2 am. Passing through Sawdust, Alabama. Below you can see a $1.50 Waffle House ‘coffee’ – basically slightly coffee flavoured hot water, but at least you get a gallon of it. Ann bought a cold with her to America and I have a raging sore throat and we are both sneezing and sniffling. We have 50 miles to go to get to the last available hotel room within a 200 mile radius in Montgomery, Alabama. A very nice fellow at a web based reservation site spent about half an hour on the phone finding it for us. We are lucky. Shortly afterwards internet searches revealed no vacant hotel rooms in North Florida, Alabama, Western Georgia or Eastern Tennessee. We find out later that Trip Advisor rates our hotel room as ‘avoid if possible’. If not possible, expect gun shots, drug deals and sex work on premises. As long as it has pillows and no one is shooting at us we don’t really care at this point. At every stop we meet fellow evacuees and friendly concerned locals all discussing the lack of hotel rooms. We are sleep deprived and have been driving in slow, busy traffic all day, with only a brief stop in St Augustine. On the plus side we have a car, credit cards and each other. We really felt for an older woman travelling with only her small, frightened dog that we came across at a gas station who seemed quite overwhelmed and very, very tired. She decided to turn back to Jacksonville, despite us assuring her there was nothing available there. Every so often one of us will say ‘I wonder how that woman and her dog are doing’.
Resonant light 