Day 9: Hammond, LA to Columbus, GA – 444.4 miles*
Today was supposed to be a short drive in case we were going to spend the morning in Hammond, no plans materialized, so we opted to combine Sunday and Monday’s drive into one long Sunday drive. Kind of like a horse returning to its barn, we are accelerating home. We even briefly considered trying to finish the whole thing today by driving the last 250 miles, but decided against it when we realized that we lost an hour when going back to Eastern Time at the Georgia border. We will now get home Monday evening, one day ahead of schedule.
Like yesterday we started the trip on the Interstate to make some decent time and progress on our route diagonally across Alabama from Mobile to Columbus, but could only stand so much, about 2/3rds of the drive, before hitting some 2-lane back road blacktop. We managed to snag 4 more Motoring Challenges, 2 cities; Troy and Union Springs and 2 counties; Bullock and Macon (above.) We will probably try and snag a few more on the way back across Georgia tomorrow, including a National Monument, Ocmulgee, that is near Macon.
Somewhere, while bump, bump, bumping along over I-10’s very annoying 141,000 concrete expansion joints, the Emperor bumped past the 141,000 mile mark.
*Pre-drive Google Maps estimate: 413 (-31.4) – Total miles so far: 2616.1
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1355