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| TRAVELS WITH MY DINOSAUR 05 June - 05 August 2003 |
| Thursday 19th June. I was on the road to Atlanta for much of the day, after reluctantly deciding to give Savannah a miss this time round. I am learning to be more disciplined with myself to avoid becoming too tired this summer. My headaches are also still occurring later than usual, and would have interfered with the time of departure, so I felt it would be more sensible to bypass the town and head on up to Atlanta in one trip. We were delayed in Jacksonville for an hour whilst the management considered doubling up our coach rather than running two half-empty services. In the end, both buses ran their respective schedules to Atlanta, and our driver set out valiantly to regain his down time. Across the Georgia State line, our first stop was Waycross, a small town where we had to leave three passengers standing at the stop due to our full capacity - how could the manager even think of taking another bus out of service? Just past Abbeville we hit a violent rain storm and slowed to a crawl as visibility dropped almost off the scale. Five minutes out of the rain we were bathed in sunshine. At Jacksonville I met a lady waiting to board the coach. Bernice sat next to me up front, across from the driver. She was visiting friends in GA and looked forward to their reunion in the evening. She had lived in FL all her life and enjoyed telling me about her family back home and across the country in California. We took a half hour break at the MacDonald�s in Fredricksville, where I experimented with a chicken cob McSalad which was surprisingly tasty. After all the delays, we arrived in Atlanta just 8 minutes behind schedule, and passengers collectively praised the driver as he disembarked. My welcome to Atlanta came in the form of possibly the grumpiest cab driver in town, who muttered and mumbled as I watched the lights of Peachtree slip past. Fortunately, my greeting at the Atlanta Youth Hostel was much more pleasant. The young lady at the receptionm desk even assisted in checking my emails by taking control of the mouse for me. I�ve found this is the most difficult part of using a computer without enlarging systems. I spend most bof the time searching for the mouse rather than actually working constructively. Also, none of the commercial access systems thus far have allowed me to change their accessibility settings, which doesn�t help. I have a better feeling about Atlanta, even though it does have three interstates carving up downtown . |