hero won.
For the first time, we've run across some fellow MiataWorld II participants in our travels. In an accident-related traffic backup on I-40 halfway through Tennessee, we ran across a couple traveling from New Jersey in a Velocity Red Mazdaspeed MX-5. And as we arrived at the hotel tonight, we did so shortly after another couple arrived in a '91 BRG. They hailed from Ohio, and claimed they left home this morning. That's about 12.5 hours to here by our calculations, and that's a whale of a drive in a little car.
Speaking of that accident-related backup, it had us pretty much parked for the better part of an hour. Then we got to a point where the left lane of two was closed, and we all got to that point and merged, slowly, and suddenly the road opened up and we were off and running again. How they can go from an accident that had us stopped on the highway with the engine off to clear road with no sign of anything going wrong is pretty impressive.
Another thought was that it's kinda strange these days that all the big chain hotels like Holiday Inn Express and Hampton Inn don't use those "NO VACANCY" signs anywhere. We've been pretty lucky in this trip to find every place but one with rooms available when we dropped by unannounced. Who decided to get rid of this fairly simple, fairly important bit of signage?
There's three outfits that photograph cars on the Dragon. One of them already has photos from Tuesday up and there's maybe a dozen of us from Tuesday on his site (Link). Once we see what the other two have come up with, we'll buy some to put in the Bob Claffie Office And Racing Room back at the homestead.
It's another day of driving tomorrow, but less than we've done in the preceding three days. GPS says we're 300 miles or so from Grapevine, so if we get off to a start at a decent hour tomorrow, we should be there by early afternoon. Then the fun begins.
More later.