25+1 or 6/24. Sorry, That just popped into my head.

We got off to a good start on Wednesday, June 24. One thing that didn’t work was our new power station. I had tested it and it ran our refrigerator for 24 hours. When I hooked it up as we were packing up, it decided to take a nap. Fortunately, our old power station worked just fine.

We headed down over the Skyway Bridge to the southern terminus of US-19. I saw a sign for End US-19, but didn’t see one for the start. The sign in the header photo is about at the starting point.

It took us 4 hours to make our way up to Crystal River. The temperature was in the 90s and it was humid. There are hundreds of traffic lights and most of them were red. It was a very challenging ride. I was overcome by the heat – not heat stroke, but close. I was drinking a lot of water along the way, but it was, obviously, not enough.

We had lunch in the parking lot of the Wawa in Crystal River.

There was plenty of traffic north of Crystal River.

We stopped a couple of times to rest and cool off, but I really didn’t recover until we were able to go inside of the Sun Stop Market in Cross City, FL. It’s one of our favorite stops for either gas or a snack break. We drank a Gatorade and felt much better the rest of the day.

It was still hot, but traffic was light the rest of the way. We checked into the Ramada Inn (formerly a Rodeway) in Albany, GA. We showered and had some dinner. I checked our new power station and, miraculously, it came back to life. After that we headed straight to bed. The heat really got to us today.

Thursday

Most of the day was overcast and cool. Temps were in the 70s all morning and low 80s in the afternoon.

We had our usual coffee break at McDonald’s.

The big challenge for the day was following US-19 through Atlanta. I did quite a bit of research to create the route, which turned out to be spot on. Traffic was not too bad, except north of downtown we had to stop for way too many red lights.

Beth found a park in the GPS and we stopped there for lunch. The “park” was actually a parking lot for a very nice trail. After lunch we enjoyed some great twisties as Rt 19 went up and over the hills.

We continued through the mountains of northern Georgia and checked into our hotel in Bryson City, NC. We had dinner at Bryson City Brewing. We’ve been here before, but they are at a new location and they now serve food. When Drew and I were here we had to get takeout from a place next door. That was a notable evening. It was trivia night and we won about $30 worth of beer. (Actually, Drew knew most of the answers and Dad helped just a bit.

So now I’m writing the blog and refreshing my memory on how to process the photos. Beth will edit and I’ll publish.

But wait! There’s more…

It’s Day 2 and surely something is broken. Yep. Stay tuned.