The far East......

For some reason the Blogger app on my phone no longer works so I'm doing this from a different utility on my laptop. It's a little different.
Annie (my wife) and I have had a trip to the East Coast of the United States planned for several months. Annie has wanted to attend a NASCAR race for 20+ years. It's a bucket list thing. A couple of my motorcycle riding buddies (Gerry and Orv) happened to be meeting in Atlanta,GA to rent motorcycles for two days to ride the infamous Tail of the Dragon and many other awesome roads in the area. Seemed like a great way to kill two birds with one stone. Riding near Atlanta and a NASCAR race in Charlotte,NC.

Well Annie is very afraid of flying. She's only done it once before. We both thought the temptation of going to a NASCAR race would help overcome that fear, but as the departure date got closer that didn't turn out to be the case.

Mount Hood poking through the clouds...

I think this is the Mississippi River, but as you can see it was getting dark.

The sun on the horizon behind us as we were heading East created this beautiful rainbow effect. I've never seen this before on a flight

The flight was uneventful although we did have a little bit of turbulence as we landed in Denver for our transfer. I wondered if the turbulence was more than Annie could handle.

 She was pretty excited. The flight from Denver to Atlanta was much smoother though and she made it through.
ATL airport is the biggest airport I've even seen. You actually take a train to get from one concourse to the next and then another to get to the rental car area. That's when our troubles began. I don't do credit cards and I always check to make sure everyone I am dealing with accepts debit cards. Apparently Enterprise Rent-a-car doesn't follow uniform guidelines throughout their business'. Online said no problem, but the local renter would not rent us a car without a credit card even though my reservation used my debit card... Budget right next door set us up, but it cost us another $100 having not made a reservation and we ended up with a Nissan SUV instead of a Buick. A little cramped to get in and out of but otherwise OK.
Traffic out of Atlanta was horrible even at after 10:00PM! Construction everywhere.
We're staying at the Econolodge in Marietta. GA for three days after which we will drive to Charlotte for the race. When we arrived after our long day in the air at 11:30 PM, our room had been sitting all day with no AC and was at last 85-90 degrees inside. We fell asleep pouring sweat waiting for the AC to cool it down... Nice King size bed though!
First day was a little rough.