greetings from Metropolis!

Operation Spotted Owl - the photo album

1. After a whole series of unfortunate events, I'm spending the night in Metropolis. !!!!! So far there's no sign of Supes, or any of the Luthors or Chloe Sullivan. But as for Chloe, I'm happily delusional that she's off in Gotham, Edge City or Blüdhaven and being dark and awesome. [That's another story, but whatever. CHLOE ROCKS...or at least she used to, back when I still watched Smallville and even then it was only for her.]

2. I've driven 8 hours to Miami and felt like I wanted to die. I've driven straight from NOLA to Tallahassee (only stopping in Miss. for gas) and that was mind numbing but not soul sucking.

The drive through Georgia wasn't awful at all. Hell, I didn't even have to turn on Garmin or look at a map once all the way until I stopped right near the state line -- apparently my inner compass fu was fraking SPOT ON.

3. I like driving near mountains. Maybe not through them, or over bridges really, but curving around them with gentle (or not so) climbs is really kinda fun...at least for bits at a time.

4. Rock City in Chattanooga was really cool. Not meant for people with guts, and hell, the tall, gangly girl had issues squeezing through some of the rock paths, but it was really nice. I got there way early in the morning so some of the lookouts probably weren't what they could've been, but the vegetation was lush and everything was well laid out. Also, GNOMES. And a creepy as fuck "Mother Goose" area with day glo diaramas of story book stories. Really, no shit.

5. There was an aborted side trip to Lynchburg to see the Jack Daniels Distillery, but no.

6. Still made it to Nashvegas in plenty of time to hit the Parthenon at Centennial Park. I sat for an hour and read some from The Confusion [really, my love for Jack Shaftoe cannot be properly textually rendered at this point], see hateful children terrorize a large flock of Canada geese (oh how I wished they'd been bitten), and walked around the park and took pictures of the Parthenon itself.

Also, using the Garmin for this part was a fantabulous idea. No problems driving through urban-ish Nashvegas whatsoever...though getting used to the British man's Britspeak will take some getting used to.

7. State count so far stands at: Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Georgia again (Lookout Mtn is strange and confusing), Kentucky, Illinois.

8. There was a moment there when I crossed into IL and saw signs that would've taken me Chicago where I was ready to ditch my plan to do St Louis and go there. BUT, aside from being home to some of my favourite bands, one of the largest fangirl meccas, and well...I don't know...there's probably a third thing -- NO. I think after tonight's adventures (and the less said about them, the better), me and IL are not on good terms.

Hope I have better luck with Missiouri.

9. Um, I'm sure there's more commentary, but I've driven, like 400 miles today and dealt with scary drivers and BLAH, so now I'm going to watch the rest of the Closer, plan out crap for tomorrow and rotate pictures on Facebook but lord knows that I haven't figured out how to do that in the upload process on my phone.