Sylva: As Bad as Being Lost in Downtown Atlanta

Amy and I started out today for Mountain Hounds, a weekend greyhound gathering for greyhounds and their humans, at 7am. We sailed through downtown Greenville. We flew up 25 to Interstate 26. We nearly glided onto Interstate 40, more like a cloud caught on a breeze than a car on the highway.

And it was there, on Interstate 40, that our happy little fluffy cloud turned into a screaming thunder storm...

We were cruising along when it suddenly occured to me that I didn't know where our next turn-off was and the directions were somewhere on the floor. I dug through McD's cups and dog food bags, with an occasional poke in the elbow from whichever dog happened to be sticking a nose through the seats to see where on earth Mommy was taking them, until I found the Mapquested directions.

Mapquest, Amy and I have since decided, is not of our Lord. It is evil and is probably run by minions of the Hot Place who sit back and watch as unsuspecting travellers like us forgo the warning to "check all routes in advance of travel" and strike out with only a list of turns and interstate numbers as our guide.

Anyway, we followed the directions down the page until it said to get off 40 at exit 27. The problem with that was that we had just passed exit 20 and the exit numbers were getting smaller...so we turned around and went back. At exit 27, the numbers on the side of the road did NOT match the ones on the paper, so I did what any red blooded Southern American girl would do in such a crisis.

I called my Daddy.

"Where are you?"
"Um...Sylva."
"Sylva? Oh, oh me..."
"What? Is that bad?"
"Umm...yes."
"Bad like not hard to fix bad, or bad like the time I called you from downtown Atlanta, completely lost and only able to see the capital dome ahead of me?"
"Bad like that second thing."
"Okay, well, we're on the Blue Ridge Parkway."
"Blue Ridge Parkway! Nancy! What are you doing over there?"
"What? Where does it go?"
"Virginia."

At that point I nearly lost my composure, but happened to hear a tiny voice in the background that brought everything back to the hilarity of the moment...it was my mother's voice in the background: "Why are you telling her to go to Virginia?"

Dad eventually handed the phone over to Mom, and as she was reminding me of all the five zillion times I'd travelled through the Great Smokey Mountains Amy smartly went into the nearest gas station and asked for directions.

We are here now, and being lazy. The trip seemed to take forever because we came up through the Great Smokey Mtns National Park...30 miles at 35mph behind, I think, every Harley owner from NC, SC, GA, and Tennessee.

I'm kinda thinking that we will head home on 40 and just press on that way...but who knows, maybe we'll make a pit stop in Virginia first.