Departure Day Friday 12/26 (and the night before) Queen’s bad Mojo.
We had a nice Christmas with family and that evening planned to go pick up the rental car…we drove this trip. We were going to leave right from BrerFan's Dad's house, but we forgot to grab the credit card, so we had to make quick trip back home first. While we were there, I was outside for some reason…I can’t remember…and it was icy and only getting worse….you see where this is going…I fell in the driveway. I landed on my right side, managed to bruise and otherwise make sore, my right arm and shoulder, hip, and knee. I didn’t know at that time how long the soreness would last.
We got the rental car picked up without too much problem, though it had been smoked in, so we left the windows down to air it out…brrrrrr.
Friday morning brought terrible black ice. Some roads and interstate ramps were closed down, but we weren’t stopping. We got the car packed and I was just walking around the table, to a chair, to put my shoes on. In full stride, I rammed my little toe into a large immovable oak cabinet in our dining room…I went to a corner and spoke in “tongues” for a few minutes. It was bad, I knew it when it happened, but put my shoe on anyway. We didn’t get an hour down the road and I had to get my shoe off because of the swelling. My little toe was turning the most remarkable colors and was quite deformed. Once out of shoes, I couldn’t get my foot back in shoes, even my sandals. The pain was bad too. Oh, by the way it was my RIGHT foot, to go along with my other injuries from the fall.
With the ice, we didn’t exceed 20 mph until we got to the interstate, by which time it was warming up and melting off somewhat. Parking lots and side roads were still terrible.
I called our sport’s medicine doctor to ask his opinion about the toe…nothing to do but keep it elevated, not an easy thing in a car…ice it, also not easy to do in a car…and IF I have to walk on it, tape it to the toe next to it. IF?…IF?...I’m going to Disney World during the busiest time of year! Walking is going to be necessary. I could hardly hobble to the bathroom when we stop on the road, so I was feeling a bit discouraged on the trip down.
Bad mojo not quite done yet….so I make some remark about “at least I haven’t hurt anything on the right side of my head”…bad to tempt fate at this point. Somehow, I do not know how, while I was handing a bag of Doritos back to the kids, I hit myself in the RIGHT eye with the corner of the bag, scratching it and causing a huge red splotch in the white of my eye. Okay, I need to be knocked out for the rest of the trip for my own safety and perhaps the safety of others.
Actually, once I was fully injured, from literally head to toe, the bad mojo seemed to be satisfied and I had no further incidents.
The trip was uneventful until just west of Chattanooga where we got stopped on the interstate for miles, and once moving were then detoured without signs. We had NeverLost GPS Navigation in the rental and were exceedingly thankful for that. It was dark and rainy on the border of Tennessee and Georgia, and we couldn’t figure out what happened to cause the problem. Both States troopers were rerouting traffic from both directions and all we could see were a lot of emergency vehicles, fire, ambulance and police. We were trying to make Atlanta by around 8PM, it ended up being 9:30PM due to that long delay. Once in Atlanta, we stopped at a Best Western near the airport for the night. It was nice, clean and relatively quiet except for the proximity to the airport. But once asleep, it didn’t matter.
Up next…Atlanta to Orlando.