Day 1: Charlotte to Nashville

So it's Wednesday morning, and I got up at 6am so that I could shower, and do all the last minute stuff I needed to before my sister comes to pick me up. I got my new MP3 Player the night before and I spent all night loading it up with songs. Granted, I only got 532 songs on it (and they took up 1.73 GBs - I have to clean it up a bit, I should be able to fit twice that in that space) and I knew my sis wouldn't like half of what was on there, but hey, it's my MP3 player, and when I'm driving, I'll listen to whatever I please, right? Anyway, so she stayed at a friend's house in Charlotte last night, since her 3 cats and my 2 stood as much of a chance of getting along as a rat and a snake. Well, she called me about 5 different times in the morning to get directions to my place, and generally bitch about traffic and the ordeal she had getting her cats into their carriers. Gee, this trip is sounding better and better by the minute, right? Well, she finally arrives, I see I have about 2 inches of trunk space for my tiny suitcase and none for my purse. (It got to sit on my feet nearly the entire trip.) After a bit of rearranging, we leave. We get as far as the Circle K next door (at my request so I could buy some cigarettes for the trip where I knew they'd be cheap) and spend about 20 minutes gasing up, buying coffee (Ha! She said never to tell anyone that she drank gas station coffee, hee hee now the whole world knows!), buying bananas (yes, Circle K has fresh fruit) and then I realize that I'm bringing another "friend" on the trip. So after a quick trip to the rest room, we're back on the road. We make it about 3 miles when I make a quick stop to avoid ramming into the back of a garbage truck (which was stopped - stupidly, on a major road right after a sharp curve) when we hear the sound of falling litter. She had an open box of kitty litter and it had tipped over. So we stop at another gas station where we clean up the mess, vacuum the whole trunk, and re-rearrange the contents. Finally, we're back on the road. Finally. We make it to 40-W with no further incident, and pop in the Harry Potter. Since 40-W takes us all the way to Flagstaff, AZ, we really didn't need that triptik from AAA, but heck, you get all sorts of free booklets (which DID come in handy). I had prepared to listen to HP & The Goblet of Fire by almost reading all the books up to that point (I had 50 pages to go on #2, and brought along #3 - I'm a quick read, I had only started #1 Sunday night, and this was Wednesday morning). I actually quite enjoyed it. Anyway, just before we get to Chattanooga, TN we see a big, huge wreck in the mountains in the Eastbound lane. It was awful. A west-bound tractor-trailer had apparently been going too fast around the curves and overturned into the East lane. The tractor was still in the one of the West bound lanes, but the trailer was completely blocking the East bound lane. The cops hadn't even gotten there yet, but we saw that traffic was backed up a good ten miles already. Thank God we were going in the opposite direction at the time we were. It could have been much worse. We pulled into Nashville, our first planned stop, around 5 o'clock. I wanted to go all the way to Memphis, but sis was insistent on stopping in Nashville. Not like we went on the town or anything. We ate at the O'Charlies across the parking lot from our over-priced, craptastic hotel. But hey, they didn't care we had 3 cats and they had HBO. So my sis was able to watch 6FU (which she ended up watching all or parts of it about 4 times over the whole trip). I think it was, um, "ladies" night at O'Charlies . Sis and I felt a bit self-conscious since we were out together, but it wasn't completely obvious that we're sisters ya know. Anyway...we go back to the hotel, she watches TV and I finish HP #2 and make good headway on #3. Stayed tuned for Day #2....