21:26 12/2/2001
Long, long day after a short, but almost disastrously long, period of sleep.
I set both alarm clocks last night, for 03:30 and 03:31. Either I set them wrong, which I find hard to believe, or one or the other of us shut them both off. Sadly, I fear the former...
But Karen saved the day... she got up to go to the bathroom at 04:15, then she got back in bed and realized what was going on. We needed to be at the loading area at 05:00, and we made it. I even had time to go back and get the sack of snacks that we'd left behind.
Anyway... 14 hours is a long time to be riding in a bus. I did win a door prize, though... a hat with "Carnival" on it. And we watched four (4!) movies... The Mummy, The Mummy Returns,I love Lucy, Lucy goes to Europe, and finally, Shreck. The mummy movies were pretty good in a camp, black humor kind of way... the lady in front of me didn't want any more mummy movies, so I tried to get the chant, "More Mummies! More mummies!", going, but my efforts were in vain. That's when we got Lucy.
We had ample rest stops, I guess, more than I would have wanted, but many fewer than I would have needed when I was smoking.
My butt was getting sore when we passed Huntsville at 18:00, but it was another two hours to get to the hotel... and about a half-hour to get into the rooms. Karen and I went over to the Wendy's next to the hotel, and Matt and Kim went across the road to the seafood place on the pier. Matt had never seen the ocean before...