17-VIII-2007.: To Orlando
The dates on the photos are unreliable - the Fujica left no EXIF data in them, the file dates are from almost a year later (what did I do then, and why?), so just judging by the fact that the next day we had daily shots of us in Orlando, I'd say that we took off on 17th, after lunch. I see there was some activity online, I extended the domain for sGradlj.com for another year, visited the forum, even checked in some code for Feds, in the medical records area, at 13:28 local (no conversion, it's a timestamped comment that my intellisense script inserted).
Even commented on UA at 16:10, in re of Carl Rove's resignation
(whats with the soldier/troops thing?)
My small protest against language abuse. I've actually heard one congress(...person?)... member agree that it is abuse. One soldier is a human being, a person. Troops are a plural of a plural (word "troop", look up any dictionary, assumes a group of people, be they actors in a troupe, or soldiers in a "theater of operations"), faceless and expendable. Not a single soldier has died in Iraq. It's troops who do, and it's troops who are sent there - but when counting them, they don't mean "20000 troops" as "20000 military units" (that they don't have, anyway), they actually mean "20000 armed persons". It's just that the persons are invisible this way.
You can always see when they start raping the language. Just listen to the news - you'll never hear about Blackwater being mentioned as militants (or the favorite pejorative from the nineties, "paramilitary formations"), nor about Hezbollah or Hamas as security contractors or troops. You won't hear about Chavez government, but you'll hear about Chavez regime, whereas you'll never hear about Israeli regime. And so on.
I even switched my cell phone from ATT to Cingular that day (which I read as tzingular, tz as in pizza, the tzing sound of a little bell is so tele-phony). And posted another one on UA after 19... so it means we took off after dinner. Well. It's a long trip, and much easier to drive at night, with low traffic. Nina couldn't go, she already used up her vacation, stayed to work; I carried my work (i.e. nezavisni) with me, Lena was off school too, so off we went, to Orlando, to visit Go and Ricardo. It's only about 750 miles, not like last year when I drove via DC and made almost a thousand.
Corolla just got new tires, so the ride was smooth, and there's just about nothing to remember about the trip west (except that one of the seven cities, perhaps Southampton or Ivor) had road signs in serifed fonts, which I actually liked and found more readable. Once we hit the I-95, it was straight south all the way. After some hundred miles south I needed gas and also heard some weird sound from the front right wheel. Went off road to some gas station and found that the plastic mud shield around the wheel's space got warped and was chafing the tire. Tore it off and went on without it. Then the rain began, just when I got finished with that. When we returned to the 95, I barely saw anything, so we took the nearest restarea and waited it out. The old trouble with the redirection of air in the Corolla came to play again - the windshield was fogging on the outside, as the AC cooled the glass, and outside the humidity was above 90%.
Anyway, it passed soon so I drove off, and of course within half an hour it was all dry where we were. I managed to get as far as mid South Carolina when I felt that I was tired, so we found a motel and crashed there.
On 18th we had breakfast in the motel room, bagels and coffee. There was no smoking ban in place, the place was run by just one guy during the day, perhaps a cleaning team would come around noon. The coffee was probably the instant we brought, we still didn't get used to the filter stuff they had everywhere, and which we could perhaps get at the lobby, reheated all night. I see I was smoking Samson again, something went awry with Smokin' Joes - they got into a legal bind by not being able to prove the customers were of legal age. Dunno why, the porn sites have the same obligation, so why couldn't they just do the same? There was some Papa Joe's smokeshop in the neighborhood (a whole mile away, though, but then the americahn idea of neighborhood... everything's bigger here), so I bought what they had.
Judging by the plastic flatware and dishes, the 20$ (or was it 25$) for the night seems to include some breakfast - bagels and these small packages of cream and cheese are standard. But the plastic box seems to contain some food we brought along.
Somewhere on a restarea in Georgia (or was it the only one - there were none on the way back on the other side of the 95) we ate again, probably around noon. The next stop was another restarea in Florida, where I was too lazy to get back to the car and get the camera - you could see all those huge insects crawling on trees. There's a story that Floridians saddle them and ride.
We found the place easily, I was here before, didn't even need any remote guidance. Had to call Go to come and swipe her card („bunny's picture“) to open the gate for us, it's a gated community. It was already dusk - the first pictures of us there show still some light coming from the outside, while the big room is rather dark.
We didn't see much of Ricardo, as he tended to stay at work until late at night. I remember from my last trip that we'd pick him up at 22:00 or so, and it didn't get any better meanwhile.
Mentions: Feds, Fujica, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), nezavisni, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), sGradlj.com, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian