Jeff Billimek’s Journal

We woke up extremely early again today at 4:30am.  After catching a taxi to the airport, we checked-in and headed to the gate.  The first flight out to Atlanta at 6am was oversold and they were looking for volunteers to give up their seats.  This didn’t bode well.  The same thing happened for the next four flights.  It was turning out to be a pretty bad travel day.

I used my cell phone to check flight information and things didn’t look good.  Basically it looked as if we would not be getting to Atlanta by plane today.  So we bit the bullet and decided to drive.  We rented a car from National (no Avis like we would normally do because they were all sold out).  Most of the car rental companies were getting sold out.  For some reason it was turning out to be a very bad weekend for travel.

So Jen and I began the lengthy 12-hour drive to Atlanta.  This is the first time in my nine years of traveling that I’ve had to drive to get home.  We didn’t wait until tomorrow because Jen really needed to get to work on Monday.

Shortly after we began our drive we stopped at a Cracker Barrel to rent an audiobook for the drive.  We rented ‘The Thirteenth Tale‘ by Diane Setterfield.  It was pretty good and made the time go by very quickly.  We also stopped at a staples to buy a USB car charger to charge our cell phones.  And we also stopped for dinner at a little Mexican place I think somewhere in Virginia.  It was mediocre.

Jen actually drove the bulk of the time.  She’s a real champ!  We finally got home at about 2am and went to bed.  Before going to bed I checked the rest of the flights from DCA to ATL and saw that we did the best thing by driving - we would not have made it out today.