Tony’s Guatemala

Well, I’m writing this in Atlanta, but I’ll have to publish it when I get back, since I’ve got no internet up here.

Rachel and I had planned to leave Tallahassee at about 5 pm, which would have put us in Atlanta at about 10pm. We ended up spending a little more time in Tallahassee, we ate dinner before we left, and did just a little bit of other stuff, and ended up leaving a little closer to 8pm, putting us through Atlanta more like 12:30-1:00 am.

There was a tornado that tore through downtown Atlanta between 10 and 11 pm. We would have been driving through right in the midst of the tornado if we hadn’t been a little late leaving.

Sometimes God really does work in mysterious ways. We ended up getting in late, and therefore not getting as much sleep as we would have liked before Rachel’s conference the next morning, but we missed the tornadoes without even knowing they existed.

Well, I’m sitting here, about to leave on another weekend trip.

Rachel has a conference in Atlanta for the job she just started, and we’re going to stay with one of my best friends, Dave, while we’re there. It’s always good to see Dave.

I look forward to seeing Dave, but I’m not looking forward to the drive. Especially after driving a total of 18 hours last weekend.

I need a vacation I think, I mean, I’ll be out of town 3 weekends in a row, none of them with less than 10 hours of driving on a 2 day weekend, yikes!

Well today has been kind of interesting, I’ve had another possibility as far as my phones go, since I found my Dad’s phone.

My Dad had a Motorola Razr v3 phone, which conveniently is pretty useable for pre-paid services, I’ve still got to research what carriers it’ll work with, but it gives me another option.

I pulled all the photos off of my Dad’s phone and loaded them onto my Mac powerbook via bluetooth. There where a lot of photos of the family vacation he and my mom went on with my sister last summer, and the first picture he took was of my mom.

The last pictures my Dad took on his phone where actually of me while I was doing a photo shoot for their church.

After my relatively late rising, Rachel, Mary and I snacked a little bit, and then went and visited with their Grandmother, also known as “Gan.” I suppose at some point I should find out why they call her that, but I don’t know right now. We visited for some time, and then left about 2:30.

The 3 of us went for a walk, and ended up going down to the French quarter, and had sushi at a place that had very good prices on the lunch menu, but not nearly such good prices by the time we got there, since it was after 3. Afterwards, we walked a little further down Decatur street, and eventually ran into the French market, which looked exactly like what the rest of the country calls a flea market. I’d never been, so we walked through it.

After Rachel and I walked through, we looked for Mary, only to realize that neither one of us had our cell phones with us, so we couldn’t call her. We tried walking through the market several times, but to no avail, there was no sign of her, we where about 1 1/2 miles from the hotel, and we weren’t sure if she knew her way back, so we sought out a plan to find Mary. We looked for a pay-phone, but no-one was exactly sure where to find one, but a nice guy at a place called New Orleans Madness Masks offered to let us borrow his cell phone. Now the dilemma was, neither of us knew her cell number off the top of our heads, so Rachel planned to call her parents and get the number from them, after she called the her parents house a few times and got no answer, I reminded her that they where probably in another state trying to do some fund-raising.

Well, Rachel couldn’t remember either of her parent’s cell numbers, but eventually Rachel recommended that I call my brother and ask him for their numbers, since I’d sent him an Email a few days earlier with their numbers in it so that they could hang out while they where in the same city. Bingo! We got the numbers and on the second call got through to Rachel’s Mom, and got Mary’s number, a few minutes later, we where all happily re-united, and we started walking back to the Hotel

Well, I’m writing this from New Orleans, and I’m tired.

My Girlfriend Rachel’s Grandmother lives here, and while Rachel’s sister Mary is in town, we thought we’d all come over and visit.

Friday morning I got up, and went and got an oil change on my poor little car, then I got a new (used) tire on the passenger side front, since there was a bulge in the tire, and anytime you got over 15mph you got a free back massage. After that, I picked up Gavin, and drove to Jacksonville from Tallahassee, normally  a 2 1/2 hour drive, but since there was a bad storm blowing for about 95% of the drive, it turned into more like 3 1/2 hours. I dropped Gavin off, and drove back, another 3 1/2 hours, then when I got to Tallahassee, I went to Rachel’s apartment, and picked up Rachel and her sister.

Then the drive to New Orleans began, of course, by the time we hit the road, it was 9:30 at night, and with the light traffic, but heavy wind, we ended up in New Orleans at about 3:30 in the morning. We Checked into the Lafayette Hotel on St. Charles Ave, and carried everything up to the 5th floor.

I have a room facing east(ish) out over the park (I don’t remember the name of the park, and as much as I’m tempted to call it Lafayette park, I don’t think that’s right) Of Course, it was about 2:30 local time, which is still pretty late really. I went to sleep and woke up about 4 hours later, since the sun was shining in through the windows, over which I’d forgotten to draw the curtains. I got up, brushed my teeth, since I’d overlooked doing that due to my exhaustion, I also drew the curtains. (After laying back down and realizing I’d forgotten to do the thing I’d initially climbed out of bed to do.) Then I returned to my slumber, and slept for another 3 hours or so.