Today is our last day in South Carolina. Once again I was up at 7:15 this morning. I got up and got ready to face the day. I showered and dressed and woke Andy up at 8:16 so that he could get ready. We managed to keep on exactly the same schedule as yesterday without even trying or setting an alarm or anything. We have an 11:00 meeting scheduled this morning so we can be pretty leisurely.
It was around 9:00 when we got out of the hotel and drove over to the Waffle House to get some breakfast. As always, the Waffle House breakfast was awesome. I love eating there. I really wish that we had a Waffle House somewhere in New York that we could go to. That would be cool. As it is the nearest one to us is in Clark’s Summit, Pennsylvania which I will be going through all of the time as I go back and forth to New Jersey starting next week.
After breakfast we drove out to the health campus so that we could do some work. Andy put in a lot of time last night learning how to program the scales that they use in Anderson so that we could get them set up and working for them. Their local scale company wasn’t able to program them so we had to do it. We arrived at the hospital at 9:45 and Andy got right to work. It took him almost no time at all to have the scale working properly. It was really obvious that the scale company hadn’t tried to work on the scale at all if Andy was able to just read the programming book and set up the scale on the first try. The scale company tech is supposed to do this stuff for a living.
We had our meeting at 11:00. That went well. There wasn’t really all that much for us to talk about in the meeting since the real reason that we were there was to give everyone a chance to meet Andy now that we are going to be transitioning him in to take care of the account. It was all very informal.
After the meeting we went out to lunch with Joe at Carson’s (Claim Your Steak) Steak House. I was able to get a catfish sandwich there. We were able to kill time until around 1:30 but at that point Joe had stuff that he had to do so Andy and I were left with an empty afternoon. We decided “better safe than sorry” and took the opportunity to drive to Atlanta early. We didn’t have to leave Anderson until 4:00 and that should still have left us with more than enough time to get to the airport and to get through security but it seemed dumb to just hang around Anderson just in case anything went wrong with our travels. So we were on the road west before 2:00.
We got down to the airport so early that we really had to find some way to kill some time. It was only about 4:30 when we got to the airport and our flight was not until 9:00. Yeah, that is some serious time to kill. This is one of the things that I really hate about flying. Even a short flight can end up being so much of a hassle that it ends up killing your entire day. So to kill time we decided just to drive around Atlanta. Neither of us has ever spent any time in Atlanta so we figured that it wouldn’t be a total waste of time. We drove up route 29 from the airport through College Park to downtown. It was handy to get a little bit of a feel for the city. That really is quite a large city. You really don’t realize it until you are driving through it but it is truly huge.
So that was a long drive and we managed to kill quite a bit of time. We never once stopped and got out of the car. We just drove around. That wasn’t the best thing for keeping me well rested as I was tired of driving even before we started driving about aimlessly. But I am glad that I got to see the city a little bit. I hope that at some point that I will have a good chance to come down and enjoy the city for a few days. I really think that I would like Atlanta.
We got to the airport and dropped off our rental car around 6:00. Nothing like having tons and tons of time to spare. And better yet having tons of time to kill in an airport while lugging around a very large amount of luggage since we weren’t checking anything. I dare not check any luggage with my pending trip to New Jersey just three days away. It is better to have a bit of inconvenience now than to have any problems to deal with on Monday. I can’t believe that we are all ready up to the point where I have to worry about things for Monday.
We took our time getting checked in and getting through security. No reason to be in a hurry today. We fought to get a table to sit at in front of a Ben and Jerry’s and decided to get some ice cream as the airport was way too warm and we really just needed anything to help pass the time. It took about half an hour, or so it seemed, to get through the line and to actually get the ice cream. It wasn’t very good. Actually, it wasn’t good at all. Oh well. At least it helped to kill some time. We both got B&J’s Cookie Cookie Sunday but the cookies that were in them were rock hard and tasteless. Andy didn’t even end up eating his.
We decided to give up the table so that others could sit down and be disgusted by the ice cream selection, wait and prices. We moved down to the gate and set up shop there. It was just barely 7:00 when we sat down at the gate and our flight wasn’t due to board until a few minutes before 9:00. We had to fight to find anyplace to sit since the flight leaving from the gate previous to our flight hadn’t boarded yet and all of those people were at the gate sitting around. What a boring afternoon this was. I was feeling totally exhausted from a combination of stress, an over busy schedule, long hours of doing nothing and lots of driving.
We ended up sitting next to a technologist from Rochester, Brian Moyer the COO of StormFrog from Bushnell’s Basin. We talked with him for almost two full hours and it really helped to pass the time. I really hate waiting in airports. The airport in Atlanta doesn’t even have free Internet access. How silly is that. Even Rochester’s airport has free Internet access. Time for Atlanta to get with the times. It IS the world’s busiest airport.
The flight back to Rochester was uneventful except for the fact that I had terrible stomach cramps the whole way. I am blaming the bad ice cream. We got into Rochester just after 11:00. Dominica had been out of work for a while and had gone down to dad’s and picked up Oreo so she and Oreo were at home waiting for me. We had thought about having her pick Andy and I up from the airport but it ended up being more hassle than it was worth. So Andy and I walked way out into the airport parking lot to find my car. We were stuck parking so far out it probably took us close to twenty minutes just to get to the car. And it was a little bit cold out after having been enjoying the South Carolina and Georgia weather for the past two days.
I drove Andy to his apartment in Brighton and then drove down to Geneseo. My stomach was still killing me by the time I got to the house. Oreo barked as I came in. He and Dominica had gone to bed some time before and were sleeping. I didn’t actually manage to get into bed until significantly after 1:00 in the morning and probably didn’t fall asleep until close to 2:00. But boy was I tired. These past two weeks have been just totally crazy and things aren’t slowing down. Three days until New Jersey.