The traffic is getting worse every year for our Christmas trip down to Warner Robins. I'd expected problems on the inbound trip, since it is the end of a holiday weekend, but we had no trouble coming back up, it was heading down that was wretched. I don't think it would have been any better if we'd left earlier.

We didn't get out of the house until eleven although we got up at 8:30, then had to dodge downtown because of some football game or the other. Except for the heat (it was up in the high 70s before we knew it), it wasn't a bad ride until we passed Southlake Mall (which is a veritable ghost town these days; I recall the days when we drove up to Southlake because it had more and different stores from Macon Mall). Then for seventeen long miles it was zero to twenty miles an hour. The funny part is that there was no difference in the spots where the traffic was good and when it was bad; the road didn't get narrower where it slowed down and there weren't any accidents. There was car after car of Floridian folks presumably headed home and almost as many out-of-state cars presumably heading down to the House of Mouse or House of Harry Potter. After that it sped up a bit, then slowed down a bit; we didn't get to go the speed limit until we were nearly to the I-475 split south of Forsyth. It basically took us nearly three hours to do a hour and forty minute trip. I didn't sleep well and could barely see between sleepiness, a sore right eye, and sun glare.

We met the folks at Olive Garden and had a nice meal and chatter. Our appetizer came so late that we just took it home along with most of James' meal and a slice of black-tie mousse cake. Then we did a gift exchange back at the house with a football game running in the background. We gave Mom and Candy a soup basket this year; soups we accumulated from various craft shows and novelty soups we found in the supermarket, along with two big Mickey Mouse soup bowl mugs. The artwork is like an architectural drawing.

Then we went over to Maggi and Clay's for a while. The two dachshunds, Rupert and Jennifer, greeted us with a salvo of barks (Rupert kept barking at us through most of the visit; I thought Willow had protective issues!), and we were also greeted by a mostly-lab adolescent black puppy, Tessa, who belongs to Maggi's grandson Jayson, who's living with them. They weren't able to come to the Twelfth Night party last year and we missed taking them their gifts at Anachrocon, so they had two sets of gifts to open. We shot the breeze for a couple of hours and then set home in the dark. Traffic, as I mentioned earlier, was now fine, so at least we got home in good time, although we missed The Librarians (it's on the DVR) and were just too tired to watch Alaska: the Last Frontier (ditto).

Labels: Christmas, family, friends, gifts, traffic, travel

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:53:00 PM

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