Opportunity

We had a window of opportunity.

With 6 new tires, 6 new brakes, and nothing else needing work on our trailer, we could leave Canada a day or two earlier than planned. 

American Thanksgiving, with its associated traffic, was a couple of days away.  

A Canadian snowstorm was coming in one.

We don’t normally like long days of travel. Pulling a trailer down the interstates alongside big tractor trailers and going through cities with little cars zigzagging unexpectedly in front of us can be tiring and stressful. To me anyway.

Plus you miss lots of interesting areas as you roll on by.

But this opportunity was too good to miss. The weather was good, and wasn’t going to stay that way. So we pointed our nose south, and didn’t look back. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.

This was the first time that we had crossed the border at the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit. It isn’t an especially easy crossing. There was the stop and go traffic of Windsor before the bridge, and a misleading sign directing cars and RVs along one blissfully quiet lane only to discover that we had to merge back into the same truck traffic later.

The scowling border guard threatened us with a $500 fine, confiscating of our truck if we had any undeclared meat, fruit, or vegetables and then let us pass after our wide eyed disavowals. Thank goodness we had given away our frozen packages of chili back at the trailer service center.

Once on the I-75 and heading south, we were golden. The roads in Michigan were rough, but the weather was perfect. We took the time to visit the Airstream factory in Ohio looking for some specialized parts, but other than that, we didn’t slow down until we hit Cincinnati. And then the late afternoon rush hour traffic did that for us.

At least when we did stop for the night, at an all night truck stop, we were beyond the snow and the below freezing temperatures.

The next day was one I didn’t even know existed: Thanksgiving Eve. But here in the States, that’s a real thing. And it turns out to be the busiest travel day of the year. Businesses close early, and everyone rushes to where they want to be on Thanksgiving – one day early. We expected the real Thanksgiving Day to be the road closure, but we were mistaken by one day. 

So we struggled through the day in bumper to bumper-car traffic and reached a campground just south of Atlanta to rest and recuperate for a few days.

Wait. Did I say rest? But we have not stayed in Atlanta before, so “resting” is done on our feet, checking out the tourist areas.

We visited the World of Coca-Cola, which was extremely busy on Black Friday.  Isn’t everyone supposed to be shopping? I couldn’t believe how many people wanted to go through a building holding the history and antiquities of a product that was 130 years old. But hey, we were there, too.

And we really enjoyed the old TV advertisements playing in the theatre. Oh, and all the free samples at the end, too.

Our first tourist stop of the city was to see the Georgia Aquarium. They have one humongous tank there that you can see from many different windows and angles, including a walking tunnel along the bottom of it. 

And that is where they keep the whale sharks. Huge gentle giants in among the manta rays, green turtles and scores of fish species.

And for some reason, we wanted seafood for dinner that night.

That was an opportunity that we wouldn’t ignore as well.

W