Go!

Rick and I pulled out of the driveway right on schedule at 7:00 this morning.  We stopped at Gainesville for coffee (f.y.i., Ben & Jerry’s now does gourmet organic coffees — their coffee is good and the shop was immaculately clean), had lunch a couple of hours further down the road at a Ruby Tuesday’s (we rely on their salad bar a lot when we travel — in Florida especially finding food to eat that’s not deep-fried can be a real challenge), and arrived in Mobile, Alabama around 4:00.  It wasn’t a bad day’s drive at all — mind you, easy for me to say with Rick doing 2/3’s of the driving.

The Prius turned out to be really comfortable for highway driving:  quiet, smooth, holds the road well, and averaged 41.3 mpg - one great automobile!

It’s nice, going north from Sarasota and watching the landscape transition from palm trees & tropical foliage to live oaks, other deciduous trees & pine forests.  The countryside around Gainesville is really pretty — rolling hills and horse farms.  Fields of wildflowers lined the road a good deal of the way.  

Coming into Mobile is very much like coming into Tampa/St Pete:  a long bridge over a wide body of open water leading to a sea-level city, totally flat.  Downtown Mobile, from what I’ve seen, has an unmistakably southern, sort of New Orleans flavor — century old buildings with filigreed wrought iron balconies.  

We went out for dinner and, at the recommendation of a man we stopped on the street to ask, ate at The Blind Mule - which looked like nothing much from the outside but where the food was good and the peach cobbler dessert way above average.

After dinner we ran into Laurie, who’ll be guiding the UGRR tour, who was the guide on both of the other Woman Tours rides that I’ve been on, and who is absolutely phenomenal; and Judi and Holly, who were on last year’s Mississippi ride.  Very excited to see them again and very much looking forward to tomorrow and to seeing the other ladies I already know and to meeting the rest of the group.

The plan is for us to get up & out early tomorrow so Rick can head down to Dauphin Island for birding before the day heats up too much.  I’ll do some sightseeing in the morning and then at 1:00 everyone on the tour assembles to go over tour logistics.  

There are some photos from today here.